Conscience and the Soul:our (modern) Age

In this age when the technological machinery,
Berates, gyrates, extirpates every cell in the human body.
In this age when the sound of the machine rips apart existence like the shattering of an exhaust pipe across the morning....

Extirpates:

To pull up by the roots.
To destroy totally; exterminate.
To remove by surgery.

In this age, when the soul is extirpated under the blinding surgical light of a hydrogen supernova.

In this age we seek and are blinded
In the histories of our education
And forget the babbling brook that once held sway over the stones of our soul.

So this river still flows from humble roots in elder forests
But always with mind to the blocking of being ... the being that would follow through on the following to the sea
Is hindered by the blinding white light
Of a housing development
With more men living in their homes
They cease from dwelling in the land.
They are given only into the technology of their procreation: the household with its private bedrooms
They are only placed in the cycle of an epidemic: which spreads and only knows expansion, when it should seek to know limitation and death.
They are death because their technology would only allow them to expand.

Our "modern" age is modern only in brackets:
The modern is the twisted nouveaux of ivy and silver and copper and brass patina'd reproductions of our age: there is Dionysus! The Paris subway Metro...
The metro is subsequently inbetween two places: work and home
It is in short a bar or cafe, a watering hole of archetypes
"There a Giraffe! There a zebra!"
I hear Klaus Kinsky's voice: pointing, owning and operating
And thank God he is a madman!
Then at least rest assured: that the madman will lead us!
Not some bureaucratic drone, on a crash course with a cold blue office cubicle.

Where the fuck are we?
What the fuck is our conscience!

Why the fuck are we living together?

There is a line between my living together with my woman and all of us living together on this earch. In each human soul the question of the collective is gathered together: do we dare gather together to live with each other? Like with unlike: the harmonies basically are mixed.

She is my woman long as I agree and offer myself to her: "you are my woman!"

So too with the human race!

But do we dare not to live with the other?

Or say: I live here now: and this is it at once!

Part ape, part monkey man, part young man, gentile narrator.

We were headed in the line toward ....
We were headed in the line toward ....
We are headed on the line toward ...

Conscience.

It is the scientia, the scire and scry of science, and naturally it is very wry, like the sound of a dentist's drill when it hits into the dentin for the very first time: it is dental in its eventing into the bones of your skull: "scrrrrrr!"

But Con-scientia is the sound of TWO dental drills!

First one, and then the other, like the imagined calling of penguins, out on the open Ant-Arctic snow we find Isis: "She was there in the medeau where the creek used to rise!" I mean what a fucking indictment! "My creek used to rise for you baby!" "Scrrrrr!"

Conscience is experienced directly and literally on the road: confronted by another chariot, there is Oedipal road-rage: the lack of giving way is death and the death of conscience. To meet the gaze of another driver is conscience. Those who avoid the gaze, drive without conscience. Those who walk without acknowledging the screaming engines of death all round them, thanking the drivers for their lives to be spared lack conscience as well.

"S-s-s-s-s-creaming he s-s-s-s-s-crewed her" Slithered the snake
And there we meet another of our gods down here
Yes...its the snake god
Yes we affirm in this age: not the fleeing of the gods
But the triumph of one of the mysteries over the other:
In this age the wrong do good: in this age the wrong will prosper!
What do we mean? -We are talking cold hard cash!
The know-how and the can-do.
Warmth from these words will shrivel:
But hold on now thats the meaning of the minions of death!--The night to gather us down under her motled skin of blue stones: even there beautiful in dawns bearing light.

"The dawn of conscience prevails!"

(What a bunch of hoopla! There is no way to belly roll into conscience this way!)

Conscience is unsettling: there the night watchman with his lowly flashlight and pack of cigarettes. There the janitor, the keeper of the keys to the boiler room where the psychotic act is performed in our horror movies: how do we liberate the janitor from being Jack the Ripper? Are these not the dreams that come to haunt me like so many deizens of our civilization, the killer is not "on the road" but in your very living room! Now see you are Jack the Ripper? What does that make us, behind our nation draped with national flags and bibles and dusty afternoon light coming through hundred year old windows: yeah, we know the dust: but the paint underneath still smells of lanolin! Wait a couple of thousand years! When the fires have come and gone again, when once again we know the lichen and moss on the stones of our cathedrals: then once again we will know the reaching of our babbling brook over the stones of ourselves! "Make of yourself a stone! Make yourself dark and sullen! And throw yourself in!"

Then finally will we be free again from the hectic observation of our clinical lamps in clinical hallways, and our efficient bureaucratic administration of the sciences: well fuck all that! I want to become a black stone rolling in the river down into some mysterious pool, down inside a well: a wishing well, there the water is still flowing: and the wish is: "there, I wouldn't have to go down still!" The answer to this is: "what have I ever learned or lost by dying?"

To die is to fall away, just as to live and to cherish is to gather one's conscience.

Conscience means "having soul;" and having soul means ...what? having body?
No. -Having the strength of body to prevail before the overwhelming onslaught of our age: its desire to define its living well in terms of killing the most. Having soul is not speaking, for speaking is always un-earnest. Speaking is the duplicity of the soul, but its way of salvation (more later); learning however came from the time before words and expression: the day we learned of the sunrise or the sunset over waters and did not seek or need to express this thing. If all is learning, then all is received into the abyss. Learning is not action, nor is it inaction, it is receiving.

"Son I am going to have to refer you to reading what I wrote in my latest moritoium!"
There the voice of the judge, Saturn, the senex, see he lives with us still

• a suspension of activity: a moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons.
• a legally authorized period to delay payment of money due or the performance of some other legal obligation, as in an emergency.
• an authorized period of delay or waiting.

But Isis does not judge, she asks: "have you lived?"

And so we ask again: what is conscience?

The capacity to bear one's soul and to bear the soul of the other, the grating of teeth and the smell of dental smoke accompanied by the sound of the drill (and drills belong to the seargent-majors: you would have to come into the bunkhouse when he makes his first round and be resolved to kill the seargent major with his big fists and willingness to "throw down.").

(In Levinas, the texts are always to be read at day, and never at night, by the light of one candle, there in the secret communion with the Shekina with her tanned legs, and the touseled curls of her hair: Levinas cannot get that erotic!).

One, well that was always "unique." One candle, as if "I alone" could be standing here.

(there in the darkness I watch my careful warring sentiments clash against the hidden guardians of Deborah. There I clash to maintain this hidden screen of my libido into the aethernet.)

Modernity sought to chase the gods away. As if by some big bright gong we could clash and hear the sound that makes the gods scatter with their weary togas and bright golden laurel wreathe crowns: maybe it is the jet engine sound of a runway: as if the gods were just "runway models for this season's ancient line!"

The gods exist in those with imagination and those with the space to use it in. To call them "gods" defers the immediacy of force. It changes force into story. In short it metaphorizes the world. This is sacred magic. Now we have run from gods and ellaborate stories to sanitized hallways of scientific cells: in short we have run into "explanation."

Explanation is the god who wanders round behind the sheep man and the decaying genius in the Dolphin Hotel: it is "the horror which lurked behind our system of golden spheres without a face" (ergo... the post on the serial killer from the "boiler room" as the modern "Hermes.")

Whether there be gods or the flight of the gods, conscience holds a line of awareness between thee and me. Whether it is one simple act of compassion that makes us stop and reach down to grasp some small figment of ourselves beyond the clinical hallways of all our human futures, the struggling slime of human DNA...

At our threshold stirrs a lizard. Be it a salamander, or a proto-snake, squirming worm, or lizard king, ours is the threshold of the orange firey lizard kingdom, if we are able to encompass this instinct with conscience. Where the lizard belongs in the wheel of conscience, encounters a link in the Zoo and the whole zodiac. The soul must travel through the wheel of heavenly creatures and must encounter each creature and each manifestation, and this is its "journey" or "voyage" to meet in the synchronized gazes of lizards and grizzly bears, hawks and owls, coyotes, heroes and dogs and queens, twins and bulls, goats and lions, all the gaze that permutates all existence cast in this one shadowy and brief judgement: the judgement of life is its measure and its measure is asked in the question "have you lived" And the degree of the answer is the vehemence toward one lives into the zodiac of creatures, and greets their stares, both representing their strengths and their empty animal world poverty at the same time. But do not put back the human face: man or woman, their only stare is the gaze of the landscape, the context that shapes what happens.

The Cloth of the Judeo-Christian Heart-Myth: More Ramblings on Religion

Ancient Hebrew dress of women from: Wight, Fred H., Manners and Customs in Bible Lands (Chicago: Moody Press), p. 98.

And so the writing god game from between heaven and earth. And he chose to write about the earth and the sky. The decision was fortunate for man, for Joseph, who had carried his technicolor dreamcoat over earth and sign, the Jews became the men and women of the cloth.

Thoth was the redeeming god because in his image the Scribe Ani chose to write about the experience of the afterworld and record it for memory that would remain: Thoth was the gift of writing to human beings to translate between the reals of the living mortals and the tenuous but vital reality of the immortals. Thoth's reed became the pouring forth of black ink that was the very line between life and death pouring from the scribe's hands.

But beyond the hands of the scribe was the woven cloth, of a far earlier memory and dream.

The Cloth was originally woven by the priestess (the Camel rests in the white rays of her moonlight). Its technology was set to break into the Pharo's selfishness. The Ibis heralds the movement away from Amon Ra the king toward first the five generations of gods, and then toward all finite mortals, mortal human beings. The pharo's corpse was wrapped in cloth, the cloth of the sutras, each was written on with a sacred prayer by the priests to guard against death and corruption.


Modern popular myth, populist myth dictates that the pharos are demonized, looked upon as decrepit mummies. However this bugaboo has lost its strength despite the film industry production of images round The Mummy (Sommers 1999 version; and its sequel "...Returns" in 2001).

The rich burn their wealth (The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky, 1973), a typical metaphor (though in point of fact each avatar of the earthly divinities is wealthy to their own excess.) The point here is to move away from the pharonic accumulation of wealth. "Burn your Pharo's wealth!" The more one goulishly accumulates, the more macabre and grottesque one's final decomposition seems to be

The mummy is a monster. Mummy: mummia

Origin: 1350–1400; ME mummie
The Persian root as "mum" (meaning "wax") points to the relation between the connective gluten or glue, colle, which is found throughout the Cremaster Cycle. What sticks together and adheres.

Egyptian religion was cold. No matter how much good work they could do the amimal faces remain immutable to any but the most primitive emotions. Animal faces lack compassion and tenderness that we humans foist as our best asset.

(The truth is we are in dire need of consultation with our animal faces-- the human face seems to have brought this planet to the verge of extinction, no matter how compassionate I might assert it to be in the ideal. The ecological face will be one that cannot simply be "many headed" Perhaps it will be the earth herself, return to the image of Gaia in infinite void of space but only as human's can render her)

("View of the Earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon")

The Theiromorphic Egyptian gods did not have the compassion or mutibility of a Christ born of the Jewish cloth. The face of Job was the first challenge to God to manifest the possibility of suffering before the divine hand. This face became the face of Christ, the face of a human being with a consummately bad day to deal with: crucifixion. And yet this was the threshold to the unseen and infinite God: it was the face of a human on a very bad day, a day of misery, this was the face of God. God was the punished. God was the one brought down.

And the cloth became soaked in the blood of man.

Before Christ there had been human sacrifice, pathetic and potent: sacred and abject. But always in that pattern of sacrifice the identification was with the greater personality or self who rose up from the charnal flames. Christ's figure announced that in this particular epithet all there was was the annihilation and death at the end of the road, complete torment and death one could worship as the implosion and crucifixion of Man. Grunewald's Christ...

(Matthias Grünewald, c. 1515 from his Isenheim Altarpiece)

The christ figure melted human with divine. No longer was each man or woman beholden to the whims of a tyrranical pharo upon this earth, nor would the tyrranical whims of the demi-ourgos hold complete sway over the life of human beings.


The point is for each human to become a king, and yet for Christ there was still deferral to the Father who was king. Individual sovereignty is frowned upon as egotism, and was likened again to the pride of tyrants. The pious man was humble, his pleas for help were and are incessant. The admission of powerlessness to affect situations becomes a cornerstone of prayer. But this is not merely the powerlessness reduced to infantile fantasy, this is a sacrifice of an adult, who enters a mature condition of awareness and humility before the predicaments one faces: the turmoil is endless, the possibility of falling before one's fellow men (who are also entirely sovereign) is profound. The only recourse is to prayer to request help. It is said that prayers that are requests for any kind of boon or bennison are doomed to short-sightedness in one's own way. How could someone's miniscule concern for her or himself matter in the face of the infinite universe. But the infinite divine force seems to work to deeper intimacy by tending to each infinitely small mending (Tikkun).


Christ did not step into the immanent politics of individual sovereignty. This maintained the human position as one who accedes to powerlessness and asks the universe, the Father, or the sacred for help. The father's place was that of infinite metaphor, distance from the immediacy of desire. And yet the Father had burned with desire when He spoke: fiat Lux.


It is the cloth of the Jews that held some metonymic texture of their first "homecomming" and founding of the state of Israel.

Metaphysical Speculations on Burning Man 2007: Ist was ich sehe und höre und rieche nicht bloß der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt?

Part 1: What is the infinite beyond toxic representation?

Black Rock City, 2007: Burning Man: sounds like a line from a poorly written detective novel: it can only be my own attempt to put this experience in phrases. Burning Man runs like a collection of cities all rolled into one for a week or two of an "art festival:" part Brigadoon, part Bankok, part Tabriz, part 1960's hippie paradise, part lethal injection. And yet the place feels safe to me; my camp-mates were largely kind, despite the brutally harsh climate of intermittent dust storms ("white outs"), toxic heat, and suprisingly pleasant evenings...

While the city takes on the shape of 40,000 or so teeming inhabitants in close woven streets the shape of concentric circles... much of the art installation is placed outside of the human habitation in a great open space of a dry lake bed, known as "The Playa." I had walked a few miles out into this open desolate space in the late morning and now simply sat down on the fine dry caked mud. I had seen a number of art pieces from various distances, including the work of Dan Das Man and Karen Cusolito, "Crude Awakening."

I was sitting out on "The Playa" ("beach!"-- there hasn't been any ocean here for millions of years) shortly before a terrible mud and sand storm will devour our encampment for 2-3 hours. There are no benches or seats out in the middle of a dry lake bed. I simply sat down. I carried a large black umbrella to shade me from the sun, but the clouds were gathering and for the moment the weather was entirely tolerable. I continued looking at the monumental piece of art in the distance "Crude Awakening"

"Crude Awakening" was a portrait of the horror of idolatry. The figures were set in praise to an oil derrick. The represent our American society which in its worst respect worships the power of crude oil, the only energy source developed and promoted. Crude oil importers and refiners become fat and rich, while "We the people" rot, waste and become impoverished by our indolence to seek any other energy resource. We are addicted to oil. I could look out of my living room window here in San Pedro and see the "minarettes" of the oil mosque: the oil refinery here in the USA.

The oil derrick was artless. Indeed, it was quite intentionally artless. There was no carving, no collage, no sign of ornament anywhere to be seen. It was a mere utilitarian structure of steel and wood. (And our society is devoted to the worship of utility at the expense of ornament.) The derrick lacked any purpose other than to gain some 40 feet of elevation above the ground level of "playa." Pure, artless elevation, it made certain people higher than others: those who rose to the top of it. I was reminded of the Zigurats of Babylon, and the ominous Tower of Babel, the root source of so much of our suffering to begin with, if we believe the myth. False escalation toward "God" or the Heavens" brings forth calamity: Tarot trump card XVI is called "The Tower." Everything in everyone's soul screamed to have it blasted.

This is also figured in Heidegger's "Frage Nach Der Technik." It was the shape of the artificial and simultaneously the artless: it was only elevation: the oil derrick itself. Artificiality that lacks art itself compared to the splendid art of the woven links of steel within the worshipping figures, some of them burned and singed by previous years of being in installation. All figures of praise... to what? To an oil derrick?

But just how much is this the true and undisputable vision of our predicament? How much was this depiction a true depiction of the times? Could we think otherwise?

Beyond the oil Derrick was the mountain. This at last was an object worth worshipping to, an object worth adoring. This I believe was Trego Mountain.

Trego Mountain through my days at "Burning Man" had an inescabable force for me: it was ostensibly a heap of blackened slag during the day, but it shone in the evening at dusk, white before a darkening sky. Mount Trego bore no signs of any plant life, simply a heap of rock, and yet it had a special trembling beauty to it.

So what was the religious question? First came the statues in expressions of worship. Rilke writes in the Duino Elegies "Praising is what matters!" ("Ruhmen, dasists!" ) Before there were statues there was just the open empty space of this Black Rock Desert and Mount Trego. Then there was an idol. The idol was clearly a bad idol. It was easy to see that it was a false divinity and to want it burned down.

My attentions wander further out in this great open space to the "God of Metaphor." What is this "God of Metaphor?" It is in part the essential iconoclasm that extends from Abraham and Isaac down through to Mohammed. This entire world is a metaphor for... what? (We are still waiting for the answer) We can say that the world and all its books and religions, its priest-kings (Rex/Flamen) present and represent an image of the ideal and the sacred. They manifest power of life and death, just as today the oil corporations manifest this power. But they are NOT the real power. Christ is reported to have said "My kingdom is not this kingdom" (John 18:36).

Part 2: Digression on Monotheism, Polytheism, and Pantheism

The problem I realized was the assertion of a "oneness" to this divinity. This externalized "oneness" of divinity was also the source of the externalized sense of manyness being bad. But could there be a manyness of infinity? Could there be different kinds of infinity? ... not just infinities of various finite ontic conditions (infinite apples or infinite oranges).

There is more to this argument than some sort of logical progression of ideas. I put forward polytheism as a belief system because I cannot reduce the divine or "the god of Metaphor" a single "one-ness." One-ness is a human construction. We use it to keep our very tiny minds from getting bent out of shape. I will not impose my human sense that the infinite is only one kind of infinite. If there is a space of "infinite," beyond my awe at mount Trego, for example, then that infinite leaps and over-rides itself. It is not bound to rational fixity, nor is it without the capacity to manifest as reason. It is simply beyond:the Prajnaparamita mantra: gate gate, paragate, parasamgate. Kafka calls this the sagenhafte druben, the "fabulous yonder," but I am not prepared to get into his parable on parables any more at this moment.

The father archetype here is the "God of Metaphor": the "transcendent sky god" as Lionel Corbett puts it... transcending the one and transcending the many at the same time. Were I to discuss the pantheistic perspective then I must see the divine in every moment, the mother as "god immanent" (as Douglas Overton Blue, Swami Atmatatwananda explained one lovely day about 10 years ago at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood).

I add this digression about polytheism and pantheism because I have felt oppressed by the promulgation of traditional Christian and Muslim "one-ness" of God or divinity. Something about this "one-ness" if not questioned becomes another form of idolatry... it stands between us and the divine yet again (yet another oil derrick) when the divine is best met with total incomprehension, and the best humility we can muster. The saint is sacred fool, steps once again into his innocence, the sage steps only to his defense as needed.

Part 3: Figments toward "The God of Metaphor"

IN the film Il Postino (Radford, 1994) there is an assertion about the nature of this world as a metaphor for... ( ... ).

"for example,
I don't know if you follow me...

that the whole world...

the whole world,
with the sea, the sky...

with the rain, the cIouds--

Now you can say etc., etc.

Etc., etc.

The whole world is
the metaphor for something else?"

( http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/i/il-postino-script-transcript-postman.html )

Perhaps this is where we derrive all our nonsense about what Nietzshe dismissed as "the afterworldly": heaven. For Nietzche (Geneology of Morals), life is to be lived here in the midst of its wealth and abundance, not leached away by the vampires of the priest-hood, always promising a better place (figured also in Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor.". Perhaps in this passage of simple words ["Then this world is a metaphor for... ( ... )"] we see a doorway to a much more complex expression of the world... would this then be "heaven?"

Perhaps the mistake is made in the announcement of the "whole world" as a totality of "etceteras." The whole world can never be gathered, much less one single mountain, much less, in Kafka's words a trip to "The next village."

If nothing can be gathered, then nothing can be metaphored. (notice how the dialectic of nothing and no-thing-ness is constellated in this phrase: this compiles a second threshold in the text, between this world and the realm of stars.) (That previous comment is extremely problematic and must be held forth with... it marks my ineffectiveness and ineptitude in the realm of thinkers, but it may also mean I have found something.

Peter Handke writes in "Lied vom Kindsein" used in Wender's Wings of Desire):

Als das Kind Kind war,war es die Zeit der folgenden Fragen:Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du?Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort?Wann begann die Zeit und wo endet der Raum?Ist das Leben unter der Sonne nicht bloß ein Traum?Ist was ich sehe und höre und riechenicht bloß der Schein einer Welt vor der Welt?Gibt es tatsächlich das Böse und Leute,die wirklich die Bösen sind?Wie kann es sein, daß ich, der ich bin,bevor ich wurde, nicht war,und daß einmal ich, der ich bin,nicht mehr der ich bin, sein werde?

(http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/archives/2005/04/05/lied-vom-kindsein/ )

The "World as Will and Metaphor" might be another term for Schopenhauer's work. In this sense "Vorstellung" becomes "Gleichnis": representation becomes parable. The parable or metaphor has the uncanny ability to somehow delay or defer desire in a sudden confusion, was this real fulfillment, or just the promise thereto? (A parallel exists here between Shopenhauer and Freud's model of incest taboo as deferral of desire... as read through Derrida's Post Card)

Part 4: The Performance: Abortion: Heinous trampling of tenderness

All these efforts to speculate on religion and the infinite should now be bracketed in the light of the "performance." This "performance" was on the night of the first into the morning of the second of September 2007. In the "performance" there was no room for the niceties of theological speculation. I am sure that given the mood of the evening anyone would simply look at me with empty eyes and tell me to stop babbling. The "Crude Awakening" stayed true to its name in this respect, and remained only alive in internal speculation. The outward expression was ghastly. To my knowledge no one was hurt or killed by the performance on the "playa." Nevertheless the maiming and killing goes on without cease in Iraq and the centers of our "crude oil" based theocracy and culture. Areas of "vital importance" to the United States are still maintained at the cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives and unknowable ecological damage.

When I look into Das Man's effort I see that the Crowd of onlookers was part of the performance. Heidegger ironically calls the everyday ignorance of humanity das mann. This ignorance was far more horrifying than the didactic spectacle of "star-spangled-salute-turned-apocalypse." We were listening to the senseless ramblings of the pathetic instrumentalizations of "The Mutator," a band started by a child molester, the audience was drawn and numbed by a special spectacle of a half-naked woman on a high wire spinning fire: the music (self-laceration) signifies something more horrible because it drew us to this location: ART AS ABORTION (the very essence of the spectacle part of Burning Man).

In the end our little spectacle was over soon enough, after two hours of numbness and waiting accompanied by the senseless cliche's of rock culture, the pablum of music called "the Mutator." Suddenly the diarhea of music was replaced by a deafening wail of a "victory siren": an unbelievably loud "air raid warning." This was followed by smoke, pathetically celebratory fireworks display, and rending apocalyptic explosion. The "derrick" was immolated in hydrogen flame, collapsed to a flaming heap, a rubble of missed expectation: the members of the audience still commented: "that explosion wasn't nearly loud enough!" or "That tower's height was still unsuitable; it should have been even more massive!" These comments, true enough point to our essential role as audience: we must remain essentially ignorant. The statues returned, through the writhing holocaust of technological pain, to worshipping the infinite: the object-lesson's criterion had been satisfied. Certainly we as a collective were least likely to consider the work's true implication. I was left to ponder the work of Carl Jung, wherein he calls the Rebis of the Rosarium Philosophorum as the object of alchemical work: "A monster and an abortion."