The Great Stadium

By Brian George

Symbols were not supposed to have been difficult; no, not at all, each metaphysical conundrum was almost perfectly designed to allow for public use. Objects were as interrelated as the branches of a tree. To dream was not to be other than conscious. Space was transparent. Stories were as continuous as the Platonic Year was long. There was nothing that was not hidden in plain view by the Eight, but, once the black waves of the Deluge had subsided, a race of duplicates destroyed and buried all but a few fragments of their work. It took years for the light of Sirius to hit me. As I watch, from the roof of my new studio at 31 Piazza de Spagna, Rome, even now it continues to radiate, like the double star that it is, in order to project an image of what happened long ago.

Who in the future present sees me looking back? I am not sure, but it dares to regard ME as its shadow.

Out of brontosaurus bones the ancient birds built stadiums. The early race, whose hearts were as wide and generous as the yolk-like sky at dawn, whose tongues were as articulate as the wind, and within each of whose eight limbs 10,000 eyes blinked open, was content to allow each spectacle to follow its own course, and yet, with each millennia that floated past, they became more ill at ease. Although their long-term strategy prevented them from acting on their vision, they had, in the wake of a series of premature decapitations, become more than a bit ambivalent towards their friends. A plague of opaque symbols served to justify their paranoia. The gods would soon prove treacherous. Species would forget from whose body they had come. As humans strove to perfect the zipping and unzipping of their DNA, which allowed for four of their eight limbs to be temporarily removed, the gods had darker plans.

If time were then in existence, one might say that it was running out. Narrow pink and green pennants snapped on the then still topless towers. Stars were visible underneath, as well as up above, and a sun could be observed at the center of each stomach, moving back and forth with each citizen as he or she wandered, hand in hand, perhaps, through the streets of the non-local city. The creation of a horizontal plane was, at that point, still very much a work in progress. To this end, they had set up reproductions of a number of ancient factories, complete down to the last detail, with vacuum molds and blast furnaces and great ladles for the pouring of hot iron, which would function as museums.

As I have said, out of brontosaurus bones the ancient birds built stadiums, and these, too, were being continuously updated. The most important one, where the Aeonic Games were held, was located on a glass hill just a bit left of the city. At its center was a keyhole, into which the five traditional contests fit like keys. So, time flew by, and, as a steadily louder ticking sound approached from the horizon, the translucent crowds grew hungry for greater and greater excitement. To add an unpredictable element, set an inch above the keyhole, the City Arts Council had decided to install a white tornado, which, if the pontifications of its architect were correct, would tilt at occult angles. The gods played; their thoughts acted, in order to bring about the full gymnastic tension of each contest. So far, so good, this was the way that things were done, but, once they met and copulated with the potsherds of past worlds, they began, more with each year that went by, to spiral out of control.

They spread the myth that their human predecessors had been created as their subjects, that a debt had somehow been incurred, on which interest must be paid, and other such sick and almost incomprehensible jokes. In fact, humans were the gods courageous enough to jump headfirst into death. Their superabundance created the immortals, and thus, to this day the immortals respond to the human race with fear.

Arc upon intersecting arc, complex geometric patterns were projected onto history. We explore on foot their ever lengthening shadows. Was the horizontal axis still firm enough to step on, or would one’s foot tear through? 26,000 years is not too great a length of time for the voyager to be haunted by nostalgia. It never does grow less, and, to a great extent, this strange emotion was quite unexpected. It was not an officially sanctioned means of coming to terms with distance, or the fact that one’s home, now many light-years away and on the far side of an ocean, quite probably had ceased to exist. No, this was not how the glyphs had instructed that we should act. No memory lapse was to be incurred as the soul put on and took off incarnations. Early man could live for several thousand years, although not necessarily in one body or as himself.  It was planned that vatic speech would exit from each baby's mouth. To breathe was to create. To lose one's head was to perpetuate the prehistoric lineage. Severity now stalks the station where once the Eight were exported to Ionia. The blind seer dreams that he doesn’t wake up.

It is possible, however, that our ignorance is a hoax, a strategy that the Double has instituted for our safety. Without it, it is possible that our enemies would destroy us, and quickly, for our supernatural weapons are in storage. The years have rusted our battle skills. We have lost the subtle art of bi-location. Yet, should our memories return, our egos would again be transformed into spheres. At the factory of prosthetic limbs, there would not be any workers. Row upon row, the fluorescent lights would fail, and the silence would be louder than any imaginable noise. In mid-turn, every crankshaft would be frozen. My mind, as though not moving, stops. It came from nowhere: enough energy to resurrect the dead.


(Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, Gladiators)

The Span of Black Ladders

By Brian George

I probe by metaphysics a fixed image in the child’s brain: North African Ionia, the afterbirth of Alexander’s grand but quite absurd attempt to reconstitute a lost world-wide maritime empire, as though it might be possible to do such a thing by land. Shadows cut the city that, in spite of dozens of superimposed conquests, even now bears his name. The day fades. The shadows grow almost infinitely long as they advance. Surveyors for the railroad then abandon their plumb bobs, compasses, and tripod scopes at the great depot under construction.  Its vaulted glass and iron hall is an almost perfect marriage of Ionic, Corinthian, Coptic, Islamic, Gothic, and Baroque styles, but the project, somehow, is still incomplete after 26,000 years. The sky is green. A comet curves above the Polytechnic Institute.

“South wind, bring me knowledge,” I said, but I was not prepared for the displacements that would follow the first flood of correspondences, or for how strong I would grow. Like an occult sun, unseen by the human race, I had no fixed place in relation to Earth’s orbit, and was free to travel where I would. If need be, at times, my light might slip beneath a door. I was searching for the key that long ago had been hidden in my hand. With it, I would unlock the seed whose radioactive genius had once given birth to the city. The stone head of the philosopher is still waiting to be found at the bottom of the topless staircase. If the body that corresponds to it is located on the Earth, that Earth is not the current version, nor can one access it directly. That fountain is pregnant. You will not return the same to anything you know. Love is distant, hard. The stage set flutters, and, for just a moment, the gears that operate the sky show. A scent of jasmine and burnt ozone laps the dock.

It is almost certain that the artist who created the first god did something of importance wrong. De Chirico will soon intuit the mistake. The patriarch on his column has been issued a coral toga, as, from the square, the sea concludes its slow withdrawal. And yet, it is the sea. If, for a second, we were to suspend our obsessive-compulsive preparations, it would no doubt read that as an invitation to commence its almost imperceptible return. Flags flutter on the phallic tower. An egg makes demands on you. To the dead: grow up. Though Mu was marred your mothers threw caution to the wind. They brought the Age of Iron forth. Pick your bones up. Don’t litter the beach! The machinery at the seaside factory has stopped, but some high-pitched lamentation still vibrates in the air. It can be sometimes difficult to tell where the land ends and where the sea begins. The parental affection that once governed all of the tides has been, from the dawn of modern history, at least, almost altogether absent. With their flowing manes, black horses romp among the underwater ruins.

There was an aqueduct that stretched from Uranus to the sun. It is possible, certainly, that its frequency became scrambled; it is far more likely that our ears are now inadequate. In the good old days, even an average child could feel the outermost planets wheel. They sang, orbit upon intersecting orbit, and yet somehow managed to arrange themselves in an axis.  You could hear their harmonies not only with your ears, but also with your heart and groin and feet and solar plexus, and with all of the translucent currents of your body. Like the dead, the living could then navigate by scent. You could touch the gods. Visions, as if by themselves, erupted from the mouth. The seer, although his eyes had been removed, could see more than enough to know which glyphs a black wave frothing from the Deluge had transplanted, from whence they came, and how they should be read. There was an elixir that flowed from one end to the other of the aqueduct. It may now have become a toxin, and the archetypes that once supported us may, through no fault of their own, have morphed into atonal ghouls.

The watchman at the factory of prosthetic limbs is drunk. Seaweed on weapons, dead armies march from a fault in the mid-Atlantic. Leaning against a smokestack, his arms hermetically sealed around his torso, like a mummy, broods the almost but not quite inanimate Hebdomeros. Trench warfare echoes, boom after boom, as a red glow does little to illuminate the horizon. The new yellow fog is not good for one’s health. It might be best, after all, not to breathe. Industrial strength blood sacrifice has disquieted the muses. In this prelude to a seizure, Hebdomeros has become as cold as the smokestack that he leans against. As he stares at an object that existed before space, his eyes, once a normal size, become steadily more enormous. A tear runs down his cheek. Geometers on Saturn tremble. Their knees turn to water as they contemplate the liberation of their human shadows. The architects of Mars project clouds on the Earth.

Again, out of the mists of a lost Athenaeum, the heroes have been assembled to turn dishonor from the gates, even if, by doing so, they must launch a preemptive strike. The way is clear: They depart for Troy. Many souls cannot find their suitcases at the great Victorian train depot. It is a clear October afternoon, somewhere. At 12:15, some start to wonder why the train is running several millennia late, and, with each minute that passes, a few more in the crowd speculate that it may not show up at all. The faintest of echoes, you could hear the Zodiac shattering if you held up a shell to your ear.

Rome at the end rots with its elbow on a couch, laughing, as it gulps down the last of the Falernian wine. Its groin tingles, and it can tell that some ritual dismemberment is just about to begin, as scheduled, having spun out of control from what was originally just a fistfight. Adam begs for a banana on the ramp that leads, in a series of labyrinthine turns, to the exit for track twelve, beyond which you can hear the whisper of the surf. Overhead, there are conical speakers, from which a staticy message booms: “SEE THE ANCIENT RACE; THE OTHERS WERE TOO SLOW!” Mile after mile, and precinct after precinct, the salt smell of the sea spreads inland from the depot, with its massive prehistoric struts, for which iron was, after all, perhaps not the best material. The first race enters, blowing on their instruments; on their ten-foot thighbone trumpets, and their delicate pink conches.  Love brought you this far to one spot. Justice. You will not return the same to anything you know. The sewing machine factory is inhabited by birds. The giants left wire manikins behind.


(Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, The Dream Turns))

The Terrible Games/ Maps of the Metaphysical Double: In the Footprints of de Chirico/ Part 2

By Brian George

By a yellow van at sunset, a young girl with a stick drove her iron hoop. “However brief, may life grant you all manner of abundance!” I said. Some darkness in the van was waiting to emerge. There was a stone block on the corner. I sat, and, unmoving, wept. It was 1912. The beast ate the labyrinth, leaving, where its corridors used to be, only mud-filled trenches, and a thread that I alone could follow to the exit. There, with her paper-mache head, my Muse awaited me; on her brow, a parabola, which intersected with the arcs of several comets. A bell swung back and forth, its echo fading into silence, as the scent of blood renovated the geometry of my vision. Before its end, how intimate the world was! Already, a full year ahead of time, and disturbing my sleep, the archduke had been shot in Sarajevo; a great tragedy, of course, but also something of a farce. The two hands of a clock had been waiting for the sacrifice to commence, at 11:03, as scheduled, on the morning of June 28th.

Let us now return to that period, during which I came of age. The whole world then appeared to be convalescent, while I, after being sick for months, had more or less recovered. And so: a shadow points to the object of my fear, as it stretches from beneath my feet, but I cannot distinguish between the figure that is pointing and the object at which it points.

In the old days, it may have pointed at some gladiator in a beast mask—a rubberized Taurean one, perhaps—snorting, as he attempted to cut off one’s arms and legs. One could then do one’s best to kill him. Life was simple, even too simple, like a dream from which it was still possible to awaken. This would be preferable to the experience of being sucked toward the horizon, where one does not have a torso, even, let alone a butter knife, to then be sent back to a somewhat different Earth. Each version DOES but also DOES NOT resemble the other, like the same object seen in one’s own and in one’s brother’s dream.

Looking up, I find that my fear has now attached itself to the walls of a museum, where, inch by inch, I search in vain for some Doric capital or Ionic pediment or Roman arch. It is difficult to believe what I am seeing! At length, I am forced to admit that I am scared: some stranger has reproduced the complete works of de Chirico, the majority of which I have not yet managed to import. Then too, I am powerfully annoyed. Many centuries in the making, each painting comes complete with an almost infinite number of variations, series upon series, and now that I, Giorgio, am beginning to get some part of the credit that I deserve, this shadow shows up and claims to be in charge. It is he who has selected this particular venue for my work; it is an odd and, almost certainly, inappropriate museum, shaped like a chambered nautilus, with a 12-part skylight and a spiral ramp. Up and down the ramp, wandering, there are many bags of wind that resemble the one that Aeolus had once presented to Odysseus, saying, “Cut here, on the dotted line.” These all too solid ghosts are full of second-hand opinions on de Chirico, but it is the substitute that interests them, the shadow version. After decades of fighting a pitched battle against decadence, it would seem that I have become a “High Modernist” after all!

As we become more fully acquainted, I must confess that the shadow’s viewpoints are, if not impeccably original, then at least, in many cases, difficult to distinguish from my own. There are times that even my mother cannot tell one from the other, and, instead of stepping on my shadow, steps on me. Being a worshiper at the stone foot of the Classics, this tends to make me upset. No human foot should be stepping on a genius! It is also my firm belief that the infinite has a form, which my mother, if no one else, should almost immediately be able to recognize. This form, as it so happens, looks almost but not 100 percent like de Chirico.

Like mine, the shadow’s nose is large, the better to perfect the art of olfactory navigation, which, in the Ancient World, was not the exclusive province of the dead. He will take no prisoners, and suffers no fool gladly. In order that, at some point, he might repurpose it as a boat, he has deconstructed the mechanism that carries the sun west. There is one moment, only. His return to it is eternal. Each thing partakes in the aura of Necessity, but why, over the next half dozen years, must eight million soldiers and 12 million civilians die? 

If the shadow is not housebroken, and is not, exactly, a mirror image or a brother, he is nonetheless a kind of gateway to the world, and, if he is careless with our safety, this does not mean that he is indifferent to our welfare. Other presences, although supernaturally vast, would appear to be less benign. If blindingly bright, they are also, in the end, far less aware of their darkness than the shadow is, and their lust for oceanic violence can strike one as almost quaint. There are many hands that seek to insert themselves into ours, quite often without obtaining our consent. The records having vanished, like the leaves that a storm has taken from a tree, like a genius up a smokestack, they are free to invent whatever laws they wish to prohibit us from stating that their authority is absurd. We should no doubt have propitiated them; instead, they have come in search of the blood that we had thought to keep for ourselves. Our blood has tempted them, and, drawn to it, they have suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of each mirror, with no way to get back.

New, but not improved: the gods. Those who were stars now stagger as they go. They are no bigger than we are; no, not at all, and it is only their appropriation of the arc-lights that leads us to perceive them as gigantic. It is our breath that inflates their symbols. They have always been pretenders. Our masters now turn into helpless infants, while again, our race matures. Birds demonstrate the toroidal genius of the manikin, whose head, with all of its features, we can learn to turn inside out. In this, it is no different from our own. Slaves give birth to the technology of Atlas. Heart, be quiet! It is the hour of archaic joy.


(Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space does not Go Anywhere/ Section 19/ Revision

 

Brian George

“I don't develop; I am.”—Pablo Picasso

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In “The Republic, Book X,” Plato writes, “When all the souls had chosen their lives, they went before Lachesis. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the daimon that he had chosen, and this divinity led the soul first to Clotho, under her hand and her turning of the spindle to ratify the destiny of his lot and choice, and after contact with her, the daimon again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos to make the web of its destiny irreversible, and then without a backward look it passed beneath the throne of Necessity.”

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As you read (or hear) this, my voice echoes in your short-term and then long-term memory. As I speak to myself I imagine your—as of yet—nonexistent face. We both ask, “Who let YOU in here?” Daylight savings time assaults the nocturnal light of dreams. It does no good. Earth suddenly goes black. The transparent moon returns. To what end should we argue about the title of the preexistent death-flash video? Dreams hang on the tree of knowledge. It continues to sprout branches. Images are waiting for whoever stops to try them on.

Though indifferent to their desire, the perfect reproduce. Cities land on clouds. At first, most bodies are approximate, more like holograms. Prone to static, they fade in and out. For this reason, there must be more of them all the time. An epileptic bird damns robots to the labyrinth, where they must labor until they rust and fall apart. In the process, they discover that they are able to shed tears, if only for themselves. Next, they go in search of blood. Their new oyster-like use-once-and-throw-away bodies soon provide them with an ocean of the stuff. In time, they learn to put the extra in a bank. Earth’s rulers act at a distance, as mechanics reverse the pull of the great magnet of dissociation, which, for the past 12,000 years, has arranged our actions in its field. YOU ARE NOT WHERE YOU ARE. Unlike me, you do not see with your eyes closed; no, you keep them open, for they show you many things. Only certain of them are true. Coming face to face with your shadow, you tend to jump out of your skin. This is not good for either one of us, and, too often, I have to surgically remove your shadow from my feet.

 

Like freight trains derailing, the planets screech from their orbits. But who is this standing at the foot of my bed? You have one eye too many, you are brighter than the sun, and your head is far too conical. We had agreed that you would stay in your own world, and I in mine. Your thin hands violate the precession of the equinox. It is clear to me stranger that your tribe grows monstrous. Your prehistoric boats now dare to take x-rays of Omphalos!

 

Of course, it is also clear that you do not approve of me. I copulate with a race of questionable gods. A starfish is my master. The most considerate thing would be for each of us to go back where we came from. Symbols exchange fluids. You wake smelling of the ocean. Someone has put seaweed in your hair. A squid snores beside you. Is everything ok? A spell enforces the inviolate order of appearances.

 

What a strange thing it is for the self to be inhabited by the other. How strange to be almost dead, to be viewed by other subjects as an object. What a strange thing it is to forget one's mother tongue. How strange to be an omnipotent mushroom trapped inside an atom. How strange to find yourself projected into someone else's dream—to know it is not yours, but not be able to get out.

 

There is a unique horror to such experiences. How odd, since they are nothing if not common. How quickly the disorientation is written off as over. Hermes goes in one ear; a pedestrian falls out the other. Amnesia voids the traveling violation. The ego is a useful construct; it allows us to take possession of even the most surreal of events.

 

Perhaps each of us inhabits and acts out not one but many dreams. Their intersection allows us to create a role for choice. If the role is real, it is also perhaps more circumscribed than we are willing to admit.

 

In the physical world each actor sees himself as the enormous central character, without whom no story would exist. The actor is provisionally conscious. Let us say that the ego gets with the preexistent program. The actor conscientiously follows where the death-flash video leads, as the future and the past trade places. You are that actor, the remnant of the shadow of an enigma, the warrior once swallowed by the dream. You will work with the phenomena that present themselves. You will use what is put before you.

 

Doors open as you pass. Impediments dissolve. Your head cracks like a seed, whose two halves split into four and then into eight and then into 64. Junk DNA becomes an encyclopedia, whose spiral stairway you are free to wander up and down, and whose volumes, A to Z, can be read from back to front or front to back, or from the middle out, or in no particular order at all. It does not appear that your memory is native to the Earth. Your arms reach for the land of no return, where a radioactive treasure blossoms. Again, proving the second law of thermodynamics wrong, the empires that were locked inside of an atom fall up, as do the terrible secrets that were coiled in your coccyx. Your heart is in your mouth. A breeze harvests you.

 

If you cooperate with the instructions that the Three Fates have embedded in the dream, it is possible that you may actually have fewer choices. Paradoxically, you may also experience a greater wealth of opportunities. Freedom becomes less of a burden in becoming less rational and more intuitive; action becomes an aspect of attention. An instruction manual on ecstatic death appears, a bit wrinkled from the floodwater, perhaps, but just lying on your doorstep and waiting to be picked up. As if we were creatures of habit! As if random events were able to diagnose our trauma and to prescribe a course of treatment before we knew that we had been hurt! As if we and not the Deluge had all along been the problem!

 

Once, even after it grew bigger than an atom, the world was much smaller than it is today. It was just about the same size as a human eye, although the beings that inhabited it were almost infinitely large. Sex leads us by a thread around each of 28 U-turns, where, in spite of its low status, it is always adept at interpreting the most arcane of symbols. Meanwhile, spirit’s avatars are exposed as being far hornier than we thought. It would seem that the lowest and the highest energies work all too closely together! Boundaries are plastic. Voices interpenetrate. Each time like the first, you meet those that you have met a great many times before. Faces serve as cues to prompt the interest of the dead, who, for the past 12,000 years, have had better things to do, but who, for whatever reason, seem to once again be motivated to collaborate on a project. As you exit the labyrinth, light towers to the sky. You are right at home. The hand of synchronicity throws gifts across your path.

 

 

(Illustration: Max Beckman, Journey on a Fish)

"At the Crossroads: An Astrologer Looks at These Troubled Times"--Review

By Brian George

“The first man must have seen auguries everywhere, he must have trembled at each step that he took.”—Giorgio de Chirico, 1913
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I was a great admirer of Jessica Murray’s book “Soul-Sick Nation; An Astrologer Looks at America,” which I regard as one of the most incisive, intuitive, and provocative analyses of the escalating crises faced by the US in the first decade of the 21st Century. I eagerly awaited her next book, “At the Crossroads; An Astrologer Looks at these Turbulent Times,” which was published in June of 2012. In the months that I have been savoring this work, again and again I have found myself—quietly—exclaiming, “Of course, of course, that’s it!” When an author is able to enter into the secret chambers of the Zeitgeist, it is as though she is also reading your own deepest fears and dreams and thoughts.

Murray refers to herself as an “archetypal astrologer”: Astrological transits are analyzed less in terms of their purely personal and predictive aspects and more in terms of the alchemical challenges that they pose. She writes, for example, ““As the transit of Neptune (spiritual yearning) to the US Moon suggests, beneath America’s panic about the economy is a malaise that has nothing to do with the material world. Clients who visit an astrologer these days and insist that all they want to talk about are ‘practical’ issues like their 401Ks are missing the point. As distressing as the financial facts are, the deeper issue is of psycho-spiritual health.” Astrology is predictive, yes, but this has to do with the arrangement and rearrangement of archetypal scenery on the stage. Every stage-set is provisional, and we act within a tiny cone of light, beyond which we must learn to see.

At each moment, a particular thing is waiting to occur—like a half-formed sentence in the unconscious of a writer—yet it is we who must translate impulse into action, and, by pulling a focused image from the Rorschach blot of forces, determine what this moment means. “Astrological archetypes work as an interpretive schema because ‘real life,’ just like dream life, is a flow of symbols. An angry dog barking at you on the day of a Mars transit is a symbol. So are big collective happenings like political movements, oil spills, and tsunamis.” As in a dream, each image has both an inner life and a certain open-endedness: The dream comes fully into existence only as we tell the story of it, which we are simultaneously in the process of enacting in our lives. I would refer to this as the primordial mode of vision: No event is so trivial that it cannot be seen within the context of an archetype. Conversely, no archetype is so great that it has ceased to have a moment by moment involvement—and even, perhaps, interest—in our actions.

James Hillman, in “The Soul’s Code,” writes, “Maybe the invisibles are interested in our lives for the sake of their realization and as such are inherently democratic: Anyone will do…The angel has no way of descent into the streets of the public common except via our lives. In the film ‘Wings of Desire,’ angels fall in love with life, the street life of ordinary human predicaments.”

For the archetypes are just gods that have not yet put on our clothes. Once doing so, they may no longer be able to read by the light of their own bodies, and fall victim to the next fad in full daylight spectrum lamps.

In the mid-1980s, I had a roommate who was very excited by his discovery of Jane Roberts, who, in “Seth Speaks,” was the originator of the meme that “we create our own reality.” This was the phrase that launched a thousand weekend workshops. At the time, however, I was surrounded by quite a number of occultists and ceremonial magicians—a plethora of competing Maguses—so that this idea did not have the impact on me that it did on many others. It did not seem especially challenging or unique. Early on, I came to regard the phrase as a kind of marketing slogan, like “You’re In Good Hands With Allstate” or “Things Go Better With COKE.” The imposition of one’s magical will upon the world did not strike me as a worthwhile goal. I was far more interested in Matthew Fox’s “Creation Spirituality,” and the idea that we are the “co-creators” of the cosmos, whose role within the scheme of things is both key and mercurial. It is this emphasis on the interplay between self and cosmos, in which neither term is more important than the other, which also excites me about Murray’s work.

If our proper role is to serve as catalytic agents in the drama of “world creation,” “world centering,” and “world renewal,” as many Mesoamerican cultures believed, then we should not be especially preoccupied with the fulfillment of our personal desires. We have bigger fish to fry, and, at any moment, the Earth might suddenly be pulled out from beneath us.

Even though, from about the age of 20, I have been fascinated by—if not obsessed with—the idea of time cycles, I tend, for the most part, to shy away from any type of linear predictions. It’s not that we can’t get a good sense of which archetypal forces are in play, but rather that, once we invest our energy in a particular year or date—such as 2012—it can too easily become a blank projection screen for all of our subconscious contents. It is here, indeed, that a trap has been set for us, if we desire to become full citizens of the Commonwealth of the Zodiac. In “At the Crossroads,” Murray does a terrific job of impartially charting the interplay of microcosmic and macrocosmic forces that conspire to create the shifting stage-set we inhabit. To some extent, this may be because she does not hesitate to give darkness credit for playing a central and quite necessary role. As she says, “Out of respect for the mystery of free will,” we should not “second-guess the energies afoot. There is plenty of fear in the air, and we should avoid it like the plague.”

If we desire to respond to the planetary crisis not with fear but with curiosity, “We cannot do this,” writes Murray, “unless we loosen our allegiance to the literal significations of the archetypes. Indeed, many astrologers see the literal level of events as being merely the universe’s ploy of last resort: the means by which the cosmos gets its point across when the recalcitrant human mind fails to comprehend it any other way…For those who believe that everything in life is a symbol, even catastrophic events can be seen as invitations into an unprecedented state of possibility. To view global warming and its attendant Earth changes this way is to see that an infinite number of potential scenarios are at our disposal. The years ahead start to look not like an ending, but a beginning: a tabula rasa.”

In analyzing the pathologies of our cultural moment—a moment that has been millennia in the making—I never feel that Murray is acting out of unresolved psychic conflicts, that she is trying to make herself seem important, or that she is manipulating data to prove some predetermined point. Too often, I find that writers give in to the temptation of using metaphysical concepts as the accessories of a lifestyle—the trap of “spiritual materialism” that Chogyam Trungpa spoke about. Subtle insights become grand CGI illusions. Their fears: a species die-off; their hopes: a paradise that is always just about to happen. They would like to be rock stars, but have somehow ended up as gurus, and, not having come to terms with the real but limited function of the ego, are constantly lecturing others on the need for shattering it altogether. Murray’s work, on the other hand, is the antidote to claustrophobia. It is bracing and, quite naturally, vast. As I read it, I can feel a wind from the edge of space begin to leak through all of my windows. There is nowhere to hide, and yet, curiously, nothing that needs to be hidden. Wounds and all, we are free to be the Promethean children that we are. For the sky is, indeed, a mother.

The sky is tolerant, and it is possible that she knows the end to every story, as do we, in our less combative moments. For better or worse, we must keep to the schedule that she has set.

Given our tendency to project our thinking in straight lines, or, to put this another way, due to our habit of seeing “with” and not “through” our eyes, we might like to imagine that we are “evolving” beyond the personal, whose vehicle is the “ego,” and that, once a critical mass of enlightenment has been reached, we will simply fix, transform, or transcend the planetary crises that we face. Perhaps we will; then again, perhaps we won’t: We act upon a stage-set where no results are guaranteed. But if we do not “create our own reality,” as this is conventionally understood, Murray nonetheless reminds us that we did, before birth, choose to experience our lives exactly as they are, and with whatever peculiar mix of forces are in play. She writes, “As meaning-seekers regarding these intimidating transits, we walk a fine line. We must neither lapse into unrealism about their severity, nor forget that although the trends they suggest are immutable, their specific manifestations are not.” Our attitudes do have some degree of importance, after all. We cannot use them to create “ex nihilo,” but, by finding the balance point of the forces now in motion, we may be able to determine how the megaliths were raised, and, again, with our hands, begin to shift them as they hover.

We have work to do. In front of us, we see footprints that we had left there long ago. If we fail, as well we might, our failure will most probably be due to a split-second lack of attention, and yet success will not in any way depend upon the accident of our survival.

Our freedom of action is moderated by our willingness to learn how to read. Far easier said than done, of course! How odd that simple things, which pertain to our primordial function in the world, can now seem almost infinitely complex, while complex things, which pertain to the development of a technological dream world, can seem, due to all of our dead habits, infinitely simpler than they are. By remembering how to read the language of the stars, and by adapting to the open-endedness of the challenge posed by the archetypes, we might, as Murray says, be able to “respond, rather than merely react, to these turbulent times.”

The Lost Mariner and the Keys to the Holographic Theatre



 

By Brian George

 1

In chapter two of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” Oliver Sacks tells the story of “The Lost Mariner,” an alcoholic ex-sailor named Jimmie G., who was 49 years old in 1975—the time of their first meeting. For Jimmie, the Second World War had just ended in a triumphant Allied victory. FDR was dead. Truman was at the helm of the freshly painted ship of state. Silk stockings were again available. Radios blasted boogey woogey. New aerodynamic cars were getting ready to roll. Girls could be expected to spontaneously kiss servicemen on the street. It was 1945. The free world loved us. There were great times ahead.

Bounced from Bellevue to a nursing home in Greenwich Village to The Home for the Aged, where Sacks worked, Jimmie came complete with a cryptic transfer note. It read, “Helpless, demented, confused and disoriented.” At first suspicious of 1945 as a cut-off point—as a year that seemed too symbolically sharp—Sacks went on to diagnose the mariner as a victim of Korsakov's syndrome, resulting in near total short term memory loss, in this case compounded by extreme retrograde amnesia. For Jimmy, there would always be 92 elements in the periodic table, as he would be glad to demonstrate by drawing you a chart. The “transuranic” elements would never be included.

Navy records indicate that he was functional until his discharge in 1965. A born sailor, he was well liked by his friends, who gladly made excuses for his reluctance to grow up. His casual good humor was contagious. For sure, there was a taste for alcohol. Now and then a few missing days. A tendency towards impulsive action. It was not like he was a mama's boy—he pitched in, followed orders, and did not complain when the going got tough—but the dream of perpetual youth was already active in this macho Peter Pan. A mariner is meant to be at sea, braving dangers, responding to sirens, perpetually setting off in search of a lost continent. Jimmie was not able to translate water into earth. He should have stayed in the Navy, which provided some structure for this happy go lucky being.

He never knew how good he had it. You never know what you have until it's gone. Who knew that the Second World War would turn out to be so much fun? After being discharged he started to drink heavily, quit several jobs and, according to his brother, one day just “went to pieces.” He was never again the same. Around Christmas of 1970 he “blew his top,” became deliriously excited and confused, and at that point was taken to Bellevue. Soon, his pleasant attitude returned. His memory did not. The years flew backwards until 1945—where the pages of the calendar stopped turning. 

According to Sacks, intense verbal energy is needed to maintain this constant re-imagining of the present as the past. Events, of course, cannot be trusted to cooperate. It is of no importance; since—in several minutes—no memory will be left of this lack of cooperation. You are, let’s say, a 19 year old sailor, glad to be on shore leave, and the good doctor has just handed you a mirror. Your breath stops—as you stare in horror at the face. Who is this gray-haired stranger so intently looking back at you? Is this some demonic joke? Are you dreaming? Kids can be heard playing baseball in the park outside the window. A man in a white lab-coat sits before you. He seems to be a doctor. It is just possible that you have seen him somewhere before.

No. You are an expert in Morse code, a trained observer, who during sleepless nights with binoculars on the bridge has scanned the horizon for ME 262s, the latest of Nazi aircraft. You would never forget a face. Is there something wrong? Your heart still seems to be pounding. It looks like your breath has stopped. The good doctor has directed you to look out of the window. The trauma disappears—as though never having existed.

An informative conversation with the man in the white lab-coat follows. It is, however, quite disturbing. How is it possible that you have never heard of a submarine called “The Nimitz?” Are there Reds in Hollywood? Are you the victim of a secret government mind-control experiment? It is again time to look at the kids playing ball outside the window. No. It can't be. Some girl has hit the ball out of the park! The year is 1945. Things are good all over. Villagers laugh—having overcome their fascist ways—as they hang by the heels the ox-like Mussolini. Hitler and Eva Braun have been hosed out of their subterranean bunker. Budweiser is the king of beers. You not only would but have walked a mile for a Camel. You have just been discussing baseball with that man in the white lab-coat, who you first met at a bar called “Sleepy Joe's.” He is a physicist, perhaps. Does he work at Los Alamos?

You are glad to be a 19-year old sailor out on shore leave. From household appliances to the female body, everything has been redesigned for maximum acceleration. They are just about to take off. Who knows, one day it might be possible to aim a rocket at the moon, or is that way out science fiction, Flash Gordon stuff? There are 92 elements in the periodic table. Uranium is the last—but not the least. It was fun to think about atomic energy. The splitting of the atom has turned us into gods. “Hula-hoops” have appeared in someone else's dream. Immune to current photographs, though subject to the occasional black out, it is true, it was good to be an intelligent young man in the pre-Sputnik era!

Is there anything to be done—a way to orient the lost mariner? The subject enjoys games, such as tic tack toe and checkers, that do not require long term concentration. Easily bored, it is often hard for him to say if he feels anything at all. Music and art, however, are able to reach inside to touch him, and he is moved to tears by the celebration of the mass. A dove appears. The music of the spheres invades Normandy. Brave soldiers run. Bunkers explode. Harmony washes the beach. Time future and time past now turn like a tornado, lifting what they kill.

Up, and then further up, beyond the network that the Fates wove out of archetypes, to the realm of the Ideal. A seizure will instruct him in the art of bi-location. Shock upon shock overtakes him; he is neither here nor there. Doors to a transparent city open. From its data-banks there is no one who has, in all of History, departed. Passionate in concentration, he waits for the host to land upon his tongue.

2

Sacks comments on the therapeutic value of this state of total attention. He first quotes Luria: “A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being. It is here that you may touch him, and see a profound change.”

Sacks then says, “Seeing Jim in the chapel opened my eyes to other realms where the soul is called on, and held, and stilled, in attention and communion. The same depth of absorption and attention was to be seen in relation to music and art: he had no difficulty, I noticed, following music or simple dramas, for every moment in music and art refers to, contains, other moments.”

Though the author does not use the word, the concept of the hologram is implicit in this passage. Following where Sacks led, I thought that it might be interesting to expand on the concept of the hologram, and to ask what the therapeutic and other implications were. Reluctant to directly challenge the current scientific paradigm, I will pose my rebel yells as questions. Let us start:

Is the origin of the human species natural—or is the self part of a perfect preexistent sphere?

Is the Earth our home, or our home away from home?

Is the Mothership that we love a kind of revolving barn for livestock—real as death, hypnotic in its drone—built for a species that was once omnipotent, and that now grow fatter by the day? When our throats are cut, to whom should we offer thanks?

Is evolution really devolution? Was the soul sentenced to a year of hard labor in the labyrinth?

It is possible of course that the revolutionary is only reading (out loud) from a text—a badly translated one. Did the story that appears in front of us really happen long ago?

Let us imagine that the human race is over; who is in the audience that now applauds as from the dark circumference of a theatre?

Let us grant that the ego is haunted by a dream of infantile omnipotence; is that dream real?

Is there really only One—one self existing from before time in one location—as Parmenides asserted?

Is the ego a contraction, the remnant of a more transparent order?

Perhaps the story of each life is a hologram; in which the whole is contained in every part—though in a blurred version—whose “gestalt” we have forgotten how to grasp. The study of disease may yet provide a key to open the locked doors of the memory theater—a theatre boarded up since the Renaissance. In every niche of the rotunda is a cue that serves to activate an engram.

If, as folklore has it, a person’s life flashes before his/ her eyes at the moment before death, where exactly would this memory be stored? How could the process operate so quickly, as though all events were simultaneously present?

Do chemicals flood the brain as death approaches—to create a state of hallucination, or to activate the brain centers for a different mode of processing?

What would be the evolutionary value of this process, if the organism were to cease, a minute afterwards, to exist?

If the myth of the death-flash video is true, does the existence of this expanded state of memory also imply the existence of a soul, or of a higher self—with which we sometimes interact, and of a parallel system in which events are stored?

If this system is outside of space/ time as we know it, could it survive, without impairment, the devastation caused by a syndrome such as Korsakov’s?

Jimmie, the lost mariner, seems to intuit the existence of this alternate form of memory, of a backup system to the all too human one, and to be fully at attention only during the celebration of the mass.

No longer scrambled, his mind was absorbed by each necessary action. His feelings were transformed. His consciousness became one-pointed.

Is Jimmie a lost soul, and if so, what does this imply? Has he lost his soul, or has he lost touch with his soul?

Towards the end of “The Lost Mariner”—about a different patient, who had suffered a sudden thrombosis in the posterior circulation of the brain—Sacks writes, “Forthwith this patient became completely blind—but he made no complaints. Questioning and being tested showed, beyond doubt, that not only was he centrally or cortically blind, but he had lost all visual images and memories, lost them totally—yet had no sense of any loss. Indeed, he had lost the very idea of seeing—and was not only unable to describe anything visually, but bewildered when I used words such as ‘seeing’ and ‘light.’” For a moment, let us put aside science to treat this description as a metaphor—for a form of vision that originally was ours.

Do dead-end scenarios invite the use of unconventional technologies—technologies new to us, perhaps, but that to others are very old? If there is no hope for a cure, is it not worth questioning the assumptions on which our diagnosis is based?

To provoke a near-death experience, initiates from ancient Greece would sometimes throw themselves from cliffs into the sea. Can the death flash file be opened under less than near fatal circumstances? Is there a new and improved way of catalyzing change?

If each of us has a story—a story complete in all of its interactive parts—is it possible that we could read that story in more than one direction?

Working backwards from a hologram, and empowered to draw upon a primal depth of energy, can the higher self project its image onto chaos—to undo the damage that alcohol once caused to the delicate mammillary bodies?

Can a stoke move backwards through the hippocampus? Could an epileptic seizure cleanse the temporal lobe? Can connections be restored between synaptical receptors and their interlocking neurotransmitter keys?

What is the location of the burning library of Alexandria? Can a book live—being burnt?

How fast is a thought? Can information be truly said to move?

Is the brain the seat of consciousness or the seat of a fascist systems engineer—a kind of demiurgic dwarf—whose job is to prevent the oceanic overflow of consciousness?

Let me answer my own question: Transpersonal software can be used to reconfigure the fried hardware of the brain. Each damaged brain is now as perfect as it was, as is its presiding fascist engineer, as is the One Sphere—clear as day— that preexists. Each lost world can regenerate. The gods have the power to once again grow feet. At the exit to death’s tunnel, it is we who must again learn how to focus the kaleidoscope.


(Illustration: Brian George, Fish Swimming through a Keyhole)

The Preexistent Race Descends/ Section 8

By Brian George

Birds plead their case before the presence wrapped in rags: “We obey you. They won’t.” The boy attends the war fought to prevent the Earth’s beginning.

*

The once great powers argue in a small tent by the ocean.

The wave towers above the boy. The armies led by Archeopterix advance. A few leave wing prints on North Africa. Green, to destruction flung, giants copulate with fish. Turning against light the Earth devolves. Tribes laugh at the god in bondage. Dead kamikazes mass.
                         

The institute above the steps of Asia flares.

*

The empire falls. On a dock I curl up with my arms around a crate.

*

She who leads took over when I slept.

*

It is late at night. Summer. Wind circles my apartment. For the whole season I have watched my vision grow.

My wish was to create. The muse hears. She gives access to more worlds than I could gainfully employ. It has come to my attention that there is no one in my chair. Even ghosts do not believe that I exist. Few can tell that I am pregnant with the shape of things to come. I have less self than the shadow thrown by a disassembled colossus. The door slams as I leave to wander down the railroad tracks. It is late at night.

Smoke billows from the tall stacks of a factory now abandoned. There are thousands of feet waiting for their shoes. If I dared I would untie my own to walk barefoot through the constellations. Clothes also are unnecessary. It is said that humans are the cattle of the gods. I alone am free.

*

My ear expands! In a bubble the Egyptoid eunuchs buzz.

*

As the dead project me through the haunted arch I turn to smile at a subject. Giants blink from the effects of too much sacrifice. The winds at Cydonia freeze my bent bones to a plow.

Grand unified conspiracies obscure the monuments on Mars.

*

Where the snare's architect puts evidence new fissions bare the strata.  We disinter the technocratic phallus of the ancients. My muse shakes me. I watch myself attack the living stone I cling to. Kicking and screaming I am dragged off into hyperspace. The philosopher’s stone has no sense of compassion. It is larger than the wheel of history. It is fueled by Soma. It does not believe that human death is real.

The force preserves. Its surrogate destroys.

*

Wave on wave they crash against the moorings. The depths discharge the wealth of a lost continent. For the book fight waves of Mesozoic hawks. The horizontal every time looks newer than a dream. The foundations of the dream tilt.

*

It is a summer made of oceanic scents. I fit my vision in a seed with 8 thousand years left over. A fog settles on my city and its lamps.

*

The ancient returns from exile leaning on a staff. He burns the aviary.

(Illustration: Adolph Gottlieb)