The Mad Mother of Barbarian Tribes/ Part 2

By Brian George

When I first came to Boston to go to school in 1974, the Gardner was quite a discovery. I remember one gentle spring day, when the first buds were just popping from the branches. I had arranged to meet a girl called Donna Contantineau at the Renaissance courtyard for lunch. I remember the feel of the cool courtyard stone beneath my fingers, as we consumed a feast of pita, babaganoush, stuffed grape leaves, nuts and apricots. Donna was wearing an Indian print skirt. I couldn't figure out if she had just taken a shower with some wonderful soap, or if that were just her natural fragrance, or if my mind were playing tricks on me.

At the end of the meal, she demonstrated an unusual talent, which I had not seen before and have not seen since. She had the ability to repeat whatever you were saying, with no hesitation, at the exact moment that the words came from your mouth. It was as though some glitch in the projection of our wave-forms had occurred; we were seated on a stone bench by a fountain, from which the gods observed us, yes, but we were also the gods that were doing the observing. Voice and image had become unsynchronized; a slight gap had opened, though which we could slip. The museum was a wheel. It turned as slowly as the great Platonic year. We were statues spinning through the stage sets of a dream. The Gardner stood by like an eccentric aunt, taking note of the first signs of romance, but too preoccupied with abstract beauty to fulfill her role as chaperone.

I remember going to the Gardner several years after this with my high school friend Danny Panagakos, who was going through a New York performance art phase. He arrived for the visit wearing his then customary outfit of black leather and chains, with a three-day growth of beard and a skeleton earring. We might as well have brought a spotlight with us, and then set it up in the corner of each room. A group of security guards shadowed our every step, waiting for the sudden appearance of a knife or can of spray paint. Danny had asked one of the guards if they had an extra set of oil paints, a few brushes, and a pallet, since one of his paintings was not quite done and he had come back from the dead to finish it. A bit later, he managed to get into a shouting match with several of the guards, the only Irish immigrants I that have ever met with absolutely no sense of humor. The shouting match escalated into a shoving match, before he was thrown, with great theatrical fanfare, out of the building, and told never to come back.

My friend Danny was the fly in the metaphysical ointment, the snake that had volunteered to bring chaos to the garden. It was he who had removed the vowels from the tower of the one world language, before spreading the Big Lie that the sky did not exist. It was he who had shrunk the head of the Most High. Due to Danny, God could now be mistaken for the stopper in a bathtub. It was he who had once commissioned the Mona Lisa to paint a second and distorted copy of da Vinci, which the whole world somehow took for the real thing. For millennia now, it had been difficult for him not to lose track of his goals, and to act in such a way that he would not appear redundant. Just imagine the thrill: to find an audience that might still be capable of shock! It was a twinge of satisfaction that he would not soon forget. With all eyes on me, I quickly followed him out the door.

During the autumn 1998 visit of my father and his third wife, Judith, to Boston, my father suggested that we go to the museum. My wife, Deni, and then one year old daughter, Elizabeth, also came. My father was very impressed with the courtyard. It reminded him of the courtyard of a house he once owned in Mexico, during a period of affluence, before his company collapsed like a pyramid of cards, and he was forced to declare bankruptcy. He treated us to an enthusiastic lecture on the history of courtyards, veering from ancient Greece to North Africa to Islamic Spain to Mexico. Though not unheard of, such eloquence about aesthetics was quite unusual for him.

He would more often say, “I went here. I saw that. At such and such a place I saw so and so conduct. He was good.” For example, he might say, “That was the year that I heard Yo Yo Ma at Tanglewood, where he played Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante in E Minor. A great performance. Bernstein conducted. A few of us went to a get-together afterwards. Bernstein brought his boyfriend. He drank too much, and decided to change into some blue velour briefs with a flowing cotton robe.” My father’s inner life was locked. There was only one key. On a schedule to be determined by himself—or in a joint-venture with the businessman who also occupied his body—he would take his inner life from storage, which involved, coincidentally, the removal of his cello from its case. He would stand his inner life up and then, by a telemetry of joy instead of the usual force of will, he would make it sing and dance. On this day, however, the museum had taken charge, and had prompted him to speak in great detail about his thoughts and memories and emotions.

Thoughts of his 24-room mansion on Avenida de los Insurgentes, where he hobnobbed with Samosa, led to thoughts about his student flat above Louisburg Square. How many unexpected turns his life had taken since the 1950s, when, after giving up his dream of becoming a musician, he first moved from Michigan to attend the BU School of Engineering! My father’s mood of autumnal nostalgia was contagious, and surrounded us like the smell of burning leaves. We did not realize that this mood would prove to be prophetic, or that several months later my father would be, very unexpectedly, dead.

Another year went by, as the Gardner continued its mysterious transactions with the infinite. I again visited with my wife and daughter, who by then was two years old, and as prone to perpetual motion as a dervish. Elizabeth, when she saw the Medieval lions that stood guard at the courtyard, chortled and shrieked with joy. Crouching down, she put her face a few inches in front of each one of the lions, went “Rooaaaarrr!” and then waited for a response. When none was forthcoming, she crouched down and went “Rooaaaarrr!” in front of each of them again. Oh no they didn’t! She could not believe her ears. Again, the silence of the seed-vaults of Antarctica. Elizabeth had no doubt that the Gardner was alive, in its own reverse engineered and hermetically sealed way. Because of this, she could not help but be annoyed: There was no good reason for the lions to be rude!

By the time we got to the second floor, she felt an overwhelming urge to express her tactile appreciation for objects, or perhaps to search for the openings through which life entered the inanimate. Again, in violation of the laws of nature, the Irish security guards exhibited not the slightest trace of humor, nor did the corners of their lips turn up. They did, in fact, both move and act like Golems, who had been conjured out of blood and clay by the power of the Kabbalistic word; they served, one pointedly, the power that had called them forth. “If she’s going to make noise and touch things,” we were told, “she can do it somewhere else.” We were instructed, in no uncertain terms, to “Please control the child.” The request was reasonable, but “controlling” a two year old is far easier said than done.

She was moved to wrath. Her imperious will to power would not be thwarted. A spell had been cast. The hand of the great collector had touched her soul. A voice whispered in her ear, “The world is yours to appropriate. Carpe diem! There will time enough later to throw sculpture at the masses.” How dare the guards try to tell her what she could and could not do with her possessions! Yelling for obedience, with eyes as wide as a Sumerian statue’s, she walked with hands out towards a five-foot urn. “Mine,” she shouted, “Mine! Mine!” I scooped her up and quickly headed for the exit, her legs still pumping, and the curse on her subordinates still echoing through the halls. It would seem that the Gardner is not a child-friendly place. Some 13 years later, perhaps to keep herself on the right side of the law, Elizabeth is now thinking about becoming a museum curator. Much scholarship will needed for the stalking of her target. For somewhere, in a corner of the subterranean web, she can hear that the heart of the progenetrix still beats, if slowly. She would ask of it a question. Its answer would be in the form of a meta-linguistic key. She may yet have a chance to get her hands on one of those giant, ash-filled urns, and the lions may, any day now, decide to wake from their naps.

Curiously, it was not just children but also human beings in general who, in the first few years, were seen as potential Disrupters of the Peace. As first planned, the museum would be open for four days per month, for only three months out of the year. Using tax-codes and import duties as their weapons, Federal Philistines had insisted on a six-day per week schedule, thus tainting the pure concept of the gift. As often happens, the external world had been forced to intervene to prompt one subject to acknowledge his/ her fate. If it were not for bad luck we might have no luck at all, and the Zodiac would not be able to grow feet. This fallen version of the Gardner is the one that we now see and touch.

(Illustration, Andras Zorn, Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice)

A Student of the Nagas

By Brian George

"That which is the element of light ... is seen to exist on account of [in relation to] darkness; that which is the element of good is seen to exist on account of bad; that which is the element of space is seen to exist on account of form.”—Nagarjuna, circa 150-250 BC

“Method is more important than strength…By dropping golden beads near a snake, a crow once managed to have a passerby kill the snake for the beads.”--Nagarjuna

Hi  Olujide,

I am sorry to hear that your experience of the Vipassana method at the Goenka retreat was less than ideal. This method can, indeed, seem overly dry and rationalistic. While focusing on the normal inflow and outflow of the breath, you allow the random contents of consciousness to bubble to the surface, calmly labeling such things as “fear,” “resentment,” “greed,” “hatred,” “sexual attraction,” “nostalgia,” or, more reductively, “thought,” or “emotion,” and then, without judgment, you allow them to go on their way. So far, so good. It is a simple and powerful method, and, over the long run, can produce far-reaching results. The problem, in the short run, is that the method may not lead easily or inevitably to a state of expanded energy, and that it is the already constricted intellect that is doing all of this labeling. The web of interdependent origination, which can be perceived as directly as a landscape in a state of ecstatic consciousness, can, in this method, sometimes be pursued as a kind of moral imperative—i.e., as something that you should see, instead of something that you actually do see. I think that its effectiveness depends very much upon the character of the meditator, as well as on his or her objectives. For some, it can seem as though they are putting the cart in front of the horse, and then going, over and over, around in very slightly wider circles.

For those with an artistic bent—such as you or me—it might be better to focus first on the generation of energy, and then, once you have been projected into space, it may be easier to take in the whole of the landscape at a glance, and to grasp how each detail is related to the others.

Curiously, though, you also quote this strange and wonderful passage from the Nag Hammadi manuscripts—Allogenes XI, 3—which reads like a Gnostic version of Nagarjuna’s seminal “not this; not that” philosophy, which is, arguably, at the heart of the Vipassana method. The Nag Hammadi passage reads, “He is superior to the Universals in his privation and unknowability, that is, the non-being existence, since he is endowed with silence and stillness lest he be diminished by those who are not diminished…For he is not perfect but he is another thing that is superior. He is neither boundless, nor is he bounded by another…He is not corporeal. He is not incorporeal. He is not a number. He is not a creature. Nor is he something that exists, that one can know. But he is something else of himself that is superior, which one cannot know…He neither participates in age nor does he participate in time…And he is much higher in beauty than all those that are good, and he is thus unknowable to all of them in every respect. And through them all he is in them all, not only as the unknowable knowledge that is proper to him. And he is united with the ignorance that sees him.”

In capsule form, Nagarjuna argued that the “self” and/ or “reality” is “not this” and “not that.” Nagarjuna is generally credited with the founding of the Madhyamaka School of Mahayana Buddhism, but the method of “not this; not that” would not seem to be specific to a single school. How could it be, when you think about it? In Vipassana, by focusing, moment by moment, on the transience of all objects, we are empowered to see through the foreground of our everyday attachments and into the deeper background of the landscape. Some traditional sources say that Nagarjuna received his understanding of the Sutras directly from the realm of the “Nagas,” the “Snakes” who hold the keys to inter-dimensional knowledge—as well as, perhaps, to the lost history of our race. His very name—“Naga” (snake) plus “Arjuna” (white, like lightning or the dawn; clear)—argues for this connection. His methodology is perhaps best understood against the backdrop of the versions of sacrificial  Vedism and monistic Shaivism that were current during his period. We tend to think of these versions as “early,” but they were, I believe, very late developments in a tradition that was almost inconceivably old, and they may, by that point, have become too formulaic. This was also the period during which the Zero was invented—or reinvented—and his methodology could perhaps be seen in terms of the Zero as opposed to the One.

The key insight was that all things are inextricably connected, and give rise to each other; thus the existent cannot at any time be separated from the non-existent, nor can the high be separated from the low. While it is true that Nagarjuna was part of an international trend towards rational philosophy, his insights could nonetheless be applied in any number of contradictory directions, including that of shamanic strategy. If, in the minds of later Buddhist scholars, he was first and foremost a philosopher, this does not mean that he was any less a student of the Nagas. By attempting to be all things to all people, he made use of their non-local subtlety, and was able to do each thing while seeming to do something else. “Method is more important than strength,” as he said. In the Vedic and Shaivite views then current, the gods and the Atman—or higher self—were more or less eternal and substantial, while human beings were transient and insubstantial. What Nagarjuna perhaps set out to do was to place all beings on an equal footing, and to create a relative ease of movement between physical and non-physical realms.

If the “here” is inextricably connected to the “there,” then why should we be desperate to break through to the Beyond? There is no hard and fast barrier, and we are free to take a “middle path.” It is even possible to interpret some of the more extreme forms of asceticism in the Buddha’s and Nagarjuna’s day as coming out of a Vedic equivalent of the concept of “original sin.” We humans were incorrigibly asleep, the slaves of Maya, the food of demons, the puppets of the gods, the prisoners of our five senses, and only the most extreme measures were sufficient to set us free. (I believe that this form of asceticism—Sthanu, or the withdrawal of one’s energies from manifestation to preserve their explosive potency—actually goes back to a much earlier period, and has a different origin and purpose than might be immediately apparent, but I will address this issue in some future post.) During this period, the relationship between the worlds had become clouded, and the gods were not seen as the help-mates of human beings. They were powerful forces, to be appeased, or magicians, to be emulated. At best, they were our direct competition, against whom we must struggle with one hand tied behind our backs. Heaven had become overpopulated, and the gods desired to keep any new generations of ascendant yogis out.

In the “Saiva Siddhanta,” a Sri Lankan school of philosophy that—according to some scholars—originated around 250 BC, this tension between humans and the gods was explored at considerable length. Here, for example, is an anonymous text that succinctly sums up the issues. It reads, “Whoever among gods, sages or men becomes enlightened became the very self of the gods, and the gods had no power to prevent him. But whoever worships another divinity is like a sacrificial animal for the gods, and each person is of use to the gods just as many animals would be of use to a man. Therefore it is not pleasing to those gods that men should become enlightened.” In this tradition, the human soul is generally described by the word “pasu,” which means “beast.” Having fallen from a state of primordial clarity, the soul becomes vulnerable to the projections of a “lord,” or “pati,” who is not under any obligation to play fair. By the power of the “pasa,” which means bond or snare, the soul—like a victim of the Stockholm Syndrome—then willingly comes to embrace its own subservient position, as it looks to its oppressor for small gifts.

A kind of impasse had been reached. If the heroic yogi, with his arsenal of “siddhis”—or supernatural powers—posed a threat, then perhaps the “An-Atman”—or “Not-Self”—could slip back and forth throughout the higher worlds unseen, or at least without stirring up any premature opposition. “There is nobody here but us chickens!”—as the saying goes. Of course, there are such incidents as the Buddha’s apocalyptic confrontation with Mara, but this conflict was not so much won as simply side-stepped, by a kind of metaphysical judo. Because, in one sense, there is nowhere in particular to go, the physical plane is just as beautiful and as valuable as any other, and provides us with a stable platform from which to act upon the cosmos. So, what does the Arhat—or “enlightened being”—do when he has reintegrated his mind and body into the field of zero-point energy? The conventional answer would seem to be based upon a preoccupation with imprisonment. It is that, if the Arhat chooses to return from his state of ecstasy, then this must be due either to the unresolved karmic pull of his attraction to the lower worlds OR to his compassion for the suffering of all sentient beings. Compassion is certainly one valid reason to return, but I believe that there is an older, and somewhat more peculiar, reason. If we were to probe far back into the mists of human history, and then even further back, before the gods had been created from our surplus, and when the yogi was not different from the poet and the warrior, I believe that the original reason would have been “to play.”

Even with recent breakthroughs in our theoretical understanding of the Zero, we still, on some deep, historically conditioned level, cannot help but think of the world as a kind of inanimate stage-set. We cannot begin to imagine that the earlier versions of ourselves were in any way instrumental in bringing this and other worlds into existence. In saying this, let me be very clear that I am not referring to the New Age concept that we “create our own reality,” which I tend to see as an ego-based fantasy of omnipotence. No, we were non-local givers, not autobiographical hoarders. We were death-defying acrobats, not passive-aggressive spectators. Because we are operating on a fraction of our preexistent voltage, we tend to misunderstand both the motives and the actions of the early race, and thus to misdiagnose the origins of what we now perceive to be our imprisonment.

In the Norse “Elder Edda,” there is a line that goes something like, “The Sons of Ivaldi labored for an age to build Skidbladnir, best of boats.” When I first read this, around 1977, the line hit me like a depth-charge. Why would it take so long for the “dwarfs” to build a boat? And what sort of a boat were they talking about? Perhaps the physical world, as well as each of the worlds before it, was first envisioned as a kind of “boat,” or “vehicle,” upon or within which the gods could ride. The attributes of the boat were certainly peculiar in the extreme. Here, for example, is the way that it is described in the “Dictionary of Norse Mythology.” It says, “The ship was big enough to hold all the gods and their horses and equipment, yet small enough to be folded up and put away in a pouch when not in use. It could sail over land or through the air, as well as on the sea, and has been compared to a swift-moving cloud…” I thought to myself, “I will plant this concept like a seed, and, if I tend to it through the years, it will bring me many insights.” And so it has.

Not long after this, I also stumbled across a line from the “Orphic Argonautica,” a text written about 500 BC that seems to refer back to a previous world destruction. In it, it is clear that the Orphic speaker is both an observer and a participant, whose job, perhaps, is to gently lean on the steering-oar. At the end of the poem, he says, “Now the gadfly leaves me stinging and burning. My body learns from the unremitting sky. You will hear from my voice all the things I concealed from stubborn men; how the heroes and half gods passed over into Peiria and the steep sheer head of the Wet Country…I sail upon the ship of the world.”


(Illustration: Victor Brauner)

The inadequacy of Anitya

By Olujide Adebayo-Begun

Many  thanks for  your article “Descent of the Merkavah!” I recently attended a ten-day Vipassana retreat, organized by the Vipassana International Association (SN Goenka school), held at the Emrich Center, Brighton, Michigan; a 26-acre retreat center with very beautiful lawns and wooded area. The course duration was ten days, excluding the days of arrival and departure. The daily routine was ten to twelve hours of meditation, interspersed with hour-long breaks in order to get meals (which were very delicious vegetarian fares), shower or rest. And for the ten days there was a law of noble silence, which meant meditators could not communicate with themselves through any form or gesture. The experience was a powerful one, but also left me with a certain feeling of ambivalence, and with reservations which, at first, I could not quite bring into focus. Your article hits straight at the heart of my apprehension about the Goenka method, and gives me permission to articulate my dissent. Prior to the ten-day retreat, I knew very little about Buddhism, and this retreat served as an introduction of some sort.

The thrust of the method to the extent of its revelation in the ten-day program is that since everything in existence is a sensation that rises and passes away, it’s pointless having either craving or aversion to anything. Unfortunately most of us humans have failed to realize this, hence there’s misery. Every craving and aversion generates impressions known as samskaras which manifest as bodily sensations and perpetuate human misery. Vipassana technique entails observing bodily sensations- samskaras- with equanimity. By merely observing with equanimity, the human being would cease generating new samskaras and old samskaras will be forced to come out to the surface and be dealt with. And not only that, the person would transcend both body and mind, achieve nibbanic peace, and find true happiness, love and compassion. I find the technique to be simple and very effective in exploring the body-mind connection. The silence, over the ten-day period, dramatically concentrated my mind, and practically forced me on an inner ride. However my grouse is the definition of the human condition implied in the vipassana technique.

Over the course of the program I heard so much about life being misery and my mind kept asking: why is it so? If all is nothing but passing sensations, I ask: what is the method to the madness of the anitya? Why did they ever arise to pass away?

And while at it, I thought about some of your ideas and realized quite clearly that I am a happy pagan- not afraid of death, not afraid of misery: you once said something about the need to “respond with orgiastic laughter to a dare.” This paganistic, ecstastic hubris sustains the wheels of the universe, creates joyous illusion, distributes ashe, occasions a pleroma of tragic beauty whose alternative is nothingness and dearth. We’ll pass away. So what? My understanding of human existence was never really so turgid as to create anxiety over our passing away. That which arises to pass away is also the thing that exists beyond mind and matter. We have always been a wish-fantasy of the chthonic realm. We are a trick of frozen light. An offshoot of a cosmic prank, a love note from nothing to nothing. The real miracle, I think, is not enlightenment. The real miracle is the illusion of separation, of movement, of the head that thinks and the legs that walk, the real, magical feat is the creation of pain and pleasure. If the difference between the world of particulars and world of forms is only illusory, then perhaps what is needed is a widening of horizon, we must counter misery with a sensitive and yet robust felicity, a felicity that is keen on equanimity, and sophisticated enough to see misery as the other side of the coin to joy, both being temporal, and both being indispensable to the human condition.

Your article not only implicitly assumes this, it makes a powerful yet subtle prognostication of the way forward (I use way forward lightly) which is “repair the rip in the structure of the cosmos.” As you said- the peace on earth is not ours, we must travel on the wings of paradox to our true home. We are not the meek to whom the inheritance of the earth has been promised. We must see our true face! And your writing nails it, kills it. After it, there’s nothing to say, nothing to add: I cannot overstate how much of pleasure and understanding I derive from reading your works! One day I had to burst out to my colleagues in the MFA world about your work-forget your fatuous obsession with plot and publishability, come and see writing and bow!

You write so well about these things that comments are almost superfluous lol. Your writing has anticipated it all. The ultimate challenge is a paradox, a paradox which the reading of your works, over the course of several months, has illuminated quite clearly for me: how do we make Ashe dance after we have repaired the rip in the structure of the cosmos? You make two suggestions- we have to master the art of bi-location, to be the shadow and the substance at the same time, to equip our hardware with a factory-fitted fully developed Eshu and then some. But the second suggestion is more tantalizing, which hints at the "end of all descent... geometrically encoded in its origin": “He is superior to the Universals in his privation and unknowability. For he is not perfect but he is another thing that is superior...He is not corporeal. He is not incorporeal. He is not a number. He is not a creature. Nor is he something that exists...And he is much higher in beauty than all those that are good, and he is thus unknowable to all of them in every respect. And through them all he is in them all, not only as the occult knowledge that is proper to him. And he is united with the ignorance that sees him.” Achieving this will be the ultimate triumph of Ashe. We would have flown into that which cannot be named!

Best regards,

Jide

Eulogy for Robert George/ Part 2

By Brian George

At the beginning of the second stage, I had been out of touch with my father for 11 years, while he was trying to build a new life for himself and his second family on Avenida de los Insurgentes, in Mexico City, Mexico, in a 24-room mansion. As we were walking from the train I pointed out a car, a silver Mercedes, which I saw as a model of good design and style. It turned out to be the exact type of car that he owned. We also shared a taste for butcher block furniture, for shells and other objects from the ocean. We both preferred small instrumental groups over symphonies.

This was, however, a period of some conflict. We inhabited different worlds. He was devoted to business. I wanted to practice yoga and develop my creative powers, at that time in poetry. At one point he mentioned that he had shown samples of my writing to his most educated friends, all of whom thought it was terrible. One of them even described it as “a form of grandiose masturbation.” Perhaps I would like some money to go back to school to study business? No. He believed that I should “take my place in the world as a man among men”— his phrasing. He approached my conversion from poetry with the intensity of a locomotive. In 1984, after a particularly big blowout, I broke off any contact for perhaps a year and a half. In 1989, I began doing some visual work again. We were both surprised, if not shocked, to find that he liked the art as much as he hated the poetry. Perhaps I was not wasting my time, and might have some idea of what I was doing after all.

But the conflicts of this period were not so much resolved as put aside. We came to realize how much we both looked forward to our visits, how much we simply enjoyed spending time together. We had been divided by our similar, and very willful, natures. For far too many years, each would not give the other permission to be who and what he was, and then, more or less suddenly, a truce had been declared. I should also mention that, during psychodrama of this period, Judith was a key humanizing influence, moderating between us, and helping to establish the calm breathing space into which we would later move.
In describing the first stage I would like to share a few memories from childhood.

I remember driving up winding roads, at 80 miles an hour, on a rainy day to Tanglewood. My father had borrowed a 1950s Triumph sports car from a friend. My seat was tilted back, and I was very much aware that I was sitting no more than six inches over the road. Let me put it a different way: the road was speeding by about six inches underneath me. The fog was dense. Rabbits, deer, foxes, and pheasants would pop up, only to disappear a split-second before we hit them. With its smudges of green and gray, the landscape was as insubstantial as the fog. It was only there, perhaps, because we had both agreed to see it. On certain hairpin turns, I decided to perform a test: there was nothing beyond us when I closed my eyes. Still, I knew that one wrong move could result in our spinning off the road, flipping over, or hurtling into a tree. I was scared, yes, but my father was driving. The car hugged the road, and I knew that we would get to Tanglewood soon.

Tanglewood, an out-door music center in the Berkshires, was the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. My father was proud to have such a highly cultured son, for I insisted on going to Tanglewood at every available opportunity. He assumed that this was due to a love of classical music. Not quite, or, at least, not yet. I liked the smell of pine trees and being far away from the city. But, in fact, my secret reason was that I loved the box lunches that they sold there. The sandwiches were great. The cardboard boxes that they came in were beautifully constructed. Even then, I liked to make things, and boxes were one of my favorite things to make. That year, for my birthday, my father sent me a recording of Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony. The symphony, which premiered, in 1952, as part of a radio programme for a Soviet youth orchestra, is supposedly in Prokofiev’s “simplest” style, although, oddly, it is also in C sharp minor, one of the bleakest of all keys. It may have been written for a youth orchestra, but only an adult would think of it as a child-friendly piece. I played the record once. I didn’t listen to it again for eight years—when the seed that my father had planted came, at long last, to fruition.

On a trip, we stayed in a white motel by the ocean. We woke up at dawn to go fishing. The smell was a complex one: salt air, disinfectant from the motel, frying eggs and bacon, gasoline from the boat motors, weathered wood, dead fish. You could hear the cables creaking, and the foghorns from the tugboats. When we left the motel, already, the fog had started to thin out; it would soon be no more than a thin film on the water. The sun was red, but the overnight temperature had not yet risen much. Bouncing up and down on our toes, we zipped up our spring jackets.

There were seagulls everywhere. They perched on roofs, and on telephone wires, and on most of the posts of the wharf. They had sharp beaks, and we watched as they competed to rip apart a pigeon, which was almost, but not 100 percent, dead. The frozen fish packing plant was their base of operations. We asked, “Do they call it a base or a town hall or a church?” We speculated that they had grouped there to perform their civic duties. My father said something like, “They are probably voting on how much fish to eat!” In retrospect, I can only wonder if their purpose was more serious: They were voting on the number of sailors that they should escort to the other world. There was no part of the beach that they did not patrol, and, even miles out from the shore, you could see them circling the commercial fishing boats, as they set off for the day or returned after a week-long voyage with their catch. 

On the dock, we stepped into a shop with weathered planks, where we rented a small motor boat. We spent a half hour looking at the deep-sea fishing lures, with their colorful jointed bodies, staring eyes, naturalistic details, and three-pronged, razor-sharp hooks. I was hoping that we would go with a few of these. But no; instead, we bought two cans of worms. No fan of worms to begin with, I was horrified by the type of multi-legged sea worms that we bought, which kept biting and writhing and wrapping themselves around us. We never did catch any fish, but I will never forget how fearlessly my father handled the sea worms, as he leaned down to unwrap them from my fingers.

And, finally, let me turn to one of the earliest of my memories: It was another overcast day. We traveled in a Jaguar with cracked leather seats to a museum that was located somewhere in Rhode Island. It was old, and had ivy climbing up the walls. I think that this was probably the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, built in 1866, and featuring, or so it is said, over “12 million specimens and objects from Anthropology to Entomology to Zoology to Paleontology”—although, to be honest, I don’t quite remember the name. In any event, we went there, and we stayed for the whole day. The museum was cavernous, and it echoed. Ring after ring of balconies surrounded the central atrium, within which were arranged the reconstructed skeletons of some of the biggest dinosaurs. These were held together with wire, glue, and metal braces. To me, the braces did not look very strong at all, whereas the dinosaurs still did. Almost certainly, they could free themselves, and it seemed as if they were getting ready to step towards us at any moment.

So fascinated were we by the ancient bones, and so influenced by the spell they cast, that we somehow lost all track of time, and managed to get locked in at closing. At some point, we noticed that the lights had been shut off. We had heard the clank of the switches being thrown, but we were still talking about the head of the Tyranosaurus Rex, whose jaws gaped open a few feet from where we stood. The doors at the bottom of all of the stairwells had been locked. One after the other, we went down each of them, only to have to climb back up again. Only a few bulbs were still lit. It was so quite that you could hear the footsteps of a mouse—yet the space was not actually that quiet: it was as resonant as the inside of a shell. My father could turn even a small misfortune into the biggest of adventures. As we wandered around a balcony, we decided that we liked the skeleton of the brontosaurus best. He was, perhaps, an ambassador, who had been chosen to travel from the Mesozoic Era to our own. I was very much content to be there for the night, and did not especially want the guard to let us out.

At this point, I have reached a temporary limit of my ability to regress. Let me close with a few lines from the 13th Century Turkish poet Jelaluddin Rumi, the founder of the Whirling Dervishes of Konya, and one of the most articulate of visionaries. The excerpt reads:

Noise and action on every side,
fires and torches, tonight
this pregnant world gives birth to eternity.
…
I have no stone in my hand,
no quarrel with anyone.
I rebuke no man, but possess
the sweetness of the rose garden.
My eye is from that Source,
from another universe.
One world on this side, another on that
as I sit on the threshold.
On the threshold are they alone
whose language is silence.
Enough has been uttered; say no more; hold back the tongue.


(Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, The Child's Brain)

Eulogy for Robert George/ Part 1

By Brian George

Several weeks had gone by since the visit of my father and (his third wife) Judith in October. On a complex pattern of back roads, we had travelled to many of the places that my father remembered from the 1950s, when he has just out of Boston University and stationed at Fort Devens. Then, it was off to the airport, where we hugged goodbye, and, in three or four hours, they were back in Denver.

In hindsight, I would say that this last trip was more bittersweet than we knew, or at least than we were willing to acknowledge, and had taken place more in memory than in the landscape of New England.

So: several weeks had gone by. Already, the brilliance of the red and gold leaves had begun to fade, and there were more of them on the ground than in the trees. In their V-formations, turning on a dime, the last military jets had disappeared to the South, leaving only a few contrails. We would miss their sonic booms. We would wake to find that frost had spider-webbed the windows. How wonderful! We could smell the wood-smoke from our neighbor’s cast iron stove, which, even indoors, seemed to follow us around. Cold had driven a few field-mice to take refuge in our basement. Our cat would not kill them quickly. He liked to play with them for several hours first. Most bees had short-circuited. Their radar was gone, and they flew at odd angles, banging into things. The wind from the next season had arrived ahead of schedule. It stung fingers, and got underneath our clothes, making us, quite suddenly, aware of how inadequate they were.

One day, as I was browsing through the shelves at the Barnes and Noble Bookstore, a book by the Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert seemed to jump into my hands. I turned randomly to a page, and in front of me was a poem that Herbert had written about his father’s death. I would like to read it now.

Remembering My Father

His face severe in clouds above the waters of childhood
so rarely did he hold my warm head in his hands
given to belief not forgiving faults
because he cleared out woods and straightened paths
he carried the lantern high when we entered the night
I thought I would sit at his right hand
and we would separate light from darkness
and judge those of us who live
—it happened otherwise
a junk-deafer carried his throne on a hand-cart
and the deed of ownership—the map of our kingdom
he was born for a second time slight very fragile
with transparent skin hardly perceptible cartilage
he diminished his body so I might receive it
in an unimportant place there is shadow under a stone
he himself grows in me we eat our defeats
we burst out laughing
when they say how little is needed
to be reconciled

In this piece Herbert touches on what I think of as the three stages of interaction between parents and children, and on a final—more mysterious—stage that occurs after death.

In the first stage, our parents are giants. They have great control over the world and great authority. They exist in a mythic dimension. They cast enormous shadows as they move. The child who plays hide and seek loves to suddenly jump out. We put on an incarnation to take it off. The CEO of an international conglomerate, in the presence of a parent, can revert to being five years old. It is hard to do without our magical intermediaries, the big birds who intercede with clouds on our behalf. It is wonderful to be held in the strong arms of the ruler of the world.

We learn to take charge. We are never fully grown. When a parent dies, should he or she apologize for leaving us unprotected? The work of becoming conscious can vanish like a sand castle, as, inch by inch, the tide advances up the turrets.

In the second stage, as we grow our parents shrink to a more human scale. We see them eye to eye, as human beings like ourselves, and begin to understand their limitations. Since we know all too well our own limitations, we begin—perhaps grudgingly—to accept the limitations of our parents. It would be good if this process were as automatic as the change of the seasons or the growth of a tree. The situation is complicated by our having not one but two sets of parents. The mythic parents never do quite disappear, but go underground to live inside of us. We are confronted outside by the human ones. There are children who, for years after a parent’s death, will not forgive the one for not being the other.

False innocence can freeze the heart. It can be stunting to expect a golden childhood for ourselves. I would here pause, to direct a look at Jeff and Robbie, if my half-brothers could have put aside their disappointments to be here with us today. The soul matures by growing downwards into the darkness of the earth.

In the third stage, depending upon how long each person lives, the children might take on some part of the protective role of the parents. Bit by bit, we come to see that time’s arrow is not purely theoretical. No, all things will change. The classic, three-dimensional images that have followed us from childhood can then come to seem like badly scratched projections, and we cannot help but wonder if we have made our parents up. We come to see our parents as not only limited but also as quite vulnerable and frail. As what should be their wisdom expands, the strength of their intellect might simultaneously contract, and as the wealth of their experience grows, they might begin to develop a whole range of physical problems. At some point, they might float into the twilit mist of a kind of semi-incarnate state—a state not quite in this world, but not quite in the next.

They might rehearse their lives backwards and forwards, telling the same stories hundreds of times over. To think, “We have heard these stories!” is to miss the point. Is this simple repetition or the start of a movement beyond life itself, the first step in a process that will take off after death, and then escalate still further, in a kind of quantum leap? At the end, the parent might not even know what century he or she is in, let alone the specific year. An accountant might not be able to add up a column of figures. A dancer might not remember how she was taught to tie her shoelaces, or that the shoes for the left and right feet are supposed to match. A patriarch might become as weightless as a scarecrow. A matriarch might not recognize her child’s face. Whether we want to or not, we, the children, are forced to think—if we haven’t done so yet—primarily in terms of what we have to give. We must help our parents to acknowledge and accept that it is they who are now the dependents, and that, strangely, each is acting out the role that the other had first performed. The key thing is to operate by stealth. We must “act without acting,” and lead by way of a posture of submission. We must do our best not to get yelled at!

In the fourth stage, finally, the parents move on to a new world. We are left behind to internalize their knowledge, to develop a new and subtler relationship with them, as well as with the more intuitive aspects of ourselves. In some subtle way, our parents might once more act as our protectors.

Signs will be sent. We will speak again in dreams. We must help them to say goodbye to us, to establish themselves in the higher worlds. From there, they might act as our inter-dimensional guides, if we could only let go of all of our dead habits, and, with new ears, learn how to listen. As, with a sigh, they had once sent us off to school—first to kindergarten, then to high school and to college—so too we must send them off to conduct their life-review. From the other side of the aperture that clicks open on the light—which each is free to interpret in his or her own way—it is possible that our parents will have access to our mirrors. They will, no doubt, have important things to do, as well as many non-local parties to attend, but, when asked, they may provide us with some necessary clue. As, earlier, our parents had gone before us to the Earth, so too they have volunteered to scout the vastness of the Beyond. If we are the systole, they are the diastole; if we are the inhalation, they are the exhalation, and vice versa. It is possible that death is just birth played in reverse, and that the figure 8 is the most perfect of all forms.

I would like to present the first three stages of interaction with my father in reverse, ending with a few memories from childhood. Beyond what I have already said, however, I will not speak here of the fourth and more mysterious stage that opens up after death; it is beyond the reach of my casual recollection, and I would quickly lapse into poetry. And so, to begin:

During the recent trip of my father and Judith to Boston, I noticed that his hair had turned from silver to white, that he no longer enjoyed long walks, and, in fact, wanted to park his car at the front door of any building that we were visiting, rather than walking the few extra steps. In other words, I saw the normal signs of aging. For the first time, my father began to seem like someone in his sixties. I thought that he might develop a few health problems. It seemed like such a short time ago that he had started law school at the age of 59, bringing to it the enthusiasm of someone 20 years younger. I felt proud to have a father so willing to start again, to begin where he was and face life head on.

Now he seemed just a bit frail and cantankerous, rather than difficult in his earlier way. But what a wonderful visit that was! Speeding at 80 miles an hour through the autumn foliage, we traveled to the Bull Run Inn outside Fort Devens, where he had been stationed in 1954, when I was born. At the Inn, he remembered the name of the moose head made of sticks and scraps for vegetarians—the Egopantis—on the wall above the fireplace. I almost cried to watch him playing with his new granddaughter Elizabeth, then nine months old. He was overjoyed during a service at Emmanuel Church to find her clapping along to Bach and Schutz.

How strange that he dragged us from a meal at his favorite restaurant to see a jazz trio he had picked from the Boston Globe, a group that he had never heard of. As we were finding our way to our seats I realized that the pianist looked familiar. Out of dozens of performances he had picked one led by a person I knew. This was a person I had met at parties thrown by Elizabeth’s godfather, Steve Provizer. Stars sparkled as we left the French Library at the end of the performance. We walked back and forth along Commonwealth Ave., unable to find the car in which we had come. It had not been stolen, vandalized or towed. It was, after a hallucinated search, just waiting there in front of us.

Connections inside connections. There was a sense that we were moving deeper into memory, and then even deeper still, inhabiting a stage set made of dreams and hopes revisited. We coasted without a driver over unpaved roads.

That October trip was full of quiet joy. It was as calm as light on the surface of a lake, under which move currents that grab hold of the ankles and pull, swirling swimmers to an unknown beach. We intuited an emotion moving towards us from the future, a valedictory nostalgia. I had bought a number of ties as Christmas presents which I felt, for some reason, impelled to give to him—three months before Christmas. He appreciated the thought but wore only one, a slate gray tie with Keltic crosses on it, before his death. The others were a bit too colorful. None of them had stripes. In the October sky, a few insects blinked around us, and the stars seemed to be waiting for a new one to ascend.


(Illustration: Max Ernst, Pieta, or Revolution by Night)

Descent to the Merkavah/ Part 2 (Revision)

By Brian George

“The Just Man sat upright on his solid hips. A ray of light gilded his shoulder. Sweat came over me: 'Do you want to see the meteors glowing red? And, standing, hear humming the influence of the milky stars, and swarms of asteroids?

“In night farces your brow is spied on, O just man! You must find a roof. Say your prayer, with your mouth in your sheet, after a mild expiation; and if some lost soul knocks against your bones, say: ‘Brother, continue on your way, I am crippled!’

“...And the Just Man remained standing, in the bluish terror of lawns after the sun had died.”—From “The Just Man,” Arthur Rimbaud, tr. Wallace Fowlie

__

In Kabbalah, if we desire to cross consciously from one world to another, and, as things fall apart, to be actors and not just observers of the electromagnetic shift, the first stage of the process is referred to as “going down to the chariot” or “descent to the Merkavah.” A modern phrase similar in structure—if not in exact meaning—might be “descent to the unconscious,” as this was used by Freud and Jung.

If the goal—as in psychotherapy—is to heal, it is not to heal ourselves, but rather to repair the rip in the structure of the cosmos, which makes it difficult for us to perform our predetermined role. Some would argue that this rip is virtual, but it is nonetheless problematic. It would be best, perhaps, to view it as the time-lapse movement of a lightning bolt, which had previously shattered the upper vessels of creation, and has just struck the iron tip of a tornado, within which we have built our homes.

Blinding as—or what—it illuminates, this flash gives birth to the world that we perceive. What we think we see is the afterimage—now haunted and mechanically preserved—of a stage-set that was long ago destroyed. It is possible that each thing has happened a great many times before. For what reason, then, are we experiencing them now? A sense of vertigo takes over. It is enough, almost, to make us faint, and makes us hold on to those objects close at hand.

We must wrestle with a paradox: that the one sphere turns both clockwise and counterclockwise, up as well as down, in as well as out, and the energy that separates is the energy that connects.

Let us say that the world is a habit of projection. It does move, but it seems to do so only in a horizontal circle, which causes us to feel trapped. We are not free, because upon it we have fixed our eyes. Quite strangely, we do not know what our faces actually look like, nor can we, until such time as we have exited from the world. Until then, they are as featureless as the dark side of the sun. We must depart from what we know in order to discover what we are. It is by going down that we gain access to source energy—atomic, but of a relatively non-destructive sort—which comes complete with its own built-in interdimensional vehicle. Thus we will go from here, where we are not, to there, where there is nothing to obstruct us.

And so: why are we directed to go down instead of up? Perhaps because ascent implies a strenuous effort at improvement, a clutching at what is out of reach, a desire to become bigger when we should, instead, become smaller. Perhaps it is because the preexistent beings, the Elohim, descended towards the chaos of the primordial waters, to speak the words that began the world and program the march of evolution. Conversely, some might see this as the march of devolution, because all species have descended out of Adam’s DNA, which had not yet been unzipped from the DNA of Eve.

Perhaps it is because descent implies disintegration, a requirement for new growth. However turgid were the organs of the Elohim, and whatever their attraction to our bodies, which were, in some ways, far more beautiful than their own, it was not especially pleasurable to be buried in the Earth. It could induce claustrophobia to be tucked inside of its womb, between potsherds and the bones of dinosaurs, between out-of-date toys and kitchen sinks, in the rubble of exploded cities. Perhaps because biogenesis is just a prep-course for cosmogenesis, for a delivery to occur at the end of a great war.

Perhaps because Death is the most attentive nurse, the magician beloved by manikins. Perhaps because we assume that the “Higher Self” Is good. Perhaps because we are terrified of the Shadow that protects us. Perhaps because the end of all descent has been geometrically encoded in its origin. Many aliens look just like you or me. It is hard to tell if the lost race has gone anywhere at all. Perhaps because, appearances to the contrary, our catalytic agents are not actually out to harm us, and are doing no more and no less than instructed. “It is what it is,” as the contemporary saying goes. Perhaps because it is important to relax.

When we go down we return as to a vehicle buried, but the whole time present in the ground beneath our feet—a vehicle faster than the speed of light. If there is no space, it takes no time to move from one end of it to the other. Or perhaps—as I had earlier hinted—the Merkavah could be better understood as a tornado, ripping cities from their roots, churning crops and migrant workers and their alien overseers up, setting in motion the dead body of creation, tilting back and forth from the vertical to the almost horizontal, as it funnels the most distant of places through its center.

Time then becomes plastic. Magnetic fields congregate around a properly placed request. Often help arrives, as an accident or intuitive breakthrough, before the person becomes aware of the need for any help. Events run backwards—returning to the future world. The self, without moving from one spot, finds that little is left undone.

Upon his exit from non-local space, however, few will realize that the traveler has just stood the world on its ear. To the traveler, the world looks altogether different, like a web of luminous glyphs, with which he can interact. It looks like a body, and not a corpse. He notes that all of the clocks’ hands have gone missing. At noon it is midnight, and at 10:00 AM it is 4:00, the hour of long shadows. To others, the holographic stage-set does not seem to have blinked. Antigravity has not yet won their hearts, nor do they realize that they are standing upside down.

Thus it was necessary to postpone my transvaluation of all values. The revolution that I had launched did not even seem to exist. Truly, it was arcane in its goals. By the most psychotically complex of geometries, we had hidden our intentions even from ourselves. Our powers were great, but our vehicles were small, and we used them to hug the line on the horizon, as, bit by bit, we descended towards the Zero, then beyond.

Each day, we went to work, where we dragged our feet and pretended to be bored. Each night, we sped off to take part in god knows what. In our hands, a variety of archaic scalar weapons, which made them sting, and which we did not especially want to remember how to use; on our lips, an ecstatic chant, from a planet that the Death Star had exploded. Thus flew beneath the radar of the Lords of Industry and Commerce. My army was made up of straw dogs—very lazy!—who did not want to get burnt.

With our capacity to be both everywhere and nowhere, we would reassemble the once perfect world.

We would bridge the dimensions between sleep and waking, which may, in the end, be no more than a construct. We would redraw the maps that our ancient teachers hid. We would split the atom—but in a good way!—for at its center they had buried the bones of the First Man. Interplanetary in our scope, we would throw wide the doors to the Akashic Hall Records. Row upon row, we would wander among the statues that we left, whose anatomy is translucent. But why do their faces look like ours, with their wide eyes that have never ceased to stare? And if, in fact, they actually do breathe, then why is this breathing almost imperceptibly slow?

Would the amnesiac communicate with his other self, long since relegated to the edge of space? He would, but on a schedule that had yet to be determined.

It was clear now that my path led down, not up, and not only down, but outward.

I have heard the roaring and the droning of the Ur-text when the Powers That Be sing simultaneously the syllables of each line. To some ears, it might sound like chaos. From the center to the circumference, and from the future back, in 12 directions, to the present, in order that we have space to act the one sphere must be emptied. For it is in the nature of high energy to descend, as it is in the nature of free energy to flow. From the fog of souls, the tides of all potential versions of events, my own explorations seemed to reenact the descent of the lost race—who had not, as it turns out, ever really agreed to put aside their magic. Each thing has a certain “tendency to exist.” It was my job to coagulate the ocean.


(Illustration: Brian George, Tornado, 2001)

Descent to the Merkavah/ Part 1 (Revision)

By Brian George

1

“Man’s quest for immortality, to ‘live forever,’ or to be self-sustaining in one way or another is modeled most economically by the vortex. ‘Looking into the world,’ he observed the vortex in fire, wind, and water, and in the weave patterns of the heavens above, etc. When, whether consciously or subconsciously, he recognized that vortexes represent ‘the only manner by which a self-sustaining motion can exist in a given medium’ (Arthur M. Young), he would naturally have gravitated to such an idea—specifically, the idea that a vortex appears to be other than the medium which sustains it, but actually it is one with the medium within which it exists.”—from Martin Farren, “In the Mirror of Creation”

__

My explorations in Kabbalah and Kundalini yoga had led me in and out and upside down through the convolutions of an arcane curve, and deposited me, at a different turn of the spiral, again exactly in the place where I had started. It was in this position that I had always found myself—as a stranger with a social slot to fill, as a non-local presence with a local job to perform, as an ancient soul at a perpetual beginning.

As from a height, I had descended to a vehicle, and, from solid earth, into a state of watery flux.

There, the laws of electromagnetism could not be taken at face value. My evolution followed the path recommended to the student of Kabbalah—the “Path of Descent”—which was also the path taken by the first imploding hypersphere and its crop of unpronounceable gods, the Elohim—as they are called, for the sake of convenience, in this system. The name is a generic one, and, in contemporary terms, we could perhaps refer to them as “The Powers That Be.” We suspect—only—that they are powers now, although, in some respects, they seem close to being programs. When, amid flashing lights, they choose to put in an appearance, at times there does seem to be something of the manikin about them, and it is not clear if they really “act” at all. We do not know what they were before, or how they came to be in charge of the technology that projects us.

If it was they who lifted the first city from the Deluge, to do this they had, paradoxically, to descend. Most stories about this early race have been lost to public view. They have been buried beneath years of scholarship, darkened by paranoia, or warped by moral pontifications. “They are good,” say some, “for we choose to misinterpret all of the evil that they do.” “They are evil,” say others, “for they have shattered the once perfect world, nor do they understand what it feels like to be human.”

Our manic/ depressive hopes for total cleansing by an “apocalypse” do not really help to clarify the matter. Our sightlines have been blocked. Our intellects cannot penetrate their radioactive cloud, and, should we look on them directly, it is possible that our hearts would beat themselves to death. No, instead, we must make use of a different set of eyes, for the ones that we have been given are prosthetic. We must remember how to see from all of 360 degrees. We must think with our hearts. We must feel with the group intellect of our alien micromanagers, who, in their arrogance, may think of us as food.

We must touch the thread that connects us to the first word ever spoken. We must simultaneously speak each syllable in the Ur-Text. Only later should we pick our individual parts, as well as the cultures that correspond to them, and thus give birth to the straight lines that are History. At first, it was All for One. Then later, it was Every Man for Himself. Later yet, we would act as midwives for the rebirth of the Zero. We must listen with the eyes of the Elohim. We must see with the ears of space. We must put our trust in the depth and breadth of our experience, in order to revisit the many places that we have been. We must stop time, and, as if the ocean were a sheet, begin to smooth out all of the wrinkles. As we hover a few inches over it, we may still be able to view and then decipher the almost invisible outlines of our movements. Thus, the motives of this early race are obscure, but can be guessed:

The desire to share their accumulated wealth, which was great.

The desire to see and/ or make things happen.

The desire to remove one’s head—its awful vastness, and thus to escape from the burdens that are associated with omnipotence.

After Aeons of silence, the desire to explode.

The desire to seize Beauty by the hair.

The desire to get drunk, to pick a fight, to have sex, to wake up somewhere strange.
The desire to make a weapon of geometry.

The desire to test one’s strength against the ocean, to put one’s shoulder to the wheel.

The desire to make a name for oneself.

The desire to bind others to one’s cause; to manufacture a consensus

The desire to express oneself, to which end one must have a particular point of view.

The desire to live life, to learn from suffering, and to outlast death.

The desire to make a mark on the big dream that is History.

The desire to make a complete break with the past.

The desire to be empty, after being pregnant with a world.

The desire to discover the beginning of the circle, its ancient origin; to thus inhabit the lost story one has read.

The desire to be many, after being one, and to be one, after being many.

The desire to give the gift that keeps on giving.

The desire to transmit the knowledge that is the fruit of one’s longevity.

The desire to let go, to not be in charge.

The desire to be free, to live in the one moment, to feel joy.

The desire to again throw caution to the wind, to follow where one is led.

The desire of the magician to say farewell to his powers.

The desire to be swept off by a wave.

—Yes, the motives of this early race are obscure, as are those of their descendants in the present. Their psyches are not other than our own. As the serpent force revolts against the magic of the microcosm—from head to heart to genitals to feet and then back again to head—I can hear the Elohim conjuring the dense Ur-Text of my body. However strange or familiar, their actions follow a predetermined course.


(Illustration: Brian George, Head with vortices and snake projecting out of forehead, 2004)

Bird arising out of snake arising out of pot

This is a large black and white drawing from a series that I did between 1989 and 1993. This one was done in 1990.

Trust But Verify

By Brian George

Jonathan Zap, in his essay “”Foxes and Reptiles; Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown,” wrote:

“Many have commented that the SEC tends to employ those trained in finance but who are not as clever, ruthless or determined as those they are trying to monitor. I would suggest that they be open to hiring psychopaths with MBAs and offer them multi-million dollar bonuses and recognition, celebrity recognition if possible, for catching high level scams. Since psychopaths are a force of nature we are unlikely to eliminate, we should instead harness their unique talents to serve the socially useful purpose of catching other psychopaths. Who could possibly be better qualified, better able to pierce strategies of deception, than other highly motivated psychopaths? To use Wall Street metaphorically, we need a highly motivated team of clever reptiles and foxes to catch other reptiles and foxes.”

A key principle in medicine is that few things are toxic in and of themselves, or rather, that the amount of the toxin is what determines its effect: a large amount might result in death, but the right amount might heal us of a dangerous disease. The way that the toxin is introduced would play a role. “First, do no harm,” wrote Hippocrates. If only things were so simple! For “what harms can heal.” In their different ways, Allopathy and Homeopathy make use of this principle, which perhaps can be more generally applied. The current global laissez-faire economy is like a body without an immune system.

Death is imminent; doing nothing is not safe. No laws protect us, and a vast shadow eats the animatronic organs of Democracy—which should leave, in the near future, just a shell. It has been 66 years since happy US soldiers jitterbugged with nurses in the street, or grabbed random strangers to kiss. We had beaten the Axis powers. The Free World loved us. We were a beacon to the dispossessed. Now Corporate Fascism rules. Lawyers are the new Luftwaffe. Judges are the SS. Hedge funds are the new Reich Bureau of Occult Affairs. MSNBC, FOX, and CNN compete for the mantle of Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. They report all the news that’s fit to be projected, that is to say: Before its Time, and provide us will all viewpoints from A to B.

In love, from childhood, with the American Dream, we are hesitant to acknowledge that the year is not 1948. A few dollars are left: they will be sent to an off-shore bank in the Caiman Islands. We are not what we were, but at least let it be said that we have kept up our appearances. No one knows when the Barbarians walked casually in through the gates. Now, they are more inside than we are. They are closer to the Mad Fetus in the control room than we ever were—except, perhaps, at ceremonies for dead heroes in their transfer tubes. There are rings inside of rings, with fail-safe mechanisms at key bioenergetic points. The gods that descend from the Black Sun must be fed. Select Stockholm Syndrome victims may be called upon to remove the remnants of the burnt offering from the table, at which point the law specifies that it be ritually re-sanitized. The Barbarians wasted no time in dismantling the gates, in order to put up their own gates—which keep us from getting out. The life of the Republic is hanging by a thread. The Supreme Court will soon meet to decide a case about scissors. Perfectly dressed, a force that is not quite human has been scheduled to attack.

There are those who say that our response is several decades behind the curve.

And so, to develop our analogy: If we think in terms of “the sociopath-as-toxin,” then we had best be prepared for each possible side-effect in advance, and, in each test case, pay close attention to determine just what it is that we see. We could also compare the two systems in terms of “the sociopath-as-virus.” In Allopathic medicine, whose key principle is supposedly that “opposites treat opposites,” it is—oddly enough—accepted that a neutralized form of a disease might also serve to catalyze the cure. Homeopathic theory is supposed to be the opposite—180 degrees off, on the other side of the circle—but the key principle is “let like be cured by like”—not that different in the abstract from mainstream immunology.

What does this tell us? Perhaps that opposites interact in ways that we don’t expect. Perhaps to put aside pet theories in order to focus on whatever works. An almost occult correspondence exists between the toxin and the symptom, such that a small amount of something can help to protect us against a larger and more threatening quantity of the same. A virus attacks, and, once our system has gained access to its encrypted DNA, we are able to manufacture the corresponding antigen. Unseen to the world, a transfer of life-altering data has occurred, which brings the earlier right/ left opposition to a halt, as it redefines the nature of the contest. In Chapter eight of the “Tao Te Ching” we read, “The supreme goodness is like water…It gathers in unpopular places. Thus it is like the Tao.”

The best defense is to co-opt one’s enemy, and to get him to do exactly what one wants.

In a similar fashion, Jonathan Zap has suggested that we could use a sociopath with an MBA to root out other sociopaths on Wall Street. If bureaucrats are impotent, and less sharp than those they monitor, then sociopaths may be the necessary agents—whether calibrated toxins or pre-processed viruses—to prompt healing in the Body Politic.

Brian P. Akers, one of the participants in the Reality Sandwich forum for this essay, was somewhat horrified by the suggestion. He wrote, “Any notion that evil or manipulative psycho-malignancy can be hitched up to our wagons plays right into its hands. Evil loves such good but misguided ideas…To afford it an opening, of any least kind, is only to woo, court and flirt with disaster…Psychopathy rests on inherently violent interests or abusive purposes. Period…(We must) recognize that stuff for exactly what it is, and deal with it accordingly…Otherwise, we become its host or prey, no ifs ands or buts."

I would categorize this as the classic “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” approach. Well, that isn’t always foolproof, as we have seen. Evil does exist, but it can be a mistake to attribute to it vast mythological powers. Much evil is, indeed, banal, and only appears strong because of our ignorance and the mystique that we lend to it.

As a society, we make a great many “bargains with the Devil,” and, whether rightly or wrongly, we believe that our very survival depends upon some use of “controlled lethality.” On Wall Street, for example, we trust sociopathic hustlers to make vast amounts of money for themselves, in the hope that some portion of the wealth will “trickle down.” And it’s not as if we are unaware of what Wall Street firms are capable of; financial speculation and corruption have fueled countless boom and bust cycles, which have caused incomparably more suffering than all the serial killers who ever lived. Why is it such a problem to employ a sociopath to attempt to take back a little of what another sociopath stole?

The military is another illustration of a bargain with the Devil. In the current climate, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are not aberrations, and then there are all of the dead Iraqi civilians that nobody seems to notice or to talk about. 120,000 is one official estimate—but who knows? It is so unimportant that we have not really bothered to count. We could no doubt do things in far better ways. My point is that, in practice, most societies do tend to do exactly what you suggest—to strategically make use of the particular talents of the sociopath, or, at a minimum, to activate and harness their members’ sociopathic shadows. Sometimes this works. At other times—such as now—it tends to blow up in our faces.

In spite of wholesale surveillance programs, such as the NSA’s NIMD—or “Novel Intelligence from Massive Data”—and the FBI’s now (supposedly) defunct “Carnivore”(!), there can be no prophylaxis against Evil. But we can ask questions that might help to keep us conscious, such as: Have we incorporated the enemy on purpose or by accident?

The key thing is perhaps transparency. It would probably be best, too, to remove the fox from his role as supervisor of the chicken coop. Somehow “regulation” has become a dirty word.

How does that saying go?—Something like, “The greatest achievement of the Devil is to convince us that he doesn’t exist.” In the same way, sociopaths in high places have convinced us that “markets are self-regulating,” that the jet-setting heirs to family fortunes are heroic Ayn Randian “job creators”—veritable Atlases!—and that the best thing that the victim of the Stockholm Syndrome can do is to kiss the hand of his/ her captor. So too: that the 3497 of our 9/11 dead must be avenged by the murder of 120,000—and still climbing—innocent civilians in Iraq, that US citizens can be arrested and detained for a lifetime without being charged, and that midnight military tribunals are a substitute for Justice. A bit of intelligent oversight might be nice.

In the end: Sociopathic evil, as sly and charismatic as it is, is generally not quite as strong as goodness that is active—as opposed to merely polite—and that does not allow itself to be treated like a mark.


(Illustration:  Victor Brauner) )

I Left at Dawn for the Eternal City; It Seems that I Have Misplaced Several Days/ Part 9

By Brian George

Hallucinations erupt from the red ocean; it is dawn

In presenting this alternate view of the “Apocalypse,” of an end that opens the door to a perpetual beginning, I have used, as a convenient frame of reference, the concepts of the “horizontal” and the “vertical” axes; in turn, this provides us with a method of speaking about space—of moving up and down, as well as in and out. Each direction will lead us eventually to the circumference of a sphere—a sphere that can also be imagined as a point, as a pair of intersecting triangles, as a 10-D torus, or as a 64 cube tetrahedron.

This sphere is both our destination and the vehicle that we must activate; it will take us from where we are to where we have never ceased to exist.

Let us “fix” the world—by letting space implode; in the eye of the storm will test the explosive power of the small. If we travel far enough and fast enough in the direction that we are going, we will at some point overtake our alternate versions from behind.  To them, we will seem to be arriving from the future, or from a past whose depth subverts all current archeological theory. Who knows what each will think of the other’s odd appearance?

Once, the Great Year set up oars along the coast, to mark each spot where our surrogates had been buried, facing east. No trauma could remove the sun from before their eyes; however much tectonic plates have been—as if by accident—rearranged. Pangaea is a puzzle; there will always be pieces missing. For without such a catastrophe there would be no “primal schism.”

To the 1-inch city will return the storytellers—good to go!—from all of the cultures that a wave has carried off.

In one frame of reference, I am looking down and backwards at the Earth—at the fossil known as “Brian George”; he is little more than fuel. In an alternate frame of reference, I am standing like a new-born child on the Earth, feet bare, and with an ocean where my head should be; I am looking up and outwards at the clockwork of the Macrocosm—now once again translucent.

“Breath by breath”—I say to no one in particular—“we will sink our yogic drill-bits into History! By the power of our austerities we will renovate the Zero; one size will again fit all.” The music of the spheres becomes cacophonous, and then stops. As I stare, an atomic power plant half-materializes on a cloud; its warning signs flash, and lightning fills the air with the aroma of burnt ozone. The dark energy of omnipotence moves in for the kill.


(Illustration: Enzo Cucchi)