Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Section 14

By Brian George

If human meaning is the shadow of a shadow, how far back must we go to discover the source of illumination? A moon has obscured the superconscious sun.

Is knowledge of the world a matter of addition or subtraction? If the world is a subject, should the self then be regarded as on object? The self obeys the tutelary genius that has covered up its eyes. Existence is a phenomenon whose essence has already—and long since!—passed from view. Presence articulates its plan through absence, as a cargo cult sets fire to the few remaining books, and whole continents and their peoples are removed. Nature’s death suggests that there may be something wrong.

In fact, the error is a basic one—far older than the universe itself—and would seem to be implanted in our DNA. It is as follows: that the one is a number. The correct view is as follows: that the number one is not actually a number. It does not grow bigger when it is added to itself. So too, it can never become smaller. How strange that the simplest thing is also the most complex! Thus, as with the one, we cannot observe too directly the configuration of the self.

At the end of the world, there is never more than one consciousness left standing. There is no hook in the sky upon which to hang one’s hat. A Promethean technocracy floats on the pregnant waters of illusion. Signs camouflage the perfect guardians of the Zodiac. Though they know all, they are empty. Of the meaning of a life we can only say: “It was.”

(Illustration: Rene Magritte)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Sections 12 and 13

By Brian George

12

The Gnostic teacher Valentinus wrote, “What liberates is the knowledge of what we were; of what ego and self are; of whereto we evolve; of wherefrom we are thrown; of what birth is, and how it differs from rebirth.” (Translation by the author.)

13

Gnostics believed that matter was the consequence of “hyle”—error, an ancient flaw in the structure of creation. Consciousness preexisted the soul's descent into space. Gods were not different from monsters. Time was a snake, or vice versa; its knowledge, although encyclopedic, fell upon deaf ears. The Earth was an abomination. Sophia was violated by an army of perverse hypnotic fields.

Hallucinations made species. 12 birds forgot that amnesia was in charge, and, without thanks, continued to hatch eggs. From each shell stepped an Aeon, still wet behind the ears. So drunk were we that, in the mirror, we could not recognize our own radioactive faces, and these perfect beings seemed, at first, more terrible than the gods. Dead seas haunted languages. Blood erected—as from a catalog of bones—the totalitarian tower.

The omnipotent played games—for no good reason, or just because they could. Prosthetic hands were transplanted. Ego was the each day more ignorant shadow of the self. The body was a corpse—a kind of afterbirth.  A dream of history turned philosophers to stone. Self-consciousness was the fly in the ointment of the Archons, or planetary lords—a metaphysical black hole that led to the circumference.


(Illustration: Alberto Savinio)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Section 11

By Brian George

“The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.”—William Blake

__

The young Plato had ambitions as a dramatist. He would wrestle Sophocles. Upon becoming a philosopher—to atone for past delusions or to celebrate his exit from the cave—he burnt all but a few fragments from this period. Reason would revolutionize the music of the spheres, which, in their superabundance, had become too democratic. It was no fun to experience perfection if one had to share it with 10,000 others. A philosopher, when he took flight through the geometric playground of the gods, would do well to keep his joy hermetically sealed. Lest some beam put thoughts into the heads of the Hoi Polloi.

Fumes had driven mad the oracle at Delphi; her symbols were ambiguous, and thus offered something for everyone, words that each could interpret in his or her own way. Pindar was little better than a drunk. He believed that time flowed backward from the present to the past—that antediluvian shadows fed the gods, as well as the heroes, whose DNA had been scrambled. Homer was an early practitioner of Hitler's “Big Lie” theory. Each city in Greece corresponded to a city on a different planet. The sea was described as “red,” not blue, because the human body was not yet smaller than the Earth. The reader will note that I too am a poet. Therefore I cannot be trusted—as is demonstrated by the lies above.

Imagination did damage to the integrity of the Republic. A subject should obey, for such is the radioactive splendor of the object. Ignorant daydreamers should not impinge on the prerogatives of the philosopher-king. Knowledge intoxicated—yes, but it should not be assumed that intoxication was any guarantee of knowledge. To the mature Plato poetry was suspect—a dangerous force; it could even be seen as an instrument of the counterrevolution. Time now moved forward, as it must. A poet’s image, all too easily, became real, tempting slaves to think that they were still living in the Age of Gold.

Once as transparent as the Platonic Year was long, space must now move into differentiation, with each component rigorously in its place.

The Golden Age had long since disappeared. Gone too were the Ages of Silver and of Bronze. Telepathy had once made books irrelevant. No artificial lights were needed. Now, most human bodies were less bright than the sun. Tough love was a necessity, and, for the care and feeding of the higher worlds, a few adjustments must be made.

The new model was a simple one, of breathtaking practicality: All kings should be philosophers, since all philosophers could be trusted to agree upon the truth, and then to tell it.

At the heart of the cosmos, the philosopher found a paradox: The world was one, but only one world was real. So too, it was not that poetry, in and of itself, was bad, but rather that the Muse might lead poets to a world whose laws were somehow different than Plato’s. For the good of all, such deviance must be punished.

A new day had dawned for the inhabitants of the cave. Time now moved forward, and only forward, as it must. The whole of History had been pointed like an arrow.

Greece would expunge the ancestral pathologies that had billowed like a fog from Central Asia, with its derelict webs and domes. It would not prove easy, however, for the philosopher to do away with the avian apparatus of myth. Reason without love would not be able to take off. Skeletal wings would not be able to grow feathers.

It was always possible, of course, that the problem was not one of free association, as such, however much such irrational leaps might seem the flapping of a hungry ghost. No, instead, the problem could be attributed to the use of poetry by others. One poet, Plato, would be allowed to speak for the Many, who lacked virtue. They were slaves, and would soon be plowed beneath the field in which they worked. Transpersonal discourse would renew the body politic. As Stalin said, “All problems are caused by people. Remove the person, the problem disappears.” A conscious symbol could infiltrate the counterrevolution. In the same way that a concept can be a truth that distorts reality, so too a metaphor can be a lie that tells the truth.

But perhaps meaning is not abstract, after all, and the meaning beloved by the poet is only one obscure alternative out of many. If the meaning meant is only the foremost among equals, one's experience of the beloved must turn upon proximity.

Transfixed by her eyes, which are oceanic, the poet petitions to enter the beloved, within whose body every secret is contained. Sophia is up for grabs, like the garment that conceals her, but the arrogant demiurge finds no body underneath. Plato did; thus it is likely that the philosopher was productively mistaken. “The Symposium” is a kind of new and improved poem. He did what artists do, as vision drove him to ignore his own self-serving propaganda.

As Heraclitus said, “They do not apprehend how being in conflict it still agrees with itself; there is an opposing coherence, as in the tensions of the bow and lyre.” Ideal and shadow secretly collaborate. A daimon lends its supernatural weapons to the ego. No one knows from what indeterminate depth the first star has erupted.

Perhaps preexistent ideas do not create but only help to direct the reality behind appearances. They are actors, also, no better and no worse than their human counterparts. Dead voices carry. Archetypes give form to downwardly mobile dreams—such as that of time’s one-way arrow, or of the living dodecahedron, or of the radioactive city in a seed. A mask creates the cosmos. It is possible that the Human Consciousness Project can best be understood by you—whatever your impediments—as you follow the twists and turns of the even now devolving story.

The abstract adherents of the ideal have had their day. Reason has triumphed, in a fashion, but not so that humans are more objective in their views. The gods and their advocates have sent investigators below.


(Illustration: Rene Magritte)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Sections 9 and 10

By Brian George

9

In a video exploration of the point that preceded the Big Bang, Stephen Hawking says, “Knowing how the universe works is not enough to tell us why it exists.”

However encyclopedic the attempt, no elaboration of the how can ever break the code that separates us from the why. There is a firewall between the why and the how. It guards the encryption against human hands. Humans need not confront the convoluted strangeness of their origins.

It is possible that another—and more important—boundary exists inside and not outside of consciousness. We do not know what we know. As we do not know what we are we cannot remember how much we have lost. Subject becomes an object that separates the observer from himself—a black moon that eclipses the act of primordial self-reflection. Ego tunes out the instructions broadcast from the self.

Speech now lacks the energy to create. Breath provides the blood with oxygen; it does not project the apparent order of appearances. Objects cannot be taken home from dreams. The symbol's other half has retreated into to a world before our own. Myths can safely be disregarded.

10

In his contemplative poem “The Four Quartets,” T.S. Eliot warns us that: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

__

Consciousness does not exist in space but only in relation to it—at a tangent, so to speak. It has no scale.

Are we specks of dust floating on the depths of an indescribably vast cosmos? Humility is needed, yes. It is true that we should not overestimate our importance in the larger scheme of things. This does not resolve, however, the conundrum posed by consciousness, which is not a speck of dust, or smaller (necessarily) than the cosmos. Despite the appeal of this superstitious metaphor—at which our future selves may laugh!—I would argue that consciousness is not subject to the authority of space. As a non-spatial field, perhaps consciousness does not need to go anywhere.

It is not consciousness but rather its vehicles that evolve.

As a non-spatial field, it cannot contradict itself, and there is no question whose answer has not been hidden in plain view. Each thing that we take to be a conundrum is a sign.

Is consciousness a part of the objective world, or is the objective world a part of consciousness?

Begin before. Shut off the senses that hallucinate a dream history for the ego. Retract evolution. An indeterminate flame coagulates the self. Consciousness is the primary fact. Our attempts to explain its origins are secondary. “They are little more than a distraction,” say the birds, but others do not believe this to be so. Hypothesis: space interdependently arises from the breath. A test of the new/old paradigm creates experiences—whose first act is to dismember us, thus taking us by surprise. Beyond birth, and beyond the math that coordinates our industrial-scale sacrifice, the joy that breaks us open is a kind of occult proof.

In “The Temple in Man,” R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz tells a story about Pythagoras in Egypt, where the philosopher had asked the priests to expound on their traditions.

“As life follows death,” he was told, “the existent follows from the nonexistent.” He was asked to prepare himself by fasting in solitude for 40 days. At the end of that time—if all went well—his body might be transparent enough to permit some small amount of instruction. Objective consciousness would recreate the senses. Other eyes would open. Ears would ring with the music of the spheres. Space would grow intimate. 

The ghost in the machine is amazed to discover that his hands can again move objects. The satellite dish no longer revolves without him. Thoughts get bodies. Memory sprouts branches through the unconscious flux of the cosmos. Desire is the seed. A one-pointed idea can give birth to the Big Bang. Present mass and energy have no bearing on the matter. Void consciousness precedes its object.


(Illustration: Pierre Roy)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Sections 5-8

By Brian George

5

Does the very lack of consciousness in one place make possible its existence in another? A subject evolves by transforming other subjects into objects—reversing and yet extending the pattern long ago set forth.

In Kabbalah, cosmogenesis occurs through the act of “Zim Zum”—or primordial contraction.

Omnipotence withdraws itself to create an opening for the unexpected. Playing dead, the light of Ain Soph Aur rolls over. Presence becomes absence. Absence gives birth to an indeterminate presence. Free consciousness populates the other side of space.

6

If nature were a grand unified conspiracy of meaning—an order absolute in its perfection, to which all intelligent men felt obligated to pay tribute—it is possible that certain subjects might experience this consensus as a prison.

Each species would have one (and only one) function to perform. A bar code would be stamped on every ego. Intuition would result in death. Fascistic beauty would be indistinguishable from the ugly. Love would be frozen by the great eye of revolving video surveillance.

Perhaps the very lack of a fixed meaning is what allows us to create an individual relationship to meaning.

Destroy the objective world self; it is a bad hologram projected by pornographers. Kill the Buddha if you meet him on the road. Prove nothing. Do not explain. Meaning begins with and refers back to the experience of meaning.

7

“How does Music Mean?” is the title of a book by Aaron Copeland, son of immigrants from Lithuania, by way of Russia, who wrote soundtracks for the Wild West, after several years of more radical experiment in France. The New York garment industry was not a friend to Schoenberg.

As an avant-garde high school student I was happy to discover this book. It was important to have a set of instructions. Common sense could resolve the conflict between subjective and objective meanings. As it turned out, I had underestimated the strength of the monster of objective detachment.

8

When I was 17 I had a horrifying experience of the power of the observing eye— the eye of the Gorgon—of its propensity to divide, of its desire to declare war on the living. I had just finished reading Sartre's book on Baudelaire, in which Sartre said that Baudelaire found a void where the self should be. Looking down he saw no person—only nothing. Perhaps this was true of me as well.

I looked and looked. Over the next few days I observed that an alchemical transformation was taking place inside of me. The process was a perverted one—leading to a kind of breach birth, as through the helixes of my DNA had been unzipped. My self split in two. One part hovered in the air about a foot above the other.

Looking down I saw no person, only nothing. My body was a corpse, a movable feast to which no guests could be invited. There was no self for the other to see. My consciousness could not be proven to exist. There was an emotion—“horror vacui”—but no one to experience it.

By day, the hands of every clock seemed frozen. The Earth continued in its catatonic orbit. The sun set—or so the shadow of the once existent would inform me. Food was a deactivated magnet. Sex did not point north. I could not sleep. The Dioscuri sat staring into space. One self had already disappeared. In a few days the remnants of the other self would follow.


(Illustration: Phillip Guston)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Section 4

By Brian George

Nagel makes a great deal out of the idea of absurdity—as something created by the disjunction of objective and subjective modes of perception. Is this sense of the absurd not more of an emotional than a philosophical issue? Perhaps Nagel is rationalizing his innate emotional response to the world with an elaborate conceptual apparatus.

Let us imagine that we are grains of sand, and that chance has stuck us to a beach-ball, which revolves. We do what the law of gravity directs. If in motion, we tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by some external force. We see what is put in front of us—or as much of it as our mostly unconscious program does not censor. We are small, and for some strange reason see our smallness as unnatural. We want to be much bigger than we are.

If chance has placed us in that one spot, and no other, then why would we be bothered to do more than fill our niche? We would have no interest in the mystery of scale.

Again, let us imagine that we are grains of sand, and that chance has stuck us to a beach-ball, which revolves. Two alien children are playing catch with the Earth, whose orbit stretches, threatening to break. A throw goes wide, and the Earth is swept off on the currents of an inconceivable sea. Habits are subverted. The marriage—once happy—of the vertical to the horizontal is over. Space is big. We are very small, or so it would appear. Is there any objective reason that this disproportion should bother us? The macrocosmos watches.

Is life absurd, and would death make any difference? Intellect is a doctor without hands. Ego is a shaman without power. Imagination is a fish without a boat.

If we had not already been where we were going, then how could we ever tell if we had we had reached our destination? If, in fact, we were as stupid as we think, then we would have no urge to interrogate each law, or to test the world against our memory of its archetype. A would lead to B, and we would eat and fight and reproduce, without caring that our consciousness was once as vast as space.

If we had not forgotten how to breathe without our lungs, then our bodies would not dare to disappoint us. Our breath would fuel the lamps of an interdimensional city.

Let us suppose that intellect, ego, and imagination are colored areas on the surface of a turning torus—a kind of donut—whose circumference turns through its center, and whose center then turns into the circumference. The motion of these areas is continuous; their separate locations on the surface do not appear to change, anymore than we must leave home for the Earth to orbit around the sun. At all times, we are standing on the outside of a hypersphere, looking in, as well as on the inside looking out.

Is it possible that our consciousness is neither here nor there, that up is down, and that the inner and the outer worlds continuously change places? Is the one self many? To whom should the inhabitants of the torus turn—if they desire to deconstruct the movement of the 10-dimensional kaleidoscope?

We come and go over inconceivable spans. One of our days is 432,000 years long. As beings, our mode of movement is the convoluted curve, thus our sense of movement is—and must be—circular. It is not—and cannot be—linear. It cannot be imposed by fiat from without. It must start where all projected systems end.


(Illustration: Pierre Roy, Cafe de la Marine)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Sections 2 and 3

By Brian George

2

As puzzled as I was by the near consensus among young artists in the discussion group, I was more puzzled by the attitude of Nagel, a rigorous thinker, who appeared to take the “speck of dust in space” idea quite seriously. Was I missing something? His own understanding of the idea was of course far more sophisticated—more finely tuned in language and more rooted in historical context—than that of the young artists. He was careful to emphasize the equal importance of subjective and objective modes; subjectivity was, after all, one part of the objective world. It was fully real.

By employing the method of “dual vision,” Nagel attempted to locate meaning in the play of contradiction. Were he successful in this ambition—and able to remain in a state of “negative capability”—I would have been pleased to follow where he led. I found, however, that he gave far more credibility to the demands of the objective mode.

Nagel writes, “Objectivity is not content to remain a servant of the individual perspective and its values. It has a life of its own and an aspiration for transcendence that will not be quieted in response to the call to resume our true identity.” He does not grant that subjective consciousness is allowed to pursue any such aspiration for transcendence. Its significance is purely local. The astounding event of consciousness has no large-scale implications.

Choice of imagery betrays the unconscious attitude of the author. “Playing in a Little League baseball game, making pancakes, or applying a coat of nail polish are perfectly good things to do.” In tests, the objective mode is preferred by two out of three mature adults. Without knowledge of the self, however, there can be no true detachment.

3

If we say that understanding of the meaning of our life is a purely subjective phenomenon, something that each person must determine for himself, by his own inexact and yet pragmatic methods, does this imply that our experience of this meaning is in some way insubstantial?

Subject and object are the two sides of one inexpressible symbol. Although the self exists at an angle to the world—i.e., it is in it, but not fully of if—what is true of one should not be less true of the other. The self, like a heat signature, fades into the fog. It cannot look too directly at the world from which it comes. A wave carries the other off. External structures are themselves more insubstantial than they seem. A promethean technocracy floats on the pregnant waters of illusion. It could be, however, that this apparent lack of substance is due to our use of the inappropriate tool.

“When I think about modern art I reach for my revolver,” said Mussolini, the defender of heroic nudism. “Stark violence is the sire of all the world’s values,” wrote Robinson Jeffers, whose weapon was the pen. An experience of the “telos” can be killed, but never forced.

For the breaking of eggs a revolution is perhaps too large a hammer. The occult instrument that can crack the cosmic egg leaves little or no direct evidence behind. As is specified in the code, the true seer is not permitted to communicate. He does not speak, but rather shows by a sign—as Heraclitus said—whereas the ignorant cannot be tempted to shut up. The big stick of the WTO creates order (of a kind) as it empties out all meaning from past cultures. The key of fractal chaos can be slid into the locks of most self-organizing systems, thus opening them for use, but such systems do not automatically connect each soul to his/her origins.

Eugenics cannot determine why the statue of the Archaic Greek warrior smiles, despite his wounds, as though he were in possession of some secret, and laughed inwardly at a joke too subtle for his descendants. An early cosmonaut once boasted that god was nowhere to be found in outer space; his nosecone had established proof of death. GPS cannot be used to track the imagination of the artist behind the animals at Lascaux.

Lamp in hand, Diogenes wanders back and forth through the city. It is noon. He cannot discover the location of the sun, and decides to look for an honest man instead.

“Nature loves to hide”—said Heraclitus. Should our own natures be any different? Perhaps our natural sense of meaning dies when subject to examination—like a heart removed from a living body.

Like life, meaning can best be understood by its presence. When it is absent, no act of will can create it. No arbitrary word can call it out of nothing.

If we stand outside of ourselves, beyond and above the paradox of the human, like a doctor probing the unconscious subject of a laboratory experiment, the hard light can indeed prompt us to regard existence as absurd. The subject is a kind of bladder, which we are glad to inflate with our demiurgic dreams.

So too, from this vantage point, we might logically jump to the following conclusions—that:

Consciousness is a mishap. The brain is chemical soup. Nature is promiscuous—an unfit mother. The net of interdependent origination is a joke. Pain warrants no compassion. Since humans are weak, it is better to be a perpetrator than a victim. It is a good thing that the observer is in charge.

Objective methodology allows for the accumulation of data. It does not allow us to enter into the experience of the subject, let alone to determine “why” the subject is. Many parts do not make a whole. If there was no subject to transmit the living spark, then our electromagnetic field would not be able to cohere; there would be no difference between a body and a corpse, and no way to distinguish between a human and a robot. Many facts do not add up to one truth.

In the space beyond Earth’s orbit, there is no fixed platform on which to position our Archimedes lever. We cannot objectively enter into the experience of another subject. Should we assume that the objective viewpoint is any more effective in allowing us to understand ourselves? If the self is an object, it is a strange and disturbing type of object—as de Chirico has said—which we turn this way and that to see how it is made, only to discover that it is haunted. The self is an absence that appropriates the other.

Beyond the existing framework, and inclusive of all contradictions, a truly objective consciousness might only be possible after death.


(Illustration: Pierre Roy)

Life Returns to the Uroboros/ Space Does Not Go Anywhere/ Section 1

By Brian George

“Coming into this particular body, and being born of these particular parents, and in such a place, and in general what we call external circumstances; that all happenings form a unity and are spun together is signified by the Fates (Moirai).” —Plotinus, II.3.15

1

Is human meaning something that can be objectively established, like the structure of a molecule or a natural law? Or is the sense of meaning closer to a physical sensation, the perception of a self-evident truth, a preexistent certainty, an ontological connection to the primal core of our natures?

Recently I helped to lead a discussion on Thomas Nagel's “A View from Nowhere”—a text that looks at the problem of human meaning in relation to the subjective and objective modes of understanding. One idea caught the imagination of the group, and was repeated in various forms throughout the morning. The idea was: that we are specks of dust on a tiny planet that orbits an obscure sun in an infinitely vast cosmos. Therefore human life has no significance whatsoever.

I was a bit disappointed. This was, after all, a group of artists, who should have been militant in their defense of the importance of subconscious symbols. How could you trust your own creative process if you did not believe that your subjectivity had any right to exist?

There is a song from the 1970s that is often played—inexplicably—at weddings. Its refrain goes, “Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind” While I confess to liking this rock anthem by Kansas, it has been 30 years since I last regarded the concept as profound.

Sipping milk from a glass, I would lie awake at 3 AM. My alarm clock would tick. Its minute hand would move. Shadows thrown by headlights would twist branches across the ceiling. My intellect would soar to the heights and depths of space—only to realize that the self did not exist. Vertigo would then take over.

My head was empty—like a manikin's. I experienced the silence that would one day supersede the accident of our biology. Hormones fueled the experiment in tumescent nonexistence. Annihilation was more intimate than sex. The cold touch of the inanimate transformed me. These experiences of the void were, in their own way, true. My mistake was the all too common one—to confuse spatial extent with philosophical depth.


(Illustration: Alberto Savinio)

The Preexistent Race Descends/ Pythagoras (Section 6)/ Beginning

By Brian George

The void does not acknowledge any single name. 26,000 years escort precession of the equinox. Democracy precedes the egg by 10. Pythagoras was the 5th. As Euphorbos he fought at Troy. At Samos as Mermotimos he probed the sex life of the food taboo. He saw behind the stage, before it.
                                                                                     
Said the birds, "Be warned that you should never tamper with perfection!"
                               
He had the sight. Anonymous bequeathed the gift when he stayed late at Saqqara--in a flash, full access to encyclopedic transport. The back part of his head was popped open by the 12. In his own body the future could be touched. Out of black gold birds have forged his thighbone. 8 observe the strange laws of the Ogdoad: fear--as at once he learned to do.

Palm fronds sprout beyond the scorpionic claws. He came from far away.

Clamorous tides where the sun cast its length. Buildings from the sky hung, like a wedding of murdered archetypes. They cut the path. They exported the palm tree’s trunk. Through a cold sky Saturn rose above the wreck of Mohenjo Daru.
                                                    
What did Pythagoras learn from Zaratas the Chaldean? The age of the sphinx.
                                                                                             
Vast the convoluted curve. Space. The incarnations were concurrent, not consecutive. It was known from the start how many would survive. Enough. It was important that the symmetry broke. Computers electrocuted dead armies to the South. The secret was its own reward. It appeared. The war was old. The grounding of Omphalos--it is not a story fit for Baal Shem Tov’s dismembered children.      

There were many gods involved. Violence was generative. The Earth itself was pregnant. The path of creation was a paradox that no omniscience could untangle.

At Delos as Pyrrhos, Pythagoras collected dreams for naked warriors to perform. Before that as Aithalides, the pilot of the Argo, he brooded on the depth.

Unnatural the Earth’s history. Space was wider than the eye could see. It was made by hand. 1 year was the life span of each god. Teachers had sex with geometry. Space in and of itself encoded all the good parts of the former Earth.

1 memory served the transplanted population. It was traded back and forth, a beloved object, not too much worse for wear, before somehow being lost. The glow from an earlier period had not quite disappeared. "Do you have the time?" a bird said.

Few souls could outrun the centrifugal movement of the wheel.

What was left of prehistory you could put inside your mouth. Prove us wrong.

Serendipitous destruction. The dead threw their weight around. Populations thronged the Theban gates. In search of bodies they have multiplied the most ancient of explosions. Exact the arcade. It echoed with the march of giants. Like the seeds of some hallucinated growth, survivors of the great flood planted memories of their trauma. Shadows hardened into the code of Hamnurabi. Inside became outside. Zeus developed breasts. Ishtar put on her technocratic phallus.


(Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, Head of a Philosopher)

Excerpts from the Reality Sandwich forum for "The Goddess as Active Listener"/ Revision of Part 1

By Brian George

(Note: I have expanded and revised the first section of "Revolution by Night." Also, I have added an epigraph by Henri Michaux.)

“I also saw there the Auroch, the Parpue, the Darlette, the Epigrue, the Cative with his pear-shaped head, the Meije, the Emeu with pus in his ears, the Courtiplian with his eunuch pace; Vampires, Hyperdruches with black tails, Bourrasses with three rows of stomach pockets, Chougnous in a gelatinous mass, Perfils with beaks like knives; the Cartuis with his chocolate odor, the Daragrues with damascened plumes, the Purpiassses with green and trembling anuses, the Baltrees with watered silk hides, the Babluits with their pockets of water, the Carcites with crystals on their mouths, the Jamettes with saw-toothed backs and tearful voices, the blear-eyed and almost decomposed Purlides, with their two venom jets, one looking haughtily down, the other up towards the sun, the Carjax and the Bayabees, rarely emerging from their parasitic life, the Paradrigues, so agile, surnamed jets of stone…Wide avenues suddenly opened up and the view dipped past crowds of spines and rumps to fall on the voids which were howling at the bottom in the universal confusion…”—Henri Michaux, from “Zoological Notes”

1
Strange bedfellows/ 6 questions about aliens

Hi Joan of Art, 

You wrote, “I really appreciate your imaginative matriarchal approach to narrative and recognition of the necessary threads we spiders weave into the cracks' of each other's psyches through imaginative hooey flab. I marvel at how you managed to present the game-changing wisdumb of aliens from a human perspective—WITHOUT being alienating, which is always my problem, but at this stage in the game I don't seem to care. What is your relationship to extra-terrestrials?”

—Please, will you watch your language! The ones I know prefer the politically incorrect name of “aliens,” which they take to be a kind of inter-dimensional joke.

Who, you may ask, is the butt of this black humor? That is the never ending question. Perhaps the eight-armed egg of Moebius knows, but he/ she cannot be tempted to say much, and we humans seem to have lost our keys to the grammar of the once universal language.

You could argue—as so many in search of re-virginization do—that certain aliens are “bad,” while others, more properly called E.T.s, are “good.” Vampiric Grays from Zeta Reticuli, for example, are out to tamper with our DNA. They are fond of cattle prods. To them, humans are a type of god that is powerless enough to eat. They can taste fear. They will shrink when we call them out. Nordic 7-D Pleiadeans are a particularly attractive group. Their white skins are translucent, and gleam. 4-D Snakes from Draco are the masterminds behind the International Monetary Fund. Their hearts are black, while the race of 9-D Ambassadors from Arcturus have no shadows.   
 
I can’t help but ask: doesn’t this just re-format the traditional light/ dark opposition that has made such a hash out of human history? How are alien or E.T. traits in any way distinct from the mix of forces that we struggle with each day? Instead, let me echo the Roman playwright Terrence, who said, “I am a man; thus nothing human is alien to me.” I would tweak this as follows: there is no part of the Macrocosm that is not—at least potentially—a part of my own body.

In the Ptolemaic cosmos, one argument for placing Earth at the central point was that it could not have an orbit. Circles were a perfect form, while the Earth was an impure mixture of four elements. If this is true, then the center of the body would seem like an odd place for a navel. The gods would disdain to communicate through such an opening. A hex would be placed on Omphalos. They would not want to catch germs.

Sal Rachele, in “The Truth about E.T.s,” argues that close to 100 percent of the Earth’s population is made up of species from other star systems, and he even gives an exact breakdown of the figures. Not only do E.T.s walk among us, but, according to Sal, they are most often indistinguishable from the average pedestrian on the street. All the better for those who would prey on the unsuspecting, and who hide their unnatural wet dreams under hats.

Let us say that you are standing at a crosswalk near the docks of the Generic City, above which a wave towers. There, you are attempting to determine the significance of each sign. Two signs—“Walk” and “Don’t Walk”—flash, but, above them, there are lights of three different colors, and the streets lead off in four directions. So: is it safe to cross?  FYI: that is not a Wagnerian helmet. Instead, those are Brunhilde’s horns. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings.

In Chapter six of the Tao Te Ching, we read, “The great state should be like a river basin, the mixing place of the world, the feminine of the world.” And, in Chapter 49, “The sage has no fixed mind. She treats the mind of the people as her mind…I treat the good as good. I also treat the evil as good. This is true goodness. And in Chapter 41, “The great square has no corners.”

One can only wonder what other Earth species, such as cows and fish, would say about the benevolence of humans if they could speak. The verdict of an alien board of judges on our race would no doubt be severe—if they were to look at such things as Auschwitz, the bombing of Hiroshima, the BP oil spill, the Stalin purges, or the institutionalized violence of the global “free market.”

There is a statement that I think is from Moses Cordovero’s “Pardes Rimmonim,” or “Pomegranate Garden.” I can’t remember the exact quote, but it goes something like: “If each thing were allotted the judgment it deserved then the world would cease to exist. Let us hope that love is the operative principle, and that we will all clap when the actors take their bows.

Joan of Art, you had asked, “What is your relationship to extra-terrestrials?” Let me respond to your question with six questions of my own: 

1) How “alien” are they, really, and is the shiver of uncanniness we feel a tribute to the closeness of our bond? 

2) Why do “aliens” approach humans in the most intimate of settings, such as bedrooms, which they enter with no prior notice, almost as though some long standing relationship were in effect, of which their Earthly counterparts, only, remain unaware? 

3) If they are exobiological, then why do they have such an interest in our bodies, which they violate with impunity, leaving only a few hieroglyphic scars, as we find that their zany transplants and their Fascist interventions often do more good than harm?
  
4) And how should we interpret this incestuous family drama: heads or tails, love match or Greek Tragedy? 

5) Are they the servants and we the masters, now grown senile, on whose behalf they perform their initiatory rites? 

6) Is our categorization of these presences as “aliens” a kind of magical act to avoid confronting the full fear and wonder of the dimension that they come from, the home that we left some indeterminate time ago, on which a door slammed shut?

(IllustraVictor Brauner, Eventail du Poete)