Sickness Afoot

Thursday, January 19, 2017

7:22 AM

The Parliament of Owls is in session

But we cannot see their eyes

Their heads are looking behind them

Because owls do not move their eyes

What's coming comes from behind

It's not what is clearly seen, so visible now

It's the sickness afoot, the sickness coming

That's what the owls are looking for now

Sickness is afoot, evil's in full view

Sickness is afoot, where is our guide?

Sickness is afoot, what to do? What to do?

Sickness is afoot, where resides the guide?

Leonard wrote that magic is afoot

And Buffy sang his words

Leonard wrote that God is alive

And Buffy sang is words

But now, sickness is afoot,

And evil is alive, and where is our guide?

Sing the song that's in your dream

Dreams of the night will be our guide!

A Note…

In the dream I saw owls sitting on branches of a tree.

No eyes could be seen as they were all looking behind

them. A sound began to rise, I think it was from the owls,

singing the line, "Sickness is afoot."

As I woke, I started hearing Buffy St. Marie singing

Leonard Cohen's words from his book, Beautiful Losers.

Dreams have to do with the future. Our conscious intentions

as well as our hopes are all formed from what we know,

from what is past.

The owls know what is coming. Look to your dreams

to provide the hints.

How the War on Reality Ended

Tuesday, January 10, 2017
6:22 AM

http://ralockhart.com/WP/HowWarOnRealityEnded.wav

They say breathing will remain free

And there will be no charge for sleep

The call of nature will be untaxed

     except in public facilities

There will be no tuition for mandatory

     courses in Newtruth

So I've been told

Hard to know what to believe

Except what has been ordered

By the PDC, the Provisional

Declaration Committee

Authorized in Tweet 767

In the Year of Our Trmp 1

The crowd's hands are not tied

But well sat upon

The crowd's eyes are not blindfolded

But no one is seeing

The crowd's ears are not plugged

But no one hears

The crowd's mouths are not gagged

But no one utters

The crowd's memory

Is not remembering

The crowd's imagination

Is cowed

The crowd's dreams

Are no more

The crowd's soul

Has departed

The crowd's ruler

Tweets in tweetspeak

A recent dream pictured a stack of manuscript pages with the title page showing. This dream, like several other dreams in the  past, came with a sense of task, as if I was being presented with something to do. I am used to this feeling, and quite a number of my articles and books have had their origin in such dreams.

These dreams arrive from somewhere outside my conscious intention, but obviously having their origin in the intentionality of “something other.”  I don’t need anything else on my plate just now, yet I cannot ignore what has been presented to me by what I have called the “presentational psyche.”

I have decided to post this dream on my blog as a way to publicly commit to the project because it feels crucial to me.

Here is the image from my dream.

The dream image shows the title, the subtitle, my name and my press, along with the publication date. What was startling to me was that the image was presented in the typeface of the 1956 Olympia portable typewriter I just received for my birthday. I realized that if I was to fully follow the intention of the dream, I would have to write this “book” …if that is to be what it is… on this typewriter.

Here is my “provisional” introduction. I say provisional, because what I will be posting in this blog is my original typescript pages. I trust you will tolerate this reversion to older technology, without the modern convenience of automatic error correction and other such wonders. I encourage feedback. I will use your feedback later on when I begin to edit whatever this project turns into.

Please feel free to comment on the blog or by email.

I graduated from high school in late spring of 1956. My graduation present from my parents was a new Olympia SM3 portable typewriter. It was the first in a long series of typewriters I collected—just as my Esterbrook fountain pen acquired a year earlier was the first of scores of fountain pens in my collection. I still use that old Esterbrook and it remains my favorite pen.

I've given away all my typewriters, replaced now by an endless string of computers.

My first experience with computers was in the spring of 1958. It was my sophomore year at USC, and the computer was a Honeywell—their first entry into the computer market. I learned programming, card punching, and how to deal with large computer printouts. I also learned how to ferry all those cards and all that paper on special carts without spilling it all—a computer user’s nightmare in those days.

All this has come back to mind because my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday. What sprang instantly to mind was a manual typewriter!

As I began to research this desire, I was surprised to find that typewriters were still being made. But I could tell they were all plastic and cheap and unlikely to last long, as is the ethos of the modern consumerist culture. What rose up in me was the desire for "the real thing," a typewriter made of metal, a typewriter that was built with precision, a truly crafted typewriter.

In short, I began to lust after my original typewriter—that O1ympia SM3.

A few quick pecks into Google and I was linked to an excellent refurbished model of the Olympia SM3. I learned it was one of the best manufactured typewriters built to high standards, of high quality materials, design and craftsmanship in post-war Germany—a kind of Mercedes or Porsche among typewriters. The proprietor had just decided to sell it because he had found an earlier model for his permanent collection. He gave it one last work-over and in a few days it was on my desk.

As I typed this blog entry, I experienced wonder that my fingers remembered how to strike the keys to make them work properly—nothing at all like the soft silent touch of the computer keyboard.

I love the touch, the sound, the slowness, even the errors. The machine needs no electric power and no connection to the Internet. It feels "right" in some way I cannot articulate. I don’t think this is the romantic nostalgia that so often grips people of my age (I will be 78 later this month). The closest I can come to expressing this inchoate feeling is that more and more we seem to be serving the machine, rather than the machine serving us. This echoes the much-neglected thought of Lewis Mumford (see for example, his Art and Technics published in 1952). He argued for the primacy of the person and it is personhood that is being "replaced" by the machine (robotics, artificial intelligence, and the mechanisms of commodification).

Hey, Mr. Thomas Wolff, maybe we can go home again. I do feel "at home" with this machine. And I have company. Though I am not a fan of any of Danielle Steel’s 100 novels, I do like the fact that she typed them all on her 1946 Olympia typewriter!

There are three great intertwined denials, ubiquitous in their reach, hegemonic in their power, and life-destroying in their structure and dynamics.

First, is the Denial of Truth. The first level is our full reality. We are unconscious of much of who we are. Becoming conscious is the great dream of psychology, depth psychology in particular. But the degree of humanity working to become more conscious is miniscule to the point of vanishing. The degree of unconsciousness underlying the great bulk of individual thoughts and actions is vast beyond imagining. Unconsciousness pervades our relationships, from those most intimate to those of only passing interest. It pervades our involvement in the groupings we become part of, and our unconsciousness multiplies with other’s unconsciousness to maximize the corrosive potential of collectives at all levels of cultures, nations, and all else. What passes for truth in the public consciousness is grasped after as if such could function to bring individuals to consciousness. Dreams are the great “truth tellers,” but how many among us billions of humans listen, let alone bring such truths to manifestation in life?

Second, is the Denial of Risk. Unconsciousness cuts us off from the fundaments of life, not only in our own body, mind and spirit, but in the body, mind and spirit of all life around us, including the life of our planetary home, the earth. Unconsciousness breeds the denial of risk inherent in separating human life from its rhizomic necessities. Chief among these risks is what functions as the life-blood of our contemporary life: money. Money has become our operative religion. More than any other single factor, we have become unalterably attached to money, as if “In Money We Trust,” would sum up every department of our lives. The powers that be that operate the world’s financial system know this, count on this, rely on this “belief” system, and operate as grand priests of the money temple. What we are not told, what is kept from view, is the degree of risk building up throughout the world. The risk is denied. Yet, the collapse of all great powers and empires has been triggered by risk gone wild and triggering the collapse. Because money has become more foundational in our lives than any other factor, this coming collapse poses catastrophic risk for everyone’s welfare. And, sad to say, most everyone is denying this risk.

Third, is the Denial of Love. We can only do to others and so much of what is happening in the world, when we deny love. We can only do to the life of the world, what we are doing, when we deny love. We can only do to our habitat, our home, our earth, when we deny love. As unconsciousness persists, as money invades and pervades every facet, love disappears. Freud spoke of the great battle between Eros and Death. Without love, death of most everything of value will be what we live. That is our present future.

It is not clear there is sufficient human will to say no to power and money and the commodification of desire.

Dreams are raising this issue as a great question mark.

[To be continued…]

PACO MITCHELL’S REPLY TO RUSS’ CATS ACCEPTING CHRIST BLOG POST

Hi Russ,

When I first read that you’d had a dream instructing you, point-blank, to read a Wallace Stevens poem every day, I was not in the least surprised that you planned to accede to the dream-mandate. How could you not? After all, to refuse such a dream-hatched directive is a most foolish thing to do.

So, when you next announced your plan to respond to each daily Wallace Stevens poem in whatever poetic way came to you, I thought: “Harrumph! Well, that’s certainly an interesting project, old boy! Eminently sensible. Stands to reason.”

Then I read your first “Stray”:

Gods and Tuna

A little-known secret:

Cats accepting Christ

Buddha and all the others

Like so many tuna

Humans could learn

From cats—but don’t

Wait for that to happen

It’s hard for me to describe what happened when I read the second line—“Cats accepting Christ.” I was like one struck by lightning—a commonplace phrase unless it happens to you. I’ve read a lot of wonderful poetry in my life, but there was something about those three words that “electrified” me.

Knowing the danger of explanations and interpretations, which can drain the precious life-essence out of a poem or a dream, I’m reluctant to say too much about my experience, besides scrabbling for a handful of superlatives. Perhaps I can make a couple of comparisons, though.

Anyone who would like to get a feeling for the quality of my “Cats Accepting Christ” experience, might consider looking up Jorge Luis Borges’ marvelous story, The Aleph. An aleph is a “point that contains all points,” and whoever sees one can see every point in the universe simultaneously. Such was the rush of images that flooded my mind when I first read that little line, that the experience reminded me of the aleph!

Another way to think about my “poetic” experience is to imagine spinning together—as in an immense ball of yarn—the entire history of Western religion from the most primitive animal ancestors, the archaic shamanic cults, through the Egyptian cat-goddesses, to Dionysian blood-rituals and mystery-cults, to Christ and the Christian Mass—the body and blood of Christ—all the way up to the present, the New Dispensation and the Coming Guest.

As you can see, this kind of experience does not readily lend itself to explanation, unless one is willing to emulate Philip K. Dick, who spent years of his life, writing 8,000 pages, in pursuit of his visionary exegesis.

Needless to say, I was dumbstruck, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I was being affected by that simple spontaneous line. Not being Philip K. Dick, however, and having been afflicted with an annoying series of Mercury Retrograde misfortunes, I did manage to compose this little poem in response:

Cats may accept Christ,

Buddha, and all the others,

In the form of tuna—

So solemnly addressed

With licking tongues and gnawing fangs,

Whiskers quivering over the sacrificial bowl.

“This is the body of Christ, my child,

Take and eat."

Alternatively, cats may also accept roast beef, lamb, pork or kibble

As Christ, et al.

But what about water from the tap?

“This is the blood of Christ, my child!

Take and drink."

I’m just skimming over the surface with this little poem, of course, but it will have to do for now. Besides, it keeps me in the flow of your poem. Thanks so much for posting your “Strays.”

Paco Mitchell

Recently, I had this dream: Read a Wallace Stevens poem each and every day.

I call this sort of dream a “task” dream. Many of the things I have written had their origin in such task dreams. Since Wallace Stevens is one of my favorite poets, I took up this task with enthusiasm. I decided to read a poem a day from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954). As always, I don’t just read a poem, but I read it aloud. To hear the “voice” of the poem, one needs to hear it, not just see it.

A few days into this new “discipline,” something began to happen that is now ongoing. To give this some context, those of you who know my book, Psyche Speaks, may remember my describing a dream I had the night that I heard Robert Bly read Lorca’s Casida of the Rose. In the dream, I was leafing through Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections when a piece of paper fell out. On it was written, “The poem wants a poem/the dream wants a dream.” This dream began to change not only how I experienced dreams and poems, but also how I related to them.

That was three and more decades ago. So this sense of desire on the part of dreams and poems has been bubbling for a long time. It’s still hard to come to terms with this. But here is what began to happen in present time when I followed the instruction of the dream and began to read a Wallace Stevens poem every day.

As I was speaking the lines from Stevens' poem, “Infanta Marina,” a line burst into my experience that was not in the poem. The line was: “cats accepting Christ.” This is not a line I “made up” in any typical sense. It simply presented itself spontaneously. As far as I could tell, it had no relation whatever to Stevens’ poem. But the experience was so strong, that I had to stop and attend to the line and, as I did so, the line became part of a poem. It was not so much that I went into some composing mode. More exactly, I simply opened myself to a kind of “flow” of lines. It was a brief experience and afterward I gave the little poem a title, “Gods and Tuna.”

Gods and Tuna

A little-known secret:

Cats accepting Christ

Buddha and all the others

Like so many tuna

Humans could learn

From cats—but don’t

Wait for that to happen

What is most intriguing to me is that this has now become a regular experience. Sometimes it begins as I open the book to read the next day’s poem. Sometimes, it occurs as I’m reading the poem aloud. And sometimes it occurs after the poem. It has the feeling of a channel being opened, a channel from which words stream into my awareness. This is very similar to what my experience is like when I am writing fiction.

One of my favorite poems by Stevens is his “Mountains Covered with Cats.” I have not gotten to that poem in my daily reading yet, but it came to mind when I wanted to begin putting these little poems together. I call them “Strays.”

STRAYS

Like stray cats,

these little poems

visited upon reading

a Wallace Stevens poem

every day

Here is another:

Advantage

The cat looks at me

Not for praise, or love

Or any such a dog would

The cat looks instead

To brew some advantage

Calculating all the while

The cat looks satisfied

Advantage weighed

Curls up to sleep on it

For now, I just want to report that this is happening and that I experience it as a gift.

I wake from a dream in the middle of the night and scratch out this note to help me recall the dream in the morning:

                   Dancing ladle/tef >silver>gold…alive

In the morning, fully awake and far from the dream state, I use my note to draw back as much memory of the dream as I can. I recognize that the memory of the dream is nowhere near as “substantial” as the dream itself, more a simulacrum of the original. But remembering is better than not, so I work my sketchy note into a narrative of sorts. Here is the text of the dream I wrote in my dream book.

I see a ladle hanging in midair as if held by some unseen hand. It's moving about, twisting this way and that. As I look into the Teflon bowl of the ladle, it changes to bright silver. Its movements are ever more a graceful dance, balletic even. As I watch, I see the silver change into bright gold. I realize the ladle is alive! I am awestruck.

I am aware to the point of pain how inadequate my written text is in relation to the dream experience itself. As text, it fails to capture the palpable reality of the dream, the awe in realizing the ladle was alive. Like my camera capturing David,[1] the resulting two-dimensional images were only reminders of what I experienced with the living sculpture itself. Even with uninterrupted moving images (film) I have seen, the framing was so focused, that the enveloping contextual reality within which I experienced David was missing.

It is common to refer to a dream as “my” dream. This is similar to the proprietary aspect of capturing a photograph that is the subject of Susan Sontag’s masterful critique of photography.[2] The “appropriating” she decries applies as well to how we relate to the dream. We appropriate the dream and call it “mine.” As I have written before,[3] when we photograph, we milk reality for its truth.[4] Likewise, we tend to “milk” the dream for our own ends, our own needs, our own intentions.

I realize that milking the dream to serve our conscious intentions is a perdurable activity that is not going to change—its history is too long, its utilitarian value too embedded, its “obviousness” too obscuring of any other approach. I know that most anything I say here is going to fall on the ubiquitous “deaf ears” of the standard approach to dreams, which leads to seeking meaning, interpretation, and analysis, all of which leads “away” from the dream itself.

Nonetheless, I want to look at the dream differently.

The dream presents itself to us. It comes as a visitor. Perhaps instead of “capturing it,” we might treat the visitor as a guest. Then we would be host to the dream. I’m thinking of Baucis and Philemon, and how they invited the beggars in, something no one else in the town did. While the townspeople who rejected the beggars paid a steep price (drowning in a flood), Baucis and Philemon were rewarded. The disguised gods (Zeus and Hermes) made it possible to grant them their wish: to die entwined together as an everlasting tree.

Freud made it a fundamental principle that dreams are disguises, disguises for the dreamer’s unconscious desires. Jung disagreed and felt the dream was “just so.” But Jung did emphasize in many ways that what was crucial was to welcome the dream as a guest. But contemporary attitudes toward the dream tend to forget this. The common mode is to “use” the dream for its utility value in serving the ego.

The dream, however we recall it, comes to our experience already crafted with exquisite precision, or impressionistic flux, or fleeting but impressive impact, or eerie vagaries. Consciously, we could produce none of this. So how are these experiences we call dreams crafted?

We don’t know. Probably the best answer is that dreams are crafted by something other, certainly something other than our consciousness. We might argue that at some point brain science will unlock this mystery and we will have a more complete picture of how the brain crafts dreams. Still, it will be how we relate to these experiences we call dreams that will be crucial.

The dream exhibits artisanal forces at work in the making of the dream, already worked, already crafted, already smithed into the forms we see by an unknown dreamsmith.

We can approach the dream as critics and form an opinion of it, try to discern its meaning, attempt to assess its value, and otherwise try to understand it. But as Baudelaire observed, “the only proper criticism of a work of art, is another work of art.” In Psyche Speaks, I wrote of a dream that pictured me leafing through Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. A piece of paper fell out and when I looked at it, there was written, poem-like:

The poem wants a poem

The dream wants a dream

Notice how this dream shifts the emphasis from the dreamer’s desire, to the dream’s desire. This dream had a powerful effect on me because it radically shifted my own way of working with my dreams as well as those of others—wherever that is possible.

Jung’s “active imagination” way of working with dreams, now made clear with the publication of his Red Book, is clearly one way of satisfying a dream wanting a dream.

I think that almost any artisanal approach to a dream carries this same spirit. As an example, I have lately taken up approaching my dreams poetically before textually. What I mean is that I steep myself in the memory of the dream and while in this experience I write a haiku.[5]

Here is the Haiku I wrote following the dream:

The Teflon ladle

turned bright silver, then bright gold

dream ladle: alive!

In my experience, working on a dream haiku within a kind of meditative state, brings forth spontaneous memories. For example, in this instance, what came is the memory of Kandinsky’s reflection I had quoted in Psyche Speaks:

Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street…Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.

At once I knew what to do. I went to the kitchen drawer and fetched the Teflon ladle. This everyday mundane object now took on that quality of Kandinsky’s trouser button. Could my consciousness see into the ladle as deeply as the dream? One thing I know: I can no longer pass by anything as if it is a lifeless object. When things become “alive” in this way, it is not the rational mind that will be moved; it will be the artist-soul that will want to dream this aliveness into new forms.

This I believe is a key to understanding the principle of eros that underlies the nature of the Coming Guest. More about this in the next post.

[1] See the previous blog post on “Dreamsmithing.”

[2] Susan Sontag. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977.

[3] See my “Afterword” to Jeff Jacobson’s My Fellow Americans… Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. The relation between the photograph and the dream has yet to be fully essayed. This afterword was my initial attempt to do so and remains my favorite piece of my own work.

[4] I used J. Robinson’s 1658 lines as an epigram: “My wished end is, by gentle concussion. the emulsion of truth.” In exploring the etymology of emulsion, I found that emulsion derives from the root melg-, which means “to milk” hence its relation to photography. How this changed when photography became digital and lost its connection to the emulsion of film, I will explore later.

[5] Haiku is a Japanese form that is not readily transferred to English. The standard English equivalent is a tercet (3 lines) with 5, 7, and 5 syllables. The “art” of haiku is rich beyond what I can articulate in a brief note. But I encourage your exploration of this form as a way of “distilling” the essence of a dream. I don’t mean to limit this approach to haiku, but I do like the way the form forces one to an unusual effort. More on this later.