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 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)

After the Bhagavad Gita

By Brian George

1

They could not grasp him—for he was born. With Brahma Vishnu plays. The planet vanishes. Of  pure stock. Frightening his yoga. I saw the boy test weapons far from his own field.

*

In those days the omnipotent were beasts. To pervert the teacher's judgment was a challenge. The boy found a head to wear. “Is x-ray vision violent?” he asks. The chant exits the tornado. Vam ! They launch the egg. It burns. The clouds above the destruction are gigantic. The 8-spoked eye of the teacher rolls. Species fed with blood before the institute march.

*

Tell what my sons and the sons of Pandu did—when they massed at Kurukshetra.

*

At first there was noise. Forces blew. Suspended animation froze the shouts. Their wheels did not advance.

*

Krishna says: “Hesitate to kill the gods will laugh at you. Sympathy is seen as fear. The dead call you names. Therefore fight.”

*

Is what was? Was there once a time when you or they did not exist? The story bring forth.

*

Declining health made speech approximate. The contraption a work by Visvakarman begs. It wants fuel. Is too much enough? Asia smokes. Visions haunt the creator of industrial descent. Think of others: be. Determine what actors crouch behind your tongue.



*

Can a robot cause an earthquake with its chrome extensor arm? You have.

*

Teacher: is direct perception of the self a gift that came between us? The star sat on the head of the Bharata. Is the enemy light? Space junk hovers. Static grows. Knowledge stops. The transplanted wave carouses. In the future you will need a book to read.

*

I will put the shadow of the giants here—or perhaps there. The city flames. As it was then—now. I appropriate the Soma; it occurs to me that I own your work. Beasts board the departing wheel. Presences consume.

*

The clouds are anxious. For 36 thousand years we wait for you to come. You are on the way.

2

Labyrinths march. Lands tilt. Now starts the echo of oceanic flux. The lord of Sthanu appears—to withdraw. A survivor is raped by birds. Castes intermix. Crime commits the Dharma to an institute that flies—where doctors hoard the seeds. Friends don't recognize friends. Good families kill each other.

*

He hallucinates a gulf. Stage sets blow from crags. His head is a fort inhabited by few. Winds whack Nanga Parvat. Spells from Saturn quarantine the species.

*

Worlds aimed by the nonexistent science ring as they collide!

*

You serve. It is we who say if you are marked for death. East the west sends ants to scale the ruins of the Vedas. Unnatural disasters roam. Shake to confront the energies that judge you.

3

The early plant fossils. Signs race the north. Dig from Tyranosaur's throat the weapon Agni cast. Its unapproachable power smokes. By the thousands the bald creators turn to cows.

*

Wonders fight the archaic senate. Tornadoes victimized by building codes endeavor to move the Earth. Drunk with harmony the gods roar. Yoga says: perfect the muse of the catatonic self. Arts I test you. I pass for a flying rock. Is the war continuous? Great. Webs advance on the rusted spokes of history. A frightening moon speeds. Says the boy to the Bharata, “Here I am!”

*

The teacher opens—as if his touch were a vehicle to ride. Death creates joy. Space revolts. I hang a tribe from the wish fulfilling tree. The troops that flatten Saryanavat laugh.

4

 

Cities implode. A crowd falls on its face. We kiss the triumphant shadow of the self. Rods and crosses streak the red sky over Earth. Who knows the motivations of Svarbanu? He blots the sun.

(Illustration: Brian George: Shiva, Dancing, 2001)

Art and Ashe in the Yoruba Tradition/ Second Half

By Brian George

Ashe means literally “it is so, or may it be so.” It is sometimes defined as “power, authority, command, scepter” (Abraham),6 “a coming to pass…effect; imprecation” (Crowther).7  It is neither a moral nor an immoral force, but simply the force, by which all things are brought into manifest existence.8 Ulli Beier explains, “Yoruba believe strongly in the power of the word, or rather in a mysterious force called Ashe…that quality in a man's personality which makes his words—once uttered—come true”.9 Says Raymond Prince, “It would appear that their background conception is that to utter the name of something may draw that something into actual existence…not only within the mind and body of he who utters and he who hears the word, but also in the physical world as well.”10

Without ohun, voice, the verbalization or performance or the word, Ashe would not be able to operate.11 This formative action is the human being's contribution to the equilibrium of the worlds.12 The Yoruba do not distinguish between the efficacy of the different forms of art. Music, dance, invocation, story, sculpture, costume, and myth interact as a dynamic whole.

A person who has learned to harness and to work with the force is referred to as an Alaase.13 The sender aims his or her Ashe at the targeted object, and then, if he or she does not wish to incur unintended consequences, asks for permission to proceed.14 This is like the call part of a call and response chant. The initiator asks, “Is it right that you should exist? Am I doing what my soul, at this time and in this place, demands?” If the work of art is successful it will not just sit there on the ground, hang there on the lips, or project itself mechanically through space.

The living work is said to possess iluti, or good hearing.15 It does what it has been asked to do. It should not only inspire or satisfy the aesthetic appetite. It should be able to communicate with its creator(s) as an almost independent being, to answer, “je, “and to respond, “dahun.”16 The work of arts says, “Yes. It is right that I should exist. This is no doubt the beginning of a beautiful relationship, for both the upper and the lower worlds. Here I am. It will be so.”





Art allows the Ashe of the upper worlds to become available for use. It sweetens the ambivalence of the trickster. It focuses the attention, so that the viewer is better able to withstand the influx of other—dimensional force. Ashe, however indispensable for any form of action, is also volatile. It is both the rocket fuel and the chariot of the gods. Eshu wears a hat that is red on one side, black on the other. The force he guards operates in many ways, in many places, and its action never looks quite the same to any two humans. Safe access comes only at the price of calm attention, if the law of unintended consequences is to be avoided. The work of art should possess the dynamic symmetry inherent in the structure of the cosmos from the start. It should act as a landing pad where the mind can luxuriate in coolness. At the same time it should expand the mind by stealth, test it, and provoke it to jump beyond itself.

Lawal asserts, “To tame or pacify is to cool the face (tu l'oju). Thus, providing the non-figurative symbol of an Orisha with sculptured face facilitates the pacification of that Orisha, for what has a face is controllable.”17 Steve Quintana, a Cuban Santero and the godfather to my daughter, would laugh at the idea that an Orisha could be controlled. One might just as well talk of controlling the currents of the sea, associated with Yemaya, the flow of lava from a volcano, associated with Agayu, or the precise tilt of a tornado, associated with Oya. If the energy of the Orishas cannot be controlled it can, however, be invoked. A relationship can be established. Energy can be transduced, through the coils or ritual and art, from one state to another.

If the Orishas act on our behalf it is because, having first established a good rapport, having learned to speak a few words in the language of Ifa, having welcomed, fed and tended to them as beloved guests in our houses, we have then politely asked. A bow and the string of an instrument are brought together at cross purposes, as Heraclitus says.18 A human hand makes contact with the skin of the bata drum. The membrane of the interactive network vibrates like an ear. Feet stomp. Eyes pop open. Breathing swells. Some trauma from a past life bars full access to the hypersphere. Trespassers will be violated. The bald doctor who was old before the deluge pulls one’s hair. Our concept of what it is to breathe should then undergo an upheaval. Again, the mother drum breathes us. There is no self to fear death. The praise song can be heard at least as far as Saturn, beyond which interest in our baby steps becomes steadily more sporadic.

Our other-dimensional counterparts have business to take care of. Like us, they have worlds to make before they sleep. Thus, it is lucky that the influx of Ashe is not required to make sense. Polyrhythms open the ecstatic body like a book. Its pages are the strata of the worlds before our own. Each participant in the bembe should feel free to bend or modernize the laws of nature.

The bond between the human and the other, brought into the present, grows. Since the Yoruba idea of hierarchy does not involve a lesser or a greater, it will at the end be a relationship among equals.19 Each can offer the other what is needed for a more complete fulfillment of the work at hand.

We can offer to the past an alternate history of our species. A glass of rum should be left to wash it down. We can offer an experience in biology to the powers who have almost forgotten the great promise of Pangaea. We can add one piece to the puzzles left unassembled by many an alien civilization.

It is Ashe that weaves the threads of potential into the many colored fabric of existence. Clothes teleported from the upper worlds create a sensation on the Earth. Fashions lifted from the Earth provoke a corresponding stir above. The logarithmic spiral is in charge of a secret system of sizes; one superconscious dream fits all. Ashe connects. By fertilizing the separate, it creates both parts anew. Ashe builds a translucent bridge from the human to the Orishas, from the Earth to the ancestors, from the ego to the occluded parts of the soul.

A scent of sacrificial blood has returned across the ocean to lap the star hub of the 8-spoked city. It is Ashe that yokes the worlds in a constant wheel of communication, a reciprocal exchange of gifts.


Endnotes

Art and Ashe in the Yoruba Tradition
Illustration at top of essay: Eshu, Unknown Artist, 1880—1920, Museum of Science, London
1) James Hillman, The Soul's Code, Random House, Inc., New York, 1996, page 255
2) Migene Gonzales—Wippler, Santeria, The Religion, A Legacy of Faith, Rites, and Magic, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York/ 1989/ page 5
3) Reginaldo Prandi, Candomble and Time, Brazillian Review of Social Sciences, number 2, October 2002, pages 9—12
4) Mgene Gonzales—Wippler, Santeria; The Religion; A Legacy of Faith, Rites, and Magic, Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc, 225 Park Ave, NY, 1989, pages 96—97
5) Judith Illsley Gleason, Clever Eshu, Parabola (Fall), Crossroads Issue, 1993, Pages 41—42
6) R.C. Abraham, The Dictionary of Modern Yoruba, University of London press, 1958
7) Samuel Crowther, A Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language, Seeleys, London, 1852
8) Henry John Drewel and Margaret Thompson Drewel, Gelede, Art and Female Power Among the Yoruba, Indiana University Press, 1990, page 5
9) H.U. Beier, Yoruba Poetry, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge/ 1970, Page 49
10) R. Prince, Curse, Invocation and Mental Health Among the Yoruba, Canadian Psychiatric Journal 5, 1960, page 66
11) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase/ African Arts, July, 1994, page 73
12) George Brandon, Santeria, from Africa to the New World, The Dead Sell Memories, Indiana University Press, 1993, page 17
13) John Drewel, John Pemberton III, Rowland Boiodun, Yoruba; Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, The Center for African Art and Abrams, Inc., New York/ 1989, Page 16
14) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase, African Arts, July, 1994, page 74
15) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase, African Arts, July, 1994, page 73
16) Richard Abiodun, Understanding Yoruba Art and Aesthetics, The Concept of Ase, African Arts, July, 1994, page 73
17) Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, African and Afro—American Art and Philosophy, Random House, Inc., New York, 1984, page 12
18) Philip John Neimark, The Way of the Orisa, Harper, San Francisco, 1993, page 12
19) John Drewel, John Pemberton III, Rowland Boiodun, Yoruba; Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, The Center for African Art and Abrams, Inc., New York/ 1989, Page 18

(Illustrations: Yoruba sculptures of Eshu/ Elegua, artists unknown)

Art and Ashe in the Yoruba Tradition/ First Half

By Brian George

“Why do we believe angels prefer angelic persons? Why assume that the genius (activating spirit) wants only to be with geniuses? Maybe the invisibles are interested in our lives for the sake of their realization and as such are inherently democratic: Anyone will do. Maybe they do not recognize the concept mediocre. The daimon gives importance to each, not only to the Important. Moreover, they and we are linked in the same myth. We are divine and mortal twins, and so they are in service to the same social realities as we. Because of this linkage, 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.”—James Hillman, from “The Soul's Code”1

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According to the Yoruba, Ashe is the foundational energy of this world and the other, existing from a time before the worlds themselves were created. Without Ashe the Orishas—the gods or active powers of creation—would be shadows hovering on the edge of nonexistence, the human body would be a corpse, words would be random noises, the greatest work of art would be a shell. When Oludumare spoke the primordial names, by which the Orishas and the stars and planets were conjured into the first light of visibility, without the power of Ashe the body of creation would have been unable to stand or move.2 It would have remained trapped in the memory of worlds before our own, a sad and impotent idea. The great Oludumare himself, eldest of the Orishas, would have less importance than an ant.

Millennia came and went like days, whole ages like weeks. The one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged keeper of the secrets, Osanyin, asked, “Does your mouth open? Do you speak ifa?” The first man answered, “Yes, I understand the code. My body has chosen the head it is to wear. I sweat with joy. Oludumare breathes me. It is necessary that I pour my own blood on the work.”

In Yoruba thought, cosmology and aesthetics go hand in hand. Each clarifies the half-seen purposes of the other. Time moves in cycles, in which species and the stage sets they inhabit may evolve, yes, in that patterns grow from earlier versions of the same, but the Rorschach blot of creation is not at all a random accretion. It is, from its inception, a work of conscious art. Human art is a much later variation of the prototypes. The light inside the void speaks. The myth gets physical. An act of interpretation opens the key signatures, collapsing the wave function and altering time/space. Ashe turns the kaleidoscope of a-causal correspondences. The planets dance. They explode with songs of celebration.

Nature collaborates with the energies of supernature to complete each task that she is scheduled to perform. The world is beautiful. It is almost certain, however, that any ultimate perfection of the artwork would be death. No story would have a beginning, a middle, or an end. It would not be possible to keep any gift in circulation.

There would be no wound to heal. Ashe would not have a catastrophe to remove. The lightning that once transported us would not be cooler than the sun, or as slow as the year is long. Earth with all her oceans would not be bigger than a pinhead. Wave upon wave, birth would not have contracted the full range of our superconductive memory, as hands cut us from an earlier but still beating state of connection. A chicken would not have descended with Obatala on a chain, to then scratch from the ocean the lost continent of Pangaea.

A bata drum summons the other bodies we inhabited. A piece of seaweed must be taken from one’s hair. Such an evolution of live memories is not distinct from repetition, as rerouted by the principle of uncertainty, and is perhaps governed by a return of the repressed. Says Reginaldo Prandi, “What happens to us today and what is about to happen in the near future has been experienced before by another human being, by an ancestor, or by the Orishas themselves… The mythical past, which is remade at every moment in the present, is narrated by the oddus of the Ifa oracle.”3





Aimed like weapons at the navel of the Earth, the concepts of chance and chaos do exist for the Yoruba, but each plays a role that is integral to a process. Without these subversive agents of the trickster, there would be no split between the future and the past. There would be no opening through which our language could emerge. The method by which order and disorder interact is the very thing that makes divination possible, that generates the occult potency of Ifa.

The Yoruba say: “It takes a little bit of everything to make the world.”

By a casting of the opele, the eight-linked iron chain that joins eight pieces of a coconut shell, the Orishas too must struggle to interpret the strange language of Ifa—the system of divination of which Orunmila is the master, but to which Eshu lends his catalytic energy. Each throw results in two columns made up of one or two line units—I or II—arranged four down to a side. At the end, you are left with a single pair of oddus, or configurations of the binary code. Eight x eight links correspond to the 64 codons of the DNA spiral. Eight links x 32 give rise to the corpus of the 256 oddus. Each complex oddu can be subdivided into another 16 subjects, forming a total of 4,096 oddus, and so forth, until we reach a temporary limit of 65,636 oddus. Furthermore, each oddu has 1,680 iterpretations.4

Our view is necessarily partial. To act is to remove one’s full attention from the whole. The most complex of equations are contained within the zero and the one. In the eight-spoked wheel of the city, we should always leave at least one gate open to fresh energies from the bush. Movement gives form to the story that is waiting to be spoken. It is our lack of knowledge that potentiates the fixed signs of the time-cycle.

When the movement of the worlds had once ground to a halt, Oludumare went to Eshu, the Orisha of the crossroads, the trickster who is the guardian of Ashe, to beg him to unblock the circuits, to reestablish the connections between each of the Orishas, between Orishas and their human  vehicles, between the upper and the lower worlds. Eshu saw his chance. He who would often appear as a young boy or a wandering beggar would remind others of his importance. He would become ubiquitous, as honored in art and ritual as he was indispensable in fact. He agreed to carry out the task, on condition that he be granted a portion of the offerings made to each of the other Orishas. Since that day, all rituals must begin and end with an invocation to Eshu, that is, with the generation and integration of Ashe.5

Ashe is the power to connect. Imagine the state of a human being before he or she is born: a sperm, an egg and a human soul each exist in their separate dimensions. Human DNA can be seen as one version of the chain by which a race of primogenitors had once descended to the ocean. Its links connect Ikole Aiye, the House of Earth, to Ikole Orun, the House of Heaven. It is not so much that Ashe creates something out of nothing. It rather brings what separately exists into a new and pregnant conjunction. A rhythm is generated, a meeting place opened, information is translated into form, a system of exchange established, a work of art, first almost inert and then more and more alive, produced.

The human being erupts, loud and kicking, as a three-dimensional object into the world. In the same way a ritual sculpture allows the Orisha a window that opens onto the Earth, a fuel depot, a base of operations from which it can carry out its agenda.


(Illustrations: Sculptures of Eshu, Yoruba, artists unknown)

After the Rig Veda



By Brian George

There was not the non-existent or its shadow the existent then. There was no space—and less beyond. Desire came at the beginning.

Are you sure that you live—or did the ancients mean something else by death?

Big bird had not unfolded his umbrella above the sky. No hand held it. There was not a body to contain the atom’s force. Was the mouth pregnant? Gods did not have complex clothes to put on or take off. Heaven flapped on a hanger.

Parapalegics blew instruments. Their skeletons were hung from wells. Species screamed at the non-existent waves.

Did the void breathe? The harmonic spheres were not yet hard. Ships were inhabited hallucinations. The Earth had no security force. Cargo was heaped on the docks. Fish flew into hungry mouths. Transparent wealth was free for the taking. Most signs were not difficult to understand. Myths demanded bodies.

Was no news good news? Nada. Sound’s messengers were not (quite) sound. Tornadoes were just embryos. They did not know how to act. They inadvertently swept gold cities off the ocean.  Bad poets developed the most prodigious memories. Chaos plowed the tundra.

Rulers could not separate the spirits from their spears. Pyres grew monstrous. The dead had not yet discovered the hygienic use of flame. Grass sprouted from the bones of decomposing giants. It lengthened like an ascetic's hair. Perfume swept the battlefield where an epochal war was fought. A holocaust echoed.

Bat men like a bow had not bent Asia. Though few its inhabitants the land looked young.

Things were great all over. Masters were generous. Slaves did not keep secrets. Magic was natural. Objects could be taken back from dreams. Paranoia did not sacrifice untouchables to the gods on the cold steps of Mohenju Daru. There was no image not present to the tongue.

Is space large? The lines between stars were mapped by the teachers of a race before our own. To the listener: breathe in and out. Aside from that there was not anything beyond.

That which coming into being was covered by the void- that 1 stood on water through the violence of austerities. What did it contain? Past worlds. Sages found the bond of the existent in the non-existent. Poets danced on the ocean.

Magicians joined hands to impregnate the Earth’s history with their speech. They levitated the inhabited sun from where it slept beneath the ocean. Birth created death. Mists arose to obscure the source of conjuration.

Did the egg dream of a conscious uroboros? Whose voice was it that echoed from above? The gods came after.

The Gayatri meter was the yoke-mate of Agni. Usni was the meter that Savitr contributed. The Viraj meter was the privilege of Mitra and Varuna. Soma was the intoxicant to which the Anu meter corresponded. All partook of the elixir that generated knowledge. They made melodies into shuttles for the weaving of the paradox. Repetitions harmonized the rebellious paths of planets. Nature’s laws are habits.

Is the myth revealed at the beginning of the end—or at the end of the beginning?

Dark the beginning that circumscribed the dark. What did it contain? Under whose protection?

Ecstasy is the god from which the material form of Soma is distilled. Ego annihilation is the press. Acts of memory are the offering.

The emptiness prior to the constellations is spread out like one body. Memories wheel. Space itself is my only mode of transport. Before me appears the trace- of what I in a different place once spoke. Against the night the cities of the Andhakas float like sparks.


(Illustration: Victor Brauner, Prelude to a Civilization)

They Have Gone Down to the Center of the Earth

By Brian George

I had reached an impasse. Doubts possessed me at the limit of my natural understanding. Who was I to act as a messenger between worlds? I could not go forward. I could not turn back. Dreams dressed like terrorists. They struck at random. They erupted at inconvenient moments into consciousness. I had no location. There was no internal or external space. My memory was a screen on which phenomena were projected. Objects were ghostly. Symbols got physical. Bad weather warned of the appearance of my guide.

A comet killed history. The desert east of Eden blazed. A tornado popped the plate-glass windows out of skyscrapers. Record banks flew. Winds brought down the collective house. Out of nowhere spoke the voice. The shadow of an echo became more solid in appearance. It said:

It is I your pharaoh--voice of the four rams of the Abhwyr. To be with you I have come complete out of the bowels of the sand. I have explored on foot the labyrinth of the great Platonic Year--that multidimensional prison. It is I who ate the key to the pyramid at Giza.
                                 
With my staff I strike: the target on the egg explodes. Do you know how much I love you? When I returned to Azilut out of my light years in the age, I found that it was I who had organized the Holocaust. 12,000 years had passed in ½ second.

There are few left who speak my language. The ones who do are old. They weigh more than the Earth.

*

Observe the wonders of the ancient world. They endure as opaque symbols. Industrial strength sacrifice has corrupted the transformation of the genome. The dead desire. Abandoned objects have grown hungry for experience.

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With a crutch I struck out blind at Utah. When I thought of you I wept. I have arrived on Earth before I came. The salt flats were a mirror of the Zodiac. At the Mormon Incest Data Banks, a patriarch joined the hands of two armies of damned souls in matrimony. Sex was retroactive. Gods drank blood. Slaves were free for the taking. Their indigenous skins were beautiful. It was the first day of the rest of the breach birth of the fascist encyclopedia. Birds picked flesh from the monumental statues. Smoke rose from a gopher hole.

Upon hearing these words I had no choice but to follow. Space was locked. The once transparent library had become a roost for pyromania. Books burned. Geniuses petrified. Flame at first brought no illumination. The guide said:

Star-crossed was the Khan. The landing pad was not on land. Do not stop at the greenhouse to water the reactor rods. Assur was a plate of glass that broke. They spread their map out on the globe. Dr. Strangelove, come forth from the future! The gods trust you to point your finger at the map!

On columns that blazed like fluorescent tubes bad rulers towered in their nakedness.

Shamans kept death simple. Knowledge was to eat. Gods were for use. Does the feathered serpent dare to think himself more intelligent than the prophet? All politics was personal. Speech was direct. In stupor ended the black magic of the technocracy. It was all good.

An army of years followed behind an ant in the great assault on the time cycle.

Others veered south from the Bering Straits. Vene vidi vici. Spikes stuck out from their heads. They stepped forth clothed in rainbows from the ark. Traditions of dismemberment had also been transported. Hearts blew open, like the doors to archetypal energies. Tongues coiled and struck like snakes. The throat of the east turned blue from eating Agent Orange. Arms and legs were gnarled into branches. Hands sprouted leaves. The red man with a saw cut igloos out of blocks of blood. They have gone down to the center of the Earth.

Damnation was relative to the speed and duplicity of the viewer. I was the murderous victim, the martyred sociopath. In slow motion birds collaborated to unwrap my karmic bandages. Self knowledge grew as I compulsively replayed the death flash video. The guide said:

There were big wheels inside baby wheels. The matched pair struck. To kingdom come by the vortex was the remnant blown. Day saved light but the state was not on Earth.

On a fence the red cock crows. Broken pillars on the plain smolder. The souvenirs of industry are plowed into a trough. No life emerges. Mohenjodaro--look: melted by the Aryan.

Giants broke laws. Each branch and blossom of science was occult. A flood has removed all traces of the lineage that an earlier flood had transplanted. The world tree has been hacked at the root. Yggdrasil is now horizontal. The park where you were made to live is black. The clay is scorched--on the ziggurat that Gumbie baked.

By touch the guide communicated many worlds of information. He would not give his name. His strength was frightening. He had no appearance. His eyes became my windows. An incantation echoed in my memory:

Prototype of Jaws: discover the harmonica. Tidal wave: roar. Action painters: stretch Toltecs over paint by number altars. Ghost: flap. Long was the knife that cut the bag. Age of wind: blow. Through the night--horse: fly. Shu: shuffle the house--the continents rearrange by chance. Living space-suit of the astronaut: devolve.

Poets gone beneath the ocean: speak. Make love to an exploded star. Space itself: feed the snake of time its tail. Protocols of the Elders of Zion: stamp out the Atlantean decimal system. It is bad. Seed city: from its fossil, free the godlike archaeopteryx. Slow orbit of amnesia: demand that the macrocosm dance. Just once is enough.

The guide said:

The man-made moon was whiter than a wrecking ball in heat. A black lead zeppelin had set fire to Siberia. Trees turned to matchsticks. Ruins flashed under permafrost. Rest period was up. Primogenitors ate their instructions. From the mouth of the most high the craft erupted with a bang. Get out!

Take wife. Erect out of mud the backward City of the Sun. Cross-pollinate the brain that the scarab out of dung raised. Your solar plexus is not old enough. No intestinal fortitude! Seek love through war. Out of hide make ego. Bend with a spade to shovel seashells from the sandbox. When you are done boys--put them back.

The great eye dropped a map across your mother, muse to German shepherds. She was great to the dream boats of the prehistoric navy. Rotten to the corps.

Don’t touch me baby or the energy will kill you. I will teach you how to play. Dead.

You who hang head downward from the rafters of a hollow egg- your head is hollow. Through it blows an age of wind. At last my dear one I can show you how the gears that turn the great year interlock. I love you so much--mutant DNA of the Triumvirate. Get out! Break a thighbone! We will guide you from a place beyond the Zodiac.

Having taken me this far, my guide fell silent for a century. He stared unblinking at an object known only to himself. There was nowhere I could go.

In a flash it came to me--that the underworld is no more than an alternate mode of consciousness. It is subject to its laws, and responds to a shift in focus. Lost cities turned to gold as my consciousness accelerated. The gods were holy terrors. Ferocious beauties competed for my love. I attended a refresher course in the art of primordial breathing. Raising a hand palm outwards, the guide said:

To Amalekh: made plain is the book--signs in your own language. If you do not read the signs will talk. Warning: your memory will be blotted utterly from under Shamaim.

Fear tested my ecstatic transport. At the center of time/space, and lifted by opposing vortices, I flew.
The vehicle had not yet self-destructed. As quickly as he had come, my guide again disappeared. I could not recognize my own face in the mirror. He had never left. He lifted my dead hand with his adamantine talons. A squeeze issued the commandment: Come. The guide said:

You are to give thanks to the lord! It is too bad he was sentenced to hard labor at the centrifuge. Statues were in charge. Plants powered the hallucination. The spider strung Einstein from her web.

The telescope stared from Afghanistan. The ghost of Akhenaten stood guard at the bell. The cuckoo wound up at his head and swung. Clang! Butterflies flapped from a silo. The stock was dead. The third experiment--over. Cyborgs in the labyrinth tore out pages from the book.

Green the line of light above the great domes of the Gobi. The sand blazed. The mineral guts were sucked up out of Earth. The turbines blew 10 ways to Sunday. With its hair a globe of flame- the day: Sat- danced incarnate as a child.

The rainbow fell in chunks. The Abhwyr turned 12 signs against the Zodiac. They have studied gears. They have stretched above incandescent oceans the two wings of a Frankenstein.  

White. Ain Soph. Black. Light screamed--O mama- no! on the heights of the Forbidden City. At the 4 gates of the breath the snake flags flapped. Volts rose up the ass of god. Boats flew. Nagas guzzled saki from a cratered bulb. I have torched a burning book. Birds sang at the break of day.

False hope had made the messenger a zombie. He met death. Like a mother he would bear the bones of Auschwitz and of Buchenwald. Each pore sweats out a UFO.

It was necessary to go down in order to go up. Past opened future. The flame transformed. The way out was the way through.

Intoxicated gods had thrown away the Earth. I had no name. An unspeakable teacher took me by the hand. He led. I followed. Fast or slow. It occurred to me that I had walked in those footprints on many occasions before. We stopped on the shore of a primordial ocean. Once ancient birds built totems to appease the brontosaurus. Fossils were now fuel. Red waves lapped at memories like tongues.

In front of us was a frame with two gates that opened onto nowhere. Salt pocked the images on the giantwork. Its towering mass tilted from a dune. Hieroglyphs rearranged themselves. From the wave-scarred gates I read out loud the words:

Immortal music moved our architect. We were spit from the creator's throat--the throat of Atum/ Tefnut/ Shu.

We erupted whole from between the thighs of the Enead. We were conjured- today- at the world’s first dawn, before sound’s exile into space was sung.

We guard the seed-sounds from which light evolves. We guard the octaves of the ancient spheres.
We were raised up by primordial love. Transcendent vice. Orgasmic intellect.  Who does not bear his memory as a gift cannot return through us. Abandon time--all you who enter here.

A screech echoed from a gull. My outmoded guide turned back with the small nod of a parent. I followed my own shadow through the gates. On the other side there heaved a revolutionary chaos. It was not hell. Space shattered like an egg. Pieces of shell landed on the ocean.


(Illustration: Mario Sironi)

To Akasha/ Part 1/ Section 12

By Brian George

His course is set for an uncharted sea. He has been carried off upon the surges of an ocean, an ocean that now boils to all compass points with suns. An ocean that now choruses the collapse of all 3-d coordinates. Whose only limits are the boundaries of a sphere. Whose center is the great dome of the human skull. Whose circumference is now constructed by the 1st man out of lightning.
                                                                                
Akasha come: dance naked on the opened cranium of the courier. His bones have been devoured by the ocean. His head is now suspended high on the flood. From a mile high trough your lost courier would call:    
                                    
May my mouth be opened. May my memory return.
May my mouth be opened. May my memory return.
May my mouth be opened. May my memory return.

Your lost courier would come to you but his body is not sound. He would raise his members dripping onto the sands of a diamond shore. To a shore where rest is an epileptic seizure. To a shore beyond the technological birth pains of the Zodiac. He would call forth each 1 of his bodies from the ages. He would raise his 14 members dripping onto the sands of a diamond shore. He would walk forth conjuring the bandwidth of a Horus out of the violence of the mile high troughs.

His own body is his only vessel. His mouth would be your instrument. He would approach on foot the gates to the Pleuroma. He would wander wide eyed through a wonderland of ruins. Through the wonders of the modern and the ancient worlds.

On that diamond beach the flowers are extinct. Lost cities float on clouds. Stone heroes wear archaic smiles. Their hands gesture at the moment between death and transformation. Species old before the Earth existed can there choose to reactivate their statues. 

He would now return the way he came. He would practice martial arts with Baal upon the 12 steps of a ziggurat. He would ply with human bones the 7 and the 12. He would touch the torch of Lady Liberty where it thrusts out of atomic shards.

He would put on and take off the shadow that was left by an atomic blast. He would wash the skull of Darwin in the clear spring of the Helikon. He would dust the sand from the Atlantean crystal. He would spit on Pavlov’s grave. He would excavate the telescopic hand of the Nefilim.

He would reach back into history. He would bounce his voice off planets at the circumference of the theatre. He would stand upon the shoulders of the tiny gods behind them. He would give thanks to the model of the Ptolemaic solar system.

He would climb on the rusted monkey bars of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. He would kiss the feet of the prototype of an alien version of himself. He would yawn and stretch. Like a happy lab rat he would shake off water.

He would swing on blackened brontosaurus bones. He would fasten to his ankles the still working wings of Mercury. He would join his song to that of ancient spheres. He would finger the strings of the Paleolithic instrument that once tilted the Earth’s orbit. He would tear the still beating heart out of his chest. He would celebrate the wound that heals, the wayward comet that impregnates, the world destruction that provokes.

He would raise towards the sky the spearhead of Longinus. He would lick from it Christ’s blood. He would stand before you with his eyes aglow with all the secrets from the Dawn Star’s fall.

His speech creates. No wish goes unacknowledged. Fulfillment precedes the desire by 26,000 years. As if according to a story known from childhood, each footstep falls where it had earlier been placed. Time is the machine that activates the symbols of the nonexistent. Fossils employ entropy to retrieve fuel from the biosphere. A wheel does not evolve.

He has stepped forth from the ocean with his phallus aimed at the light of a distant constellation. It is raised like a salute to the great dream that exploded, to a city he left long ago. On his back there hangs the hide of a baboon.


(Illustration: Jackson Pollock, Ocean Greyness)

To Akasha/ Part 2/ Section 9

By Brian George

You are the “I” that is “that.” Blue luster. Void one. Whose conch sounds fearfully. Of a preexistent race the incognito explosion. Resolute. Muse to the egg Hiranyagarbha—last survivor of the flood. Body conjured from the numbers 1 through 10. Brahma’s logarithmic spiral. Pitcher of the curve ball in the game of world destruction. Atomic skeleton. Shiva's juggernaut.

Beyond movement the circumference. You who execute the art of dance. Great solar chariot—Shakti. Purusha’s pyre. Ark of dawn. Eurika!—without amnesia. The Siddhas’ V8 wishing well. Nurse to tribes the Burning Ground aborts.

Horizon hung from zero. Spontaneous grain. Cracked code. Space created language. Self-entrainment. Resonant wave. Joy void made of void joy. Decimation’s octave maw. Geometer to the x/y chromosome. Austere 1. Form of letters. Ananda. Sat. Chit. Sleep erected. The 1 standing. Rigor of unconscious law. Millions. Knowledge. Defect. Waking state. The 4th state. Of the egg born. Shape of serpent. You who cast the net. Maya. Coiled sun. Unknowable. Clandestine.

Up rooter. Power of action. Without thought. Diamond hacked in battle. Primordial 1. Bondage. Abode.  Who have chained the ocean Ten Ten. Varuna’s snare. To the antipode—arch enemy. Deconstruction’s builder without bounds. Ahangkara in the form of Chit. Youthful. Who hold the Pinaka Bow. The bent low victim of Orion’s tusk. Of Doomsday—the word. Curtains to the Cow Cave. Vishnu’s tantric intercourse partner.

Star hub. World half maker. Vajra backward. The only 1—love of violence. You who have shattered Vala. Seed of the Assembly Beyond Space. Of Aryaman and Bhaga the reunion. Who have brought from Earth a crop of fragrant wood. You whose ark is measured 3 x 4. To UFOs—the fuel.

Surya—of great age. Muse to asteroidal iron. D-Day at the gates to the beyond. Transducer of sequential music to the spheres. Erupting bank. Gong struck by a revolution. Auspicious sign. Bridal gown—constellated. You who hold the atomic trident. Of the lotus foot. Made for Krishna. Breaker of the law that separates the vertical from the horizontal. O sandal made of wood. Biology transported.

When the sun is in Agha they kill the cattle. When in Arjuni your remnants are shipped glowing back towards home.

Awakened Kundalini. Milk maid power. The Bharata’s final solution. Refractive wave of salt. Body thrice wound—Soma. It burns. It bites and migrates. More dangerous than poison.

It has been made to eat. Asvins only may contain that measure—by the mouth of Mitra known. Magnet to Matruka—the future’s tractor beam. You who move beyond the speed of light.

Inverted radiance. Of no land. Without fear. Self-knowledge gone to ground. Triadic zigzag. Agent of anathema—constructor of the A-ankara bolt. Harvester of corpses. Retracted seed of Gaia. Soul maker. Holder of 10 thousand weapons. Root of law. Sunyata’s shadow. Giver of strength. To Agneya the acceleration. Sound. Unstruck. Nada. Void. That can not be moved.
__

O Durgashatanamastotra—you have danced forth thumping on a man hide drum out of the helix of 1 globe of light.


(Illustration: Kali, Artist Unknown)