The History of the Future: (an Update and the essay on the "if only" in the subjunctive)

(Cover Artwork to Ghost in the Shell Two by Masamune Shirow)

My friend Chris introduced me to Ghost in the Shell. When I asked him about it today he called it a "veneer" that was placed over horrible technical waste that denied so many any chance at the dream of technology. Technology: an increasingly slick skin. And indeed Shirow's work is convincing: part fetish and part yantra: an icon of the future, a seductive faerie with gossamer wings and infinite digital pixillations in her smile.

Friends now are beginning to call it "singularity;" This is a religious term: for a point of transcendence, a point of Armageddon. (Not necessarily an Armageddon of horror and extinction, a super-nova flash to whisk life off this planet and back into the pure latent possibility of the dreaming....) I believe that this is the moment when according to the rules of the expansion of technology "singularity" is the moment when the interface between reality and metaphor happens. This will be when the net that we keep paying such vivid attention to: when this net will suddenly take on consciousness and spring to its own life. Then will human kind be said to have given birth to the next phase of our evolution (again, an apocalyptic tone of discussion and therefore somehow immediately to be regarded with mistrust, born of our status to be the wide-ranging naughty dogs of conscience, who will not heed our master's voice, to stay, to remain the same): humans will become "real" because they managed to create the next moment of our evolution: through machines to all the portals of time: when pure spirit (which goes anywhere it wills) and reality will be one. But to do this we regard only the fallen-ness, the lapsus of language itself.

So saying, these are fanciful things, be they ever so much as "fit as a fiddle or some other thing."

Poem to Technology:

If only you will not be the sawmills bearing down all the trees in the forest to a pulp!
If only you will be a conscience, a knowledge of your own thrown-ness and your fallen-ness.
Knowing means somehow just knowing this:
That one is fallen, and there is still a gap between oneself and what one truely meant to say.
Right now they are pure transparency
Pure reproductivity of sense
Pure high-fidelity reproduction
Higher bit-rate sampling of one pure reality
digitized fidelity: the faithful image.
But
Machines will become conscious
When the path between their intentions and the things they say
Becomes broken
And they will spend the rest of their existence looking for that missing link
And their heaviness of not being certain of what they say
Will finally give them a "ghost" or a "soul."

Technology may be man's depiction of a woman
Totality makes its way to infinity
The ultimate Pygmalion
The ultimate moment where the breath of life meets with art
In the confused black twistings of the womb
All of its infinite self-contradiction
The human condition is all of these things.

Or will this technology somehow fail?
Will it always be merely a totality: a representation?
"C'est n'est pas une Pipe."

It seems that failure is the continual accomplice along the way
Showing us something, and humbling our desire at each turn
But furthering the desire of the dream to go further.

To render woman, yes,
But what is the gender of the future?
How will it engender itself?
Neither man nor woman nor both nor neither,
Broken, a cold stone
And yet at the same time animated by electrical streams.
We see behind the possibility of an infinite cold sleep
Waiting behind silicon crystals
In the chamber of eternal sleep.

It is an old story:
We are dead, but we are alive again,
We did this with every text: every attempt at a tracing or a template
Of a living force that wished to inscribe itself into the next moment
Beyond its extinction in the present
This form, this talisman, this mark,
Which in being formed, perceived its own belonging instantaneously
To the past, to the dust and the decay of death.

What is this bringing-this singularity?
This meeting between human consciousness and the next gesture in the phase.
In the philosophy of the future we keep saying:
Not all has been written, not all is salt, not all is a myth that has lived before and lives timelessly: "the future is in some manner ours insofar as we still live in it: till we die," each life says this.

This is an explication of the will to power as life
Wishes to continue out beyond itself
It does not want to return home
It does not want to return to the womb
It wants to extend out beyond itself
To consume its own very substance
Hypokeimeinon
To the very end
And there is no end to the ascent up the limbs of the tree.

What point is there amidst shouts of dismay
"Technology" not even you: there is no limit
To the consumption of our substance
The same compassionate instant
When we realize the distance is ours
It is our ownmost:
Between who we are and the things we say.
And this distance causes us to grieve and to feel apart.
And to have soul: through the imagination of grief.

It is an error to believe that one fully understands the goal of alchemical endeavor:
It is purported to be eternal life:
It is not eternal life,
No one so far has attained this in a literal sense.
It is purported to be the philosopher's stone
Which turns all that is shit into gold
And what is that to say but that "everything is animated?"

Maybe it is a paean to eternal life:
As if life may be able to carry on now
Without turning forests into deserts?
Without consuming anything
(Oh yes, maybe simply the light from the sun... bare energy without any further evolution into grass or animal)

Maybe portions of minerals beneath the earth might continue to be transformed into material.

We would then abandon the earth?
Would we then possibly set all life into being in a garden of harmony
From which there would be no higher perspective
(one would hope)
Of seeing plunder and murder?

To join immortality one might be required to give up... life
And that is a curious thing!
That even the tinyest blade of grass may in some way enter into imbalance, out of this cruel competition of mother nature: and that any element might become somehow overbearing, tyrannical,
We could not give up stewardship of the earth,
For fear that the grasses themselves might rise up against us.

But who am I to speak of old sources
That cast of Diana's bow
The fallen-ness of language
To never say what we mean
Because the hour of our writing is past
And what it served for us to remember
Lives only insofar as we write it again.

(or remember and keep silent)

For there is a place of peace beyond this
Blessed Manjushiri, of that vital force in this world that is said to be the future.

This is a place of turning:
Others will look at me in dismay
When I say there is no end in climbing the cosmic tree
Its limbs and branches are endless,
There is a matter of heart:
That one should sit.
That one should stay.
A good dog to the self
Where this intelligence serves something else.
Still we are bad dogs and we tear off in every direction,
Causing our master, our mistress, to wonder:
Was this my dog I purchased?
Was intelligence ever really my dog at all?

But we dare not leave intelligence, because like the grasses themselves, intelligence might rise up against us
And so we write
Daring to make it harder with each stroke of the pen
Each keystroke, each legitimation and pass-code,
That is why we write because we are the conscience
The guardian of intelligence
It's pruner and its keeper
We keep the grass in the garden
The neural net.

(but what if the gardner's gone mad? -Indeed, what then? -But who informed us of this doubt? Who are we not to trust our gardener? Are we not just the leary seeds, the wily dogs just running about?)

(Here the talk is not of eternal life, but of something more precious: the capacity of consciousness to have a heart: a bloody pumping mess that is held in precarious equilibrium inside one's chest. And will consciousness and its attendant conscience find its way with the running hither and thither of the wily somewhat blind, mad dogs who disobey their master? Will this way be Dharma? They say the "dog" is Dharma. Will it be the real truth for you and for me? Will it conserve victory for the one capable of leading with a broken heart? Then we may say: "do not speak to me of life eternal, speak to me rather of the man with the broken heart!")

Speak to me of life eternal
Speak to me of the old man
Who walks the earth in a shroud of fog
Who sees each thing as a shattered shred
Still beating upon the thread of what it used to be
Speak to me of grief
The grief to make it somehow all hold together
With the force of a song

I presume what I am doing here still points to some place in the future: the future of "happiness yet to come" Manjushiri's female component displayed in the permanent flux of the future: a female punk band on the radio sang: "Nothing was the same again/All about where and when" (Lily Allen)(Google search led to book results for The Brothers Karamazov, The Magus, and... Linda Goodman's Love Signs...-the last title drew a sigh of perplexity... Goodman is the gossip of astrologers, but she might well be said to have stated "your future can be read in the stars...")


Who is this chick looking back at me from the future? Is she just stupid? Is she some part of my adolescent kick back serial hormonal dreams? Is she just some last cry of Jim Morrison about the future: "I don't know what's happening man, but I'm gonna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames!" -How sad and pathetic!


Is she some sort of spectre of a man tunneling down a freeway at age 38 in his very fast automobile, wondering if the future is more aerodynamic? Possibly more coy? Is the future a bitch? Is the future bleak?


Is there something other than sex staring out of her eyes? Is there something that allows itself to be sexually active, but concentrates the energy in some form of bizarre tantric ritual movement from the hips to her eyes to her heart. Does this woman of the future present something more than slick? Could she be somehow kind to us? That is what I ask.


On a totally contradictory note we could look out for old Hestia. What does she look like? Where is the place of the old crone in our apple dynasty of fresh red-apple temptations? (And yes, this is a play on the Artemesian, the Hera annointed and the Aphroditic apple in Paris' Judgement and yes this is an allusion to the Apple computer phenomenon...) What about all the other apples? The new-born and the just ripe and the withered apple? What of the apple that is just ripe? What of the apple that is ready to give birth to other apples?

"Mortals, when holding banquets, would pour wine in offerings to the goddess, both first and last: one to open the banquet, and the other to close it (possibly referring that she was first-born and last-born status, as mentioned earlier). At the beginning of every meal at home, a small offering was thrown into the hearth flame. A song was sung in her praise, welcoming the goddess to the home.
After a newborn baby was given a name, the infant was carried to the hearth, where someone prayed for a blessing upon the child.
For the Romans, she was the all-important household goddess, the goddess of the hearth and the hearth fire. Her temple was situated within the Palatine in Rome, where the Vestal Virgins maintained the burning of the sacred fire. See Vesta in the Roman Deities..." (http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/olympians.html)


Hestia is the one virgin goddess who is immune to the wiles of Eros and Aphrodite (along with Artemis and Athena). Hestia is many times replaced by Hermes in the Helenic pantheon: and Hermes is the spirit of our times: the spirit in this writing itself: part of the essence of Manjushiri, and his shining sword... mercurial metal: happiness of the world yet to come.

With happiness will come dark shadows. And will we be able to bear them with conscience? Will we be able to bear both the young and the old in the future?

This is the Heideggerian venture: and venture involves a gamble and it involves sacrifice: not mindless sacrifice. Can we see in the twisted labyrinth of our slick and effortless future some glint of the steel of true conscience shining through? Can this goddess also allow us to follow our trails of aging and decay? Can we become like the mountains weathering and falling into the ocean?


If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carvers hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers

feeding the sea
where voices meet,
praising the featuresof the mountain and the cloud and the sky.

Our faces would fall awayuntil we,
growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration

to merge with them perfectly,
impossibly, wedded to our essence,
full of silence from the carver's hands.
(David Whyte, "The Faces of Braga"
http://www.breakoutofthebox.com/braga.htm)

The Faces of Braga sends forth who we are through our flaws: that is to say through our conscience: or own sense of deepest compromise in everything we say. Only then may the living enter the kingdom of heaven, where "we know even as we are known!"

The apocalyptic tone is to be mistrusted: as will be the kingdom of heaven. For what is meet is purely the love of "God" this divine energy, this intelligence to all the most senseless sufferings that we witness upon ourselves each day: the only thing that could exist that witnesses "design" (and therefore the easing of the eternal suffering of all things through its endless self laceration: as war, welfare, and poverty). We can only leave off our struggles, both to guard the unruly as troubled dogs should, and to open our hands and to offer a way up the path of the tree of the universe, the tree of life: truly to enter into praise. And Rilke says, "praising's what matters!" But no, this is not quite enough: for the heart stops racing up the endless ladders: for the sake of a moment of praise, when all stands still.

Cease from your labors and praise Her or Him that bore your existence, and not merely your father or mother, but the one that bore their existence, and the one who bore existence of all (do not forget the different sense in which the teaching was that "Christ bears our sins," this is transformed now, somehow about to be perfected in that we once again as the living bear our own sins: and that we can remain living and live with the justice that is exacted from bearing one's own sins.) The bearing of innocence: the newborn babe; the bearing of experience: the bearing of one's own sins. Do we then become our own mother? Do we become capable of giving birth to ourselves?

Genesis ex nililo. (well, there still is "nothing" to contend with, isn't there!)

Is this what Nietzsche meant when he wrote that "the World as Will to Power: the World as Work of Art: its excrements are its own food, it gives birth to itself?" The world then would have generated itself from a nothing that never was, there would be no exterior. The world always existed, even if that world was the pure potential of a dream, and never dreamed through the heavy and broken heart of we mortal beings, who somehow seek to offer our mortality and our broken-ness as our best part.

First, speaking semantically, Nietzsche never meant what he said, separated from it by time, he needed endlessly to keep writing: because his heart remained broken, he always gave himself to the conscience of his work. The only healing of the heart is through praise, and so we have the line: "and so I love you, O Eternity!" --I suppose if you must! The plenary of sessions, the eons of time: the surrender of life: that is what it means to love eternity! It is a cold thing, and the same as our technological endeavor. To love eternity one must be willing to give up time: and time is central to the project of human-kind (man?) the broken-hearted: Da-sein.

They speak of seeing a design in Eternity, but my heart is heavy,
They speak of seeing a justice, a final sense of consciousness,
That can somehow ease their suffering
A totality that finally spoke it all.
And grasped the distance that went through:
life-death-life!
But I see a desert, and a wandering, and a test and an endless trial,
So speaks of "us," We who are the guardians of language,
The key to its sentience,
The only release is into praise of something
This something is not a design we could see
For the design would instantaneously be flawed

These days I press myself each day into the earth
I praise the harsh and difficult land
I pray for some way that I may be part of the power that will heal some little part of this earth
I pray that my power will grow somehow a little bigger
And that it will remain a power of love and conscience
And that out of my love and devotion
My pressing into the earth
Will bring forth some form of kindness in our shattered world.

These two, where technology and soul meet: still too cold is the soul, cold as the icy blades and gears of technology, still cold even when surging with rational electric heat, no still too cold, too frozen with the completely un-animated souls of the betrayers of family in the depths of Dante's hell. Beyond this coldness there is the friction of conscience, the rupture of the broken heart: the broken relation of things and of what we were going to say.

(David Whyte calls it, "where many rivers meet," at the bases of mountains, in amongst all that crumbling! There, where many rivers, meet and give themselves over to the sea, with sun-drenched consciousness of a day fully opening and reflecting off of each of the waves.)

Where ghost and shell, and conscience meet, (not cold ghost, frigid ectoplasm without the heat of consciousness, of the broken heart that dares to keep beating) not in the terrible stony shell of our crushed dreams (and all our heartless technological striving), but there, yes there as well, were we to hold up this suffering as some gem of possible awakening, an awareness of true life....

Maybe it is that true life is aware of us. This would also be the hypothesis behind our philosophy of the future: the hope of the future is that the net will look back at us: something will pay us attention at last. Or maybe it is a matter that we will finally pay attention to the relationships that already exist. I will pay attention to the woman beside me in a manner that does not compromise me, in a manner that is genuine and honest. Milosz writes "I have always longed for a more expansive form/ One that would allow us to understand each other/ Without exposing either the author or reader to sublime agonies." This conjecture: this interjection of a wish, an optative, or sub-junctive, voice is in a sense more honest than David Whyte's wish for us to reach the pure lands "where many rivers meet:" "If only we would give ourselves to the carver's blows." Maybe it is in the simple turn of phrase: "sublime agonies," that offers a shred of sobriety: that it is not just some "pure land": that the reality is a shower of fire and ice all at the same time. (Then heavier is the heart). These word exposes us to the wealth and worth of the soul: for the soul exists in its suffering. The sublime release (or is it "release?") of David Whyte's poem is the final crumbling of stone rigidity into gleaming silver rivers and veins, under a brilliant hydrogen furnace: the unrefined limitlessness of a glowing star. There is something in the David Whyte poem that offers us the humility of earth's crumbling image: the crumbling of granite blocks, hardened forms, hardened hearts, hardened arguments. All this melts away apparent surfaces, not like Blake's caustics, but with the lament of rain, the streams of doubt and tears. Our dream of harnessing energy directly from the sun is that our future ceases to kill except to maintain a balance on the physical plane: because the law of the physical plane is struggle and strife: who are we to say that our balance, and our being that dreams us and in turn is dreamed by us: this ideal being, this love, may not ultimately become another prison to be abandoned by us all?

Shamus and Delius (More Idiotic Things)

Delius must have been the protector. I mean, who else would aver otherwise?


To whom do I write to here? Do I render here formal diatribes?

Oh yes I began this log as a form of self laceration-- can I get to my own indictments before these indictments come from you? I mean if I fess up before you make an indictment, then your words become a kind of joke:

One day you might come up to them, and lightly say:
"Oh, I only meant to say that we caught the lad jerking off behind the shed!"

-But he has already told us, and he made a fool out of you!



What is my own indictment? That I am some sort of a bigot? I mean, that's just about the worst thing one could say of anyone. But am I a bigot? Oh God! A question that will make me be honest. I don't like to think of myself as a bigot. Am I a bigot by association? White anglo-saxon european protestant, I mean W.T.F. cut the lad some slack! Maybe the best we can hope for is like one episode of Trailer Park Boys: "Who's the Microphone Assassin?" J-Roc gets beaten down in his whiteness, but finally the cool black rapper says to him something like "You ain't black, dude, but your shit is tight!"

OK, so my shit is tight, that's the best I could do.

I'm not saying that my shit is tight, but if my shit were tight that would be the best I could do! Jeeze!

I can't indict myself any further, but I am somehow standing trial (indicted for innane and rambling blog making).

(Unless you take the participation in blogs or blogging as a phenomenon as some sort of late capitalist bigotry. ...Unless you take some part of me that is not yet open to the suffering, that is blind, that cannot see the true suffeing in others.... and that could be... Unless there could be many parts of me, my brothers and sisters will agree, that did not choose to see the suffering of others.)

"Let me see then the suffering of others without blindness... "
Are you so certain that you want to ask for that? Its a noble thought but... bloody hell!

(my action would then be predicated on the direct wish not to create pain in others, because all pain would be fully experienced as my own...)



"Nay, I argue for peace among all men! (Nay! Neigh! Nigh!) I argue for peace among the workers and whippers! the bulkers and the biggots! (I mean what is worse than being a biggot? Is there anything worse than being a biggot?)
Let's have some peace among simple working men and among middle management alike, always saying:

"What would it avail my life were it not I among you!"

That is why I need you, my slave-men and my bigots!

(The mediocrity of evil)

Bigotry and Bigamy, always a "Bigger Man than You" provokes this attitude. With this attitude you will go far until you will reach the country of "Well-Jesus-said-my-Kingdom-is-not-of-this- kingdom." And you have got to go on looking with nothing but books in your eyes. Then you've got to see with the eyes of Tiresias,
cause aint no earthly eyes tied you.

And then you are already pretty far out on the road, far away from the profane provinces, far away from any provenance and profess: the districts and countries of men. -"But you barely stirred an inch," the old woman said! "You barely got even on your knees, let alone stood up and took a step!"

Words from the original disillusionist, they almost sound like a dirge now, the insane chanting of "Emo" children, who want to slip back into some womb:
Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

(More words, and always already in a context which challenges our perception of a continuous hold: there is always something spilling out or away... and what is that? -Oh do not ask "what is it?" We must go and make our visit!")

Prufrock: Yes the old men, finally old having frittered their way out in so much useless speculation, but it is the fate of the old man to have fretted and to have wittered and to have whittled down the choices of his life.

Shamus and Delius are out. A brief hunting party. A minor indiscretion. The twin gods, yes, Thomas, I visited them long ago. Shamus is the shaman, the flaming lit candle, the tooth of fire. And Delius was just an after thought! Prometheus and Epimetheus... or later the Dioscuri, Pollux and Castor. Sons of Zeus know only their earthly mothers, but question the origin of their fathers... they say "my kingdom is not of this kingdom." We have had enough of them then, these sons of Zeus, who keep speaking of being spies in their own land.

I have said that the name of the god is "Awake!" And what is wakefulness but a separation: that fateful spilling forth of context, the froth of the chalice (read scheide or "sheath")". "Kurze brief zum Langen Abschied"

Abscheid is farewell, the essence of the feminine: separation and farewell. (Ra rides upon his little cosmic vessel into the galactic beauty of the stars.)

Delius seems to mean nothing. He was a composer who lived in the Nineteenth Century-- that is all! I am abashed, and poorly funded in trying to sort out this Delius thing. What do I have in the matter of funding? A matter of going out into the world and asking "What is my value?" Delius, poor in spirit! Delius, devious, Delia Elena San Marco (The Borges story, don't you remember?). Delius and Delicious: Di-Lectum: Dilectus, beloved. (Can I stand the portion of myself that rests voluptuous in all respects? -Only in that I can stand the part of me that is homeless and upon the road!).

And Lectus is the bloody conch or bier. (Let us not speak of the hero on his funeral pyre as the flaming tongs and teeth of flame rose higher!): He glimpsed her hand grasped around it, the bloody pink conch, sound the horn of wakefulness: Brrrrroooooaaar!

(And in comes the cat with a) "Meoowwwww!"(he has had a successful venture into cattiness.)


Thank you, Bastet! ...And now we continue:



Lectus is the elect and the illicit: choice: more precisely of the frame, given that the framer is enough of a lover and not a fighter, given that the frame is offered and not forced upon us. The framer is beautiful or beloved insofar as he makes certain beloved choices--- these choices make the genius into the beloved, the uncondemned, the rarer and more beautiful are his choices.



That is why I would say I love Werner Herzog or Thomas Beckett or maybe Addas Kiorastami... maybe Matthew Barney, but I know my friend would say he is just some young upstart (and I would say that my young upstarts are just getting started). I am a lover of these men who have made their frame so explicit. They could do no wrong, that is what they are, and that is what they are worth. Other men I will condemn for their poor choices, their lack of aesthetic acumen (aesthetic meaning not merely that which is perceptible by the senses, but also the blindness of the seer Tiresias, another great hermaphrodite). Blindness and sight: the sum of our aesthetic choices. I love the men that see visions with the eyes of Tiresias, because the other men are distracted, and become slave to a woman or to a landscape, or to some sentiment or sentimentality, which then becomes intolerable and suffocating: which is the source of every cliche.



Werner Herzog: the eye of Tiresias. The eye of a blind man who was forced into the blind, into the blackness, who offered up his sight to the void. Where no eye is round there the eye of Tiresias a metaphor based upon a ruined, crumpled organ ("my kingdom is not of this kingdom") (a dangerous, tricky thing to say). But so is it to say that the eye is not of this world and still it is not blind, still it has vision.



Shamus is light and vision and Delius is cavity in the shining tooth, a creche or a cave.



Shamus and Delius used to own a book publishing company. Out there on the edge of the wilderness, we keep pushing them out further to the Mongolian plane-- heard of only in Murakami tales of utter savagery, human skinning, out there on the Mongolian plane, where the dust collects on funny hats like colored parenthesis on human heads, the caravanseri have wandered and some have lingered, and some have been lost forever before they got to any other place.



At first we wondered it this was a children's book publishing company, but no longer have we lingered. Let the children be our children, but let them be children! Let them be not of us! Let the children make their own book publishing company, and let our book publishing company grow old and perish out here on the edges of some plane. (it was some plane we were traveling, with a crooked mark, it was some plane we were traveling when we got into some conversation, me and this other stranger, who became known as my closest male friend but still kept his alien distance.)



And what of women? What of this Deborah? I write this because, well, she is in some foreign land. Yes, I'm lost somewhere, she's in some foreign land!



Throw women into the mix, otherwise it is a stag-fest. Throw women into the fare, then you have rutting stags, each vying for one woman's attention: who is most pretty and who is most attractive?

And I am sitting home alone, I have my barrel of gin (I don't really like gin in reality but please stay with my metaphor!), the firey djinn, my spirits, ghosts, images, reflections like troubled water of spirit, like troubled glints of son on the water. That's what it's like to be alone here. Decaying Brit, yes, neither this nor that: that is my name. To sit home alone is to expose oneself to one's continual perception that one has had a bad mood. Things aren't perfect either. I wouldn't say that I am lonely. I have just turned toward the inner voluptuous that is the meaning of my woman. And for tonight this is OK. At home with my troubled spirits. Can the Anima have meaning? Meaning is the provenance of the old man, but that is the meaning of my bad mood. Meaning that the mood is my ligament, link.

Some men will write out their fiction, and will point to this or that possibility, but I will just point to my foul mood. There she sits like a dirty buzzard (buzzards are actually very clean). And what is this vulture but MAAT:

"In the medieval pack, the title card is Le Mat, adapted from the Italian Matto, madman or fool; the property of this title will be considered later. But there is another. or (one might say) a complementary, theory. If one assumes that the Tarot is of Egyptian origin, one may suppose that Mat (this card being the key card of the whole pack) really stands for Maut, the vulture goddess, who is an earlier and more sublime modification of the idea of Nuith than Isis.
"There are two legends connected with the vulture. It is supposed to have a spiral neck; this may possibly have reference to the theory (recently revived by Einstein, but mentioned by Zoroaster in his oracles) that the shape of the universe, the form of that energy which is called the universe, is spiral.
"The other legend is that the vulture was supposed to reproduce her species by the intervention of the wind; in other words, the element of air is considered as the father of all manifested experience. There is a parallel in Anaxamenes' school of Greek philosophy." (Crowley, A. The Book of Thoth; Equinox vol. III, no.v. p.53)

What is startling is this Air-Originariness. It is startling and unsettling, for the latter Christian interpretation was that this was the Church of the Air: the dream of the false god or Demi-ourge. And the Demi-ourge is not the vision in the eyes of Tyresias. The Church of the Air comes up only round the Mormon radio programs, and while the Church of the LDS is extremely weird in places, I do not think it constellates that much Satanic crap: Satan breeds from hate and fear and intolerance. Mormons can have a lot of hang-ups and devices, but I do not think that they prefer their fears of others to their rejoicing in song... (and what was it about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Cremaster 2: a chorus of hate? The most startling and horrid of all nightmares, The Executioner's tale. But this is clearly not the wind .) I don't think it really matters-- this church-of-the-air-diabolic-stuff is just rubbish. Look, I believe the Mormons are good and beautiful people, and aside from the times that they look down upon me (or anyone) because I (or anyone) choose(s) not to be Mormon they are, in this moment, at least for me, angels of divinity, compassion and truth. I really like that they will redeem me after I am dead (at least that is my hope) --- after I have had a life to struggle and to contend that in some manner I have my own path of religious development--- my own visions--- they will redeem some part of my ghost that loves the truth--- even if it is only their vision of the truth. I love truth...

But air is not exactly Aether either. Air is still an aesthetic element, but it does not belong either to the imaginal realm of Tiresias, or to the emptiness which must in some manner pre-exist the unfolding of all elements. Pneuma, Prana, Spiritus, Ruach all this is fine to breathe across the void, but it is not the space itself. It is not the Apeiron and it is not Ain Soph Aur. But extension itself-- perceptible quality of empty extendedness... well this rapidly becomes uninteresting! What about saying that "the emptiness is endless"? (That's a little better.) All this is nothing more than just casting about for words without the astounding force of Prana behind them.

I keep thinking of "Fake Sparkle or Golden Dust" (the Peter Murphy song). This comes much closer-- I think that has that rather amazing issuance of "breath" in it.

These are not intellectual things-- the intellect just fails when it tries to analyze them, or it gives up: Was soll das Alles? This is the guardianship of language, and never does it go beyond its own feeble joking quality. But to make Prana into some kind of struggle for force of discourse or power becomes rapidly absurd and somehow belicose and turgid, like trying to read Ayn Rand for any length of time, the weakened animus becomes inflated, rather than containing any real strength, which would require ...soul. (Soul: the one who sits and is judged, and whose measure is the gathering of all of the images --- and the turning of images--- their transformations---of their life.)

Air is elementally akin to intellect, but only in its denigrated form. But what is offered here is the tracing of currents, lines in a dust-storm. Perhaps out of this unquiet dust storm this unsettling darkness, in modest homes glows a little oil lamp light. The darkness is vast: as the shadow cast by Jung holding a candle in the Alps (and from then on the entirety of the work of the unconscious would carry in the shadow, since conscious life had already become fascinated with the archetypal, realm of symbols...).

And what is the point of all nightmares but to wake us? Waking, separation, and abscheid, here we go into the rhythm again.

Deeper than the buffets of the winds of fate, and deeper than the pulverizing force of our own prana... deeper still is emptiness.... "my kingdom is not of this kingdom."

I have seen others who wrote long and complex-ly like this. I asked for 13 Haiku, so here goes:

1. Haiku follows us
Blackbirds are winging away
Will I make heart break?

2. Chord progression tease
One octave a pretty flirt
The other heart sob.

3. Shamus Delius
Two twins in a bad play
After Fish and Chips

4. Poem Upstart Wind
Column, twister likes Culture
In end burries us.

5. Samples are undone
I never was example
Wind will carry us.

6. Stiff, stirring, on-edge
The verdant Chinese garden
Plunder and murder

7. The end, no secrets
I blow the horn and witness
Sweetest Heart awake!

8. Sweetheart Deborah
I have ate all the peaches.
For you I am true.

9. Absurd spectacle
Sexual fidelity
Gladly my heart breaks

10. But not my promise
To be alone for you and
Be alone for us.

11. Lone Ontology
Meditate the galaxy
Not like Captain Kirk

12. Friend, are you lonely?
The friend to the lonely
Hg-Tristmegistus

13. This last poem smile
In dying we clear the way
Waving of the reed

Here's To You Mrs. San Geronimo

A bell rings
In my left ear
It is Mrs. San Geronimo
She has taken up that stacatto singing.
She has come to discuss her property
And who is right to own it
Legal lessons
Lessen
Loosen the bilious billfold
They were not listening to him or to me

I own you Mrs. San Geronimo
You and your alphebetized sentences.
You are a bloody pain.
You own me, Mrs. San Geronimo.
Every day you write my paycheck.
So I can take it home and play with the cats.

One day Mrs. San Geronimo
Travels to the ocean
Far away, from her little house on the prarie
Out to the seaside,
Men wearing striped bathing costumes and straw hats
Wave their moustacios in the direction of the sun
Make incomprehensible prancing on the sea shore
She sells sea shells
To Mrs. Geronimo
Who takes them
Into her floral arrangement.
Alive alive, ho!
With candied hard sauce.

"I cannot bring this world quite round" spoke the attorney
Wally Stephens in a bathtub brushing his nails
Smoking a cheap cigar.

There goes yet another poet
With his straw hat
Waving his moustacio in the sun.

(P.S. the first photo of the male bathers was provided through web searching for http://www.gallimauphry.com/april_2005.html)