Coming Soon: Corporate Kindness

Soon a corporate kindness will overcome us all. Some of us will be blinded, others will go round for weeks seeking light at the middle of daytime while wearing wool and polyester blend suits. Soon there will be corporate kindness.

Look: you have Google, and Microsoft, and IBM and Intel. Are not these giants (veritable leviathans) just opening their arms to humanity and calling themselves out: you can meet me! I provide your database! From there anything is possible: the tower of Babel or perhaps the right kind of ladder: a ladder to the heaven, absolute fulfillment, every man is enchanted by his own Houri dancer, who keeps shifting and changing and she never grows old.... that sort of thing: every man given a fig tree and some dried fruit!

Or maybe just the good old thing: knowledge is power. That's just the thing: a knowledgeable pep-talk: some young corporate believers, and older climbers, and some hangers-on will take up notice: the university is a corporation: mental health is provided to you via a corporation: all of these great corporations seem to have a certain limited grasp: they want to help you but nobody seems to have the time: they are trying to make time for the performance checks that are handed out by the corporations: performance and copy-rights handed down: that's what we are talking about: half of humanity could be starving: in fact it is: starving right now for food and shelter and some kind of human face that would say: hey, now, it's really OK just to live here: and you don't have to watch TV and you don't have to watch some kind of COPS or Reality TV show just to know what kind of criminal you should aspire to!

But even if that half showed up on our doorstep: tired, hungry, watching too much TV: I mean the tired, the poor the hungry, the huddled, the starving masses, watching-always-watching too much fucking TV: I mean those masses, huddled round us now, like some creature who was wrapped up and snuggled: a creature made of starvation itself: wrapped up around all our cool and quaint technological innovation: now imagine that!

Ways of Being "Played"

And I'm over here in the basement: mixing up the medicine: taking leering glances at Robert Walser, saying, "cool it, man, are you for real?" "Shit, you fooling me?" and so on indicating that one is playing the other just as a gilded harp or some kind of finely strung instrument: like the magic harp from "Jack and the Beanstalk" -- now there is some sort of completely dorky story! I remember hearing it on my "tale-spinners-for-children" records. My player was a mickey mouse machine: with a picture of Pluto, the dog: there we go: turning the god of the dead into your faithful dog: I mean, what the fuck were you thinking Mickey Mouse or Walt Disney or whoever you are: "I'm thinking of making a lot of money in the entertainment industry," well is that so mister entertainer?

And then we would look at each other for a few moments, Walt Disney and I, that veritable saint of children's games and fun-type media material: and I'd back down right then and there: I am not a man to strike up that sort of an argument, not with Walt Disney at least: he'd beat the shit out of me and I know it.

Anyway the arm of the record player was constructed of Pluto's bone: we played our Disney, corporate children's entertainment, on the Disneyland record player with pluto's bone and some wires stuck in the plastic bone simulation and a record stylus caught up underneath: a mickey mouse record player in that rough teal plastic blue. Well I could go on an on about this sort of trivial thing but of course you won't understand and will think it entirely irrelevant, I mean there isn't any such thing as a teal or turquoise blue Mickey Mouse record player any more in my reality, so what is the point of speaking about it at all, except that I was stuck with the thing in my childhood, and may have suffered severe emotional damage because of it (people are thinking up of the strangest things to receive emotional damage from so why not this).

So... Jack and the Beanstalk... (not David and Goliath, how could I ever be such a dolt as to forget this one!) is that really the name of that one? Jack, a quick witted fellow, spry and kind of flat Jack, not much here: move along now kind of Jack: well we have that sort of thing. Jack is a beanstalk: I mean, have you ever seen a really thick "Jack," though I am sure there are lots of them, in my life it is clear that there are no thick-looking Jack the Beanstalk kind of people, only slim ones who go diving up to the roof of the world like it was no problem.

Jack and the Beanstalk: always a corporate climber, no doubt moving upwards in a straight line, tall thin and narrow is the line to success, and each member of society is capable of the same straight line to success, no matter how inconceivable the adversity, no matter how many times they have carried round with them their own shattered dreams, like they are just serfs, and no matter what they will do they will remain serfs, unless they marry some of the landed monetary royalty: now there is a farce: the one's with power in this society are the one's with money! Of course there are other sorts of power, there is power all over the place: there is power in the woman who is turning a stirring spoon in her cooking pot for God's sake, so please leave me be: stir your own pot if you want to do that! There are pot-stirrers, there are battleships and gunboats for little boys to play with: they wear white Napoleonic Uniforms and those devastatingly fashionable Napoleonic hats: but wait I am getting beyond myself.

Corporate kindness, you beg to differ, such a foolish intimation would never be entered into by any self-respecting scholar: we all know that the corporations are in this for the power of the buck, and the bottom line is the bottom line: Dollars and Cents. But I always fancied that money taken in this respect was crass and, to say the least, somewhat unsightly and lacking in earnestness: the earnestness of the hard-working man who comes home after a day and a week of his hard-earned-labor saying: Mom I did this: I have professed the nations and the nations are somehow made invisible by my own attempts: we have conquered the world problem of capitalism or some such thing.

Well you know at least when you sober up from this kind of unsightly thinking that there are at least four (4) things in life that make sense:

1. Do not damage your dental work, it will wind up costing you more out of your pocket and drain your insurance.
2. Always keep a fresh pair of Napoleonic pants handy, just in case your hysterical pre-occupations make you insist that you can turn a Mickey Mouse deal into a Multi-National slam dunk agreement (or else all-out war).
3. Prepare yourself for the coming of the corporate messiah: clearly this one is coming soon, I have read all the signs correctly: his teaching will be: "You had your chance now get in line!"
   
4. Take a deep breath and breathe: even if what you are greeted with is insincerity you can sill sell it to somebody for half-price!
   

The Unreflected: relating: not relating: the ash of the concrete sacrifice.

The proceeding text was inspired by the cursory reading of Maxa Otto's (It is not certain if she exists fully in reality or in fiction) essay "On Relating: Thoughts on Psychoanalysis, Speaking, Madness and Hope." In the course of our discussion by email I kept asking myself if I was experiencing a kind of blindness, a kind of unreflected space, in even having a discussion at all outside of the institutional/institutionalizing boundaries of academia or my own service practice as a clinician. What are the blindnesses of enjoying a simple discussion, a walk through the garden of images with an intellectual acquaintance? This essay is an attempt to relate to blindness. "Relating" is "...not relating."

Language has always been my guard. I wanted to comment on her essay by making a suggestion: how much do we really see? I do not profess to have taken enough time to have read her essay with the depth that would be necessary to speak on it. I chose rather to draw my experience from what I was experiencing in the moment: to discuss at depth the unreflected elements that are held in the shadows of any relationship, any surface glimmer or glint reflecting.

I would say this: My theoretical approach at this time is as follows:

1. psychoanalytical approaches are "ontic" in the Heideggerian sense of the word: and all discourse on "relating" in an innocent manner is tainted by the general political, ontic cynicism of mass consumerism (particularly the consumerism of mental health).
2. I remonstrate academia and academics, even though frequently I write like I am an academic: So I talk for a while until I cannot stand myself any longer as an intellectual... and then I retreat (as in this essay) into my juvenile critique of Sartre, to the rambling incoherence of my essay, its free association, its lack of proper textual substantiation: all this sends me to hell in the academic sense.
3. Let me make this clear: I ramble because at this time I do not believe that academic "coherence" would really be in service to the soul: rather it is the abomination of the soul. The result reads like a combination of a passage of Lacan and the script to The Big Lebowski (Cohen Brothers, 1998): a combination of obscenity: willfully incorrect, willfully inappropriate, willfully wrong, willfully adolescent, willfully unmeditated, willfully unreflected (not unlike Derrida's Tain of the Mirror) : because academia is so dried up and rarified that it has just about died and gone to hell. If we have any hope, and I use that word "hope" only bitterly, knowing that the devil guards its every gesture, then it will not come from our ultimately "Christian" scholarly approach to education
4. I revile most forms of "American Academia" as expressions of politically correct consumerism. In other words "un-thought" "un-reflection" or even "anti-reflection" I am fairly certain that they would probably say "Well, good riddance to you too!"
5. I am inspired (Oppermann might say a little too much) by Derrida, Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Nancy, If I must pick my favorite names. I am inspired by my friend Oppermann, and I hope he will comment a little more on this other than to suggest that my writing sounds merely befuddled, fogged, overly prolific/productive in an age of horrid mindless technological production.
6. This discourse also reminds me of the struggles I underwent when I dealt with a former professor, Yifat Hachamovich. Yifat was brilliant to the highest degree, and inspired significant moments of thought, which shone out of my experience of college in the late 1980's.
7. At this time I was impressed with some of what Maxa Otto had presented in her work: we were discussing some similar terms: "self," "other," "language," and to boot there was some association to the phenomenological approach to study (She: Merleau-Ponty, I: Heidegger and his descendants in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, and Jean-Luc Nancy). I do find myself drawing to different conclusions: generally ones that favor the prison of un-relatedness, a place where there is no "other," perhaps the abyss of existing itself, rather than any "foundation" even if it is "relation" or the "Other." And these conclusions are terrible, horrible in many senses: but somehow I prefer their intellectual burden as a pain of guardianship of my own thought, free from appropriation of myself, or free from the appropriation of any other in the micro-fascism of pretending to "know" "relatedness."

(Between the shroud's of parentheses: The image of Magritte's "Lovers," a non-conjunction, came to me first from a Colorado College "symposium on intimacy." I do not think I actually attended any of the exhibitions or lectures, I was too angry to go to this sort of thing. However I pasted a multiple reduplication of this image on my dormitory room door, covering the door with the op-art deconstruction of surrealism: the insectile bug's eye view of technology, mass production, and the promise of infinite infantile gratification high fidelity reduplication, immediate satisfaction that is endlessly replicable... as seen on TV.)

This article is offered to all readers, and in this way I relate to you all, without privilege, with only the censorship that would lead to obscenity: relating in its essence is relating to "one" (molecule) finite particularity. This relating to the finite singular is about the development of a critical mass in the atomic shining of the technological-nuclear age. We will NOT do this in this article. This article will be about relating, but it will not relate, rather I will mediate relationship in the technological media which promises instantaneous gratification: the web log. In this manner we believe, but only in the most literal or "real" sense that a communication has been actually granted, that the message read was fully "related" to the one who is supposed to hear. So I will not relate, because in order to truly relate it would cost everything, it would cast me down in my own shame, my own broken-ness for that meaning finally to get through. I would be made "abject," cannot be made that just yet. So it would cost "everything" (I have always had a flair for hysterical drama, to paraphrase a Walser or perhaps Henry Darger) to relate, at least all of my attention, and right now I am directing my attention to you all here: being finite, futural: for them who shall be about to read...

tele-
DEFINITION: To lift, support, weigh; with derivatives referring to measured weights and thence to money and payment. Oldest form *tel2-.
Derivatives include tolerate, retaliate, tantalize, Atlas, translate, and extol.
1. Suffixed form *tel-mon-. telamon, from Greek telamn, supporter, bearer. 2. Suffixed form *tel()-es-. a. toll1; philately, from Greek telos, tax, charge; b. tolerate, from Latin tolerre, to bear, endure. 3. Suffixed zero-grade form *t-i-. talion; retaliate, from Latin tli, reciprocal punishment in kind, possibly “something paid out,” from *tali- (influenced by tlis, such). 4. Suffixed variant zero-grade form *tala-nt-. talent, from Greek talanton, balance, weight, any of several specific weights of gold or silver, hence the sum of money represented by such a weight. 5. Perhaps (but unlikely) intensive reduplicated form *tantal-. tantalize, Tantalus, from Greek Tantalos, name of a legendary king, “the sufferer.” 6. Perhaps (but unlikely) zero-grade form *t-. Atlantic, Atlas, from Greek Atls (stem Atlant-), name of the Titan supporting the world. 7. Suffixed zero-grade form *t-to-. ablation, ablative, allative, collate, dilatory, elate, elative, illation, illative, legislator, oblate1, prelate, prolate, relate, sublate, superlative, translate, from Latin ltus, “carried, borne,” used as the suppletive past participle of ferre, to bear (see bher-1), with its compounds. 8. Suffixed zero-grade form *t--. tola, from Sanskrit tul, scales, balance, weight. 9. Nasalized zero-grade form *t-n--. extol, from Latin tollere, to lift. (Pokorny 1. tel- 1060.)

And so to relate means to lift or to bear. And the bearing always takes care of the weight, the weight is it's care and it's charge. To relate... technologically? -Imagine, if you will, a forklift carrying a load of concrete blocks: it is relating. But the fabric in the technological world is only laid bare, like the laying bear of these concrete blocks themselves: bare concrete: a lime mixture: concrete: technological relation.

Concrete is a construction material composed of cement (commonly Portland cement) as well as other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate (generally a coarse aggregate such as gravel limestone or granite, plus a fine aggregate such as sand and water) and chemical admixtures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete

Relating in the barest sense to the concrete
Source: http://www.ttt-services.co.uk/truck_history.htm

Concrete is also a book written by Thomas Bernhard: it is once again as heartbreaking as existence can be, so completely frustrated and so beautiful, and we ask what did Thomas Bernhard relate by virtue of this small mean character caught in the cage of his own neurosis and morbid preoccupations?

"Instead of the book he's meant to write, Rudolph, a Viennese musicologist, produces this tale of procrastination, failure, and despair, a dark and grotesquely funny story of small woes writ large and profound horrors detailed and rehearsed to the point of distraction"
http://books.google.com/books?id=PLluAwAACAAJ&dq=thomas+bernhard+concrete&source=gbs_book_other_versions_r&cad=1_2

Here is Bernhard's precise line: precisely where he becomes in his very essence the very concrete that seems to encase every possible living activity of his soul:

"We must be alone and free from all human contact if we wish to embark upon an intellectual task!"

That's it. That is all we need to say, the rest would be the same: the page in Becket's language is a page just like any other page and the day just like any other day: objectivity, scientific realization of the zenith of human production: will require that we must be free from all human contact: even if we are speaking of the science of rendering the life of an artist like Mendelssohn Bartoldy in it's exact detail, or Oppermann's life in its exact detail, as I have tried to do elsewhere: this is the concrete fact: that in order to fully render a life, one must enter into an abomination: a monstrous condition of full un-relation, and un-reflection.

What did Bernhard Relate by this book, by his singular and circular purpose, which was not to relate at all: not to relate honestly, not to relate as Thomas Bernhard himself, but as this frustrated intellectual character, this mean little puppet, harshly lit on the intellectual stage, like some expressionist dummy (not quite an "idiot")? Was Bernhard somehow making fun of me now, in my refusal to relate: that i play the academician only makes me somehow smaller: by virtue of the fact that I will not embrace the particular form of what it is to truly relate: I remain technological?

Technology relates to no one. Die Niemandsrose, this is the technological twilight (Dämmerung): not dark yet, but it sure is getting there: "Rose de Person" to paraphrase Paul Celan's poem: This in Derrida: "Sovereignties in question: the poetics of Paul Celan"

Derrida : cette image destrué n'est pas une écriture de Celan

Here Derrida points to the "risk" or the venture of writing at all. He is all risk, that Derrida, that gambler! But the "risk" he points too is still enshrouded with too much derridean verbiage and lacks the gravity of soul-speaking: a gravity that always threatens a violence of taking itself literally, always the threat in "soul" of remaming it "blood and soil" which is alright were it not for the burden of dealing with the Jew, who sees through the cynnical nature of all power, leaders and messiahs. This Derrida, this Jew, he is in this instance nothing more than the garish gambler holding a cigar in one hand and aces backed with eights in the other: a "dead man's hand." And yet for the text itself he holds out, and this much I will salute and love him for: the heart of Derrida, the great and breaking man's heart, what was never spoken and so deserves to lift and carry, relating the essence of "the unreflected."

But as any gambler knows in a game of roulette that the game is up once the ball falls into place: it is the sound of the ball circling that matters: and this circling and re-circling is the game. To gamble, with shit/money, well that is all tasteless crap. To gamble with one's life: well that is for heroes and, after all is said, "what's a hero?" Or shall we say that "what?" is the hero, accompanied by his side-kick, "huh?" !

The hero is deadly serious, somewhere he has to take things literally: wrestling with harsh reality. The clown is not serious, and as a fool always questions the established sovereign and power: the jester: and in this sense is preferable as the one who does not take seriousness seriously. But the jester ill dignified makes fun of people in the midst of their misfortune. There are then two forms of fool or jester questioning sovereignty: one questions the violence of the ordering principle, the other obfuscates and denies, selectively re-writes history to deny genocide. There is a place for clowning and there is a place where one can no longer clown without becoming obscene in the highest degree: the capacity for evil laughs in the face of suffering.

But Derrida (ever the flare for the tragic) also points to the ashes, and the ash of all things that abide or endure (Morenius). In fact, the text is insistent, the fragment here begins and ends with the image of "ash," an homage to the dust of Hades himself, but always carried with the sacred element of the most profound grief. Ash with these ashes is not the dust of money, which retains the essence of its potential energy, somehow degraded by cowardice. The ash of Derrida is the ash of courage: literally taking heart. Ash, crestfallen, unable to overleap itself, its own nothingness: the ashes remain behind, obdurate, stuck, perhaps placed within the cement mixture of concrete. The Ash is the tragic component of the poem, born of the slaughter that is no sacrifice: Shoah. This ash sinks to the bottom of the pond, and comprises the muck at its depth, on the surface: reflection still takes place: of "human temperament" and of daylight, breathable air. Reflection (bent back flux) can only reflect some of the way, it is a surface event. The calcined ash sinks to the bottom in dull sodden silent presence, the presence of water, which is both surface and depth: the Thalean/Deleuzian logic of sense.

Still, we are too far along the dialectic to ponder the question of "what" or hunh?" when confronted by the problem of writing an essay on "relating." Heidegger asks Celan, when he gives to Celan the book after this name: "Jah, aber was heist Denken?" -I am sorry, Martin, but the question is beside the point. The question was made irrelevant in this frame of ash (even though, somehow, later, he too, indeed even Heidegger gathers too in the logos of grief): it is neither "what" nor "hunh," elementary gunslingers (Quixote and Sancho Panza, the end of naive medieval romanticism), none of this matters, none of this even seems to happen!

To What? A Hero?

The source for this image is: http://grillomation.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html

I particularly adore the grimy, dirtiness of these heraldic questions, dirty greasy questions: "what calls for thinking?" and his sidekick "Hunh?" here we begin the lengthy discourse on heroes, and a holding forth on how they are fucked: The Big Lebowski: The comedy of Heidegger's question:

"I only mention it because sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero? Sometimes, there's a man. And I'm talkin' about the Dude here - the Dude from Los Angeles. Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He fits right in there. And that's the Dude. The Dude, from Los Angeles. And even if he's a lazy man - and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide. Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train of thought here. But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118715/quotes

The essence of Heidegger's question is in this sense a tasteless joke, at best gallows humor, and he deserves to be raked over the coals for this. Comedy in this sense is a degradation of the "noble" tragic spirit? Comedy is infernal comedy, as if you can trust to all of Hitler's noble paladins the sacred cause of seeking the Truth of Being. These paladins are all based on genocidal cynicism, the de-per-mission of the reflected world, and the reflection that always questions sovereignty and power is the reflection of the Jew.

All these questions, all of Heidegger's questions (much as they point to the noble, refined spirit are not capable of seeing through his "Unfall") are not the question, because they fail to be actually relating to anything at all, aside from their own greasiness and even then it is uncertain. The point was that to relate would be to relate to the particular: to venture everything, and to lose everything (ashes!), or to gain everything, and not just money.

And that then WOULD be the blessing. That would be the blessing indeed, to speak as if one could speak, in bearing forth the intimacy of the particular: in reaching the critical mass of relatedness, of carrying on a chain reaction, of dealing with radio-active poison, residue, because every experience we know of, no matter how much energy it produces, also produces shit and poison that we must once again, kindly beseachingly turn to mother earth and begging her, say: please take this from us: please take all this technological shit! Please do something with it! Please change it back again into the brightness of the wilderness, alive, savage, dangerous, indifferent, untamed, yes, but somehow healthier than the technological toxins we place in the system to this day.

Ja, aber warum habe ich mich solch ein Schreiben aufgenommen? Was I worn out, terrorized? Struck? ...by some kind of lightning about some kind of terrible intensity within myself and had to write it as such: the terrible futural part of me that has yet to be mirrored, has never been seen, and has only the vague possibility that it has yet to be written?

Gelobt seist du, Niemand.
Dir zulieb wollen
wir bluhn.
Dir
entgegen.

And with this Celan puts to death the sacrificeable: as if we could sacrifice to another! "That is all bad faith!" Isn't what this amounts to? Sartre isn't worth a God damned penny! Not even a God damned fart! And that is because he is a philosopher of "subject" and "responsibility" and fucking "secular humanism," whatever that is! Fuck Sartre!

Jean-Paul Sartre and the physiognomy of fucked-ness:
the western "intellectual" subject,
and with whom I share relationship
through the humiliation of my own obscenity:
A Twenty-First century Dude in Los Angeles
with the bureaucracy of this French thought.

Sartre, aligned too easily with the question, but not questioning deep enough? Susceptible to cynicism: complicit or resistant?

Sartre offers us purvue of the cynic before the "subject," the chilling phrase of the shadow that protects the vulnerable anima of the situation: "someone is going to be fucked." And with this there is also a transparency, a seeing "through," and a return to ... a rythm that is without hope? Barely living and barely alive?

To put to death the sacrificeable is actually to end its possibility that it might be a sacrifice: it is a sacrifice that is really to no one and no-thing. But who am I really to end with such a dry place, a bunch of academic prose and a poor tin cup, draining the very dregs of this relating: to what? A hero? The Unreflected?

Sam Beckett: Texts for Nothing (4):

"its the same old stranger as ever, for whom alone accusative, I exist in the pit of my inexistence, of his, of ours, there's the simple answer. It's not with thinking he will find me, but what is he to do, living and bewildered, yes, living, say what he may. Forget me, know me not, yes, that would be the wisest, none better able than he."

In the endless technological twilight, where cynicism has reached its highest capitulation in the technological totalization of humanity: the cynnical appropriation of any sacrifice renders it useless, only as dead meat:

"The effacement of sacrifice, the effacement of communion, the effacement of the West: this doesn't mean that the West could be reduced to what came before it, or that Western sacrifice could be reduced to the rites that it was supposed to have spiritualized. Rather, it means that we are on the verge of another community, another methexis, one in which the mimesis of sharing would efface the sacrificial mimicry of an appropriation of the Other." (Jean Luc Nancy, "The Unsacrificeable" from his book A Finite Thinking, p. 77)

Here the action of Jean-Luc Nancy is to negate, deny, explode, implode, efface (as the name of Amelech is effaced) the act of "sacrifice," which always was held in the hands of priest-messiahs, who always violently asserted their power as the sacred. The act of "sacrifice" is a sovereignty in question for Jean-Luc Nancy. The legitimacy of power is the problem (psychologically speaking the root of the liberative/condemning Western Animus, the "father complex" spoken of in Hillman's Blue Fire), and we must go back to the pre-metaphysical "sharing" that is before the conception of power: neither the violence that is hidden behind the order/cosmos of the nomos basileus, nor is it that of the jester who questions power at every turn. There would then cease to be question because there would cease to be appropriation and cease to be a shadow to appropriation. We would become the flatness of the horizon, which has no shadow: but above and below which we would behold the rise and fall of the heavens.

But here there is a dogged determinism to stand in some verticality toward horizontal breadth, the extension of our lives: thus to cast the shadow of order: it's inherent violence: to bear the consequence, the restitution; asking if there may be some other shadow, un-reflected and beyond the parable (Gleichnis) of humanity, the depth of depth itself that would stand to meet me in this sharing... and I would melt, crumble, seeking truth through the fault-lines, my mountain broken, effortlessly shattering into a million shining rivers, reflecting ("only") sunlight, sinking into the great and uncanny sea.

The Advent of Space: Sloterdijk and the dismissal of Time

Above: Passage from Heidegger's Zolikon Seminar series.

"I was also fascinated by a chalkboard drawing Martin Heidegger made around 1960, in a seminar in Switzerland, in order to help psychiatrists better understand his ontological theses. As far as I know, this is the only time that Heidegger made use of visual means to illustrate logical facts; he otherwise rejected such antiphilosophical aids. In the drawing, one can see five arrows, each of which is rushing toward a single semicircular horizon—a magnificently abstract symbolization of the term Dasein as the state of being cast in the direction of an always-receding world horizon (unfortunately, it's not known how the psychiatrists reacted to it). But I still recall how my antenna began to buzz back then, and during the following years a veritable archaeology of spatial thought emerged from this impulse. The main focus may have been Eurocentric, but there was a constant consideration of non-European cultures, in particular India and China. Incidentally, I also owe something to Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, although later I quite stubbornly departed from his promptings." (Peter Sloterdijk, interview with Bettina Funcke, http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_05/funcke.html )

Death Cars and Foxes

This Image was found at http://www.roadkills.pixeldiversity.com/?m=200709

Originally this event happened around March 24th 2008:

Second fox sighting today: down by the sea at Point Fermin, the fox was sniffing round the tide pools as a snowy egret looked on cautiously. (7:03 AM).

I talked to some morning friends about the fox and the Merlin magic associated with him. Someone kind told me once that the real magic of the world rests in our capacity to truly hear others. Then just as suddenly the fox was up the cliff face and crossed over Paseo del Mar (the major street that runs along the ocean that is full of traffic here in San Pedro) over toward the park and the Korean Peace Bell. I was really happy to see the fox, and smiled with a woman who was astounded by the sighting; however I was scared shitless by the traffic.

I saw one man gunning his car and yelled out "Slow Down!" He turned round and proceeded to try to run me over as I crossed the street at Elanita (I think...). I made a dash for the curb and stood there, with my arms out. I didn't want to yell at him any more, but I wanted to be there with my hands held out wide. He pulled past me and looked back at me. He screamed out his car window at me, "shut the fuck up!" He was latin, with tattoos on his neck and a purple and gold Lakers hat on, a really scary man. I kept wondering what it meant with Merlin, and the real magic of the world being the capacity to hear others. Anyway that's what I guess I just found out about death cars and foxes,

Ideogram for the Future

Prologue to the Ideogram

The photograph of the ocean becomes itself an ideogram for the future archaeologists to contemplate as they work through our suffering of expression: that this civilization was based upon a need to survive.

The need to survive is a simple almost unobserved truth: like the use of the word "is" in a simple phrase of description: the world is good, the world is evil, the night is elegant, John is good, John is evil, the night is nice, John is nice.

But as we make our web-logs of this most unassuming fact that lingers in the back of each of us, waiting to corrupt any story we could tell could be answered with: "well, you needed to survive." It's really pitiful, it is a masterpiece how blunt and brilliant it all is, like a punch to the nose, and we hope to survive. What is this? Bare life? Just barely living? What is bare life if it forgets some long history or vale of tears, some lasting sentimental lament, some epic ode to our civilization? We carried this all up with us not to just be some shades coming to drink of the blood of Odysseus' sacrifice, shades in harrowing black shroud sails. What is this, bare life? Can I trust myself to you, bare life (whom I now address), that your next move in your innocence will not destroy me completely, irrevocably, utterly!

Epigram for a soliloquy: what is left when you sift these out: the lone speaker on the stage, feeling alone, the lone speaker speaks and augments himself, speak on lone speaker! Speak because you are tired and you suffering from all those who speak in this abyss: speak because you are tired of all the lying, weave the lie yourself for a while: speak as those lips or hands or eyes break into a song because they have not sung in a great while and finally you should burst forth with an ideogram, between your hurried web-logs of survival, survival, survival.

Part I: Prana

They almost reached that. The breath, I mean, transient and yet fleeting. As with the first Allegro of Schubert's 14th quartet.
Just enough of Walser to make a brilliance, just enough of a madman, just enough of a kind man sitting behind his trowsers, suspenders and clean white shirt. There on the edge of sensibility he traveled.
Traveling is like this, in the rolling conversation of green landscape.
But look we are in the big city now, and all around us department stores echo shiver and sheathe, the cry of a million dead laments, the ghosts of our once flourishing conversation languish beneath friendly signs of salesmen and the aching ceaseless unrest of the laboring sodium light.

"That hauls my shuddering shroud sail"

The moon breaks its course of existence, for a moment of pure pleasure and diversion, yes, let us see and maybe in that great maintenance....

I have been among the mountains of the moon when it is full, it is an uncanny sentiment, this Artemis who guides the winds that haul my shivering shroud sail,
Man in a dense black coat turns his back away, the five of swords in the Rider-Waite tarot, defeat and loss, one man impish, made of fire, master of his field holds three of them, two upon the ground. The point in fact the other two could pick up their swords and defeat him, maybe at the pyrric loss of one, that being the one sword remaining, the sword of strength: there is a chance if two of the three hold their swords and defeat this impish smile of knowing too well, of being the commander of the field.

That hauls my burgeoning shroud sail.

I imagine a blackness, a black flag of one's self, pure piracy, pure idiocy, pure wisdom
Upon those winds one sets out upon a voyage
Take to your ships, ye gentlemen
If the devil rules us here
Fight the bastard, fight and lose and win
Or haul out your echoing shroud-sail
And take voyage like the black wing of crow
Over the dim and tarnished vision of a vale
In a brass doorknob
The valley of sentimentality
The valley of anima attachment
The valley of the shadow of death
The valley of sorrows
Take wing on the clear wind that sails above the valley of smoke and toil,
And all your sorrows-
Take flight as a black winging thing
Black wing of yourself, O sing, with your blackened voice
Take flight over that valley, over the sea
To Helen of Troy
To fight another fight with good countrymen there
Aischros! Now there is the pity!
Causing shame, ill favored, abusive, disgraceful...
Ah but is this not what I would say
Traveling here
When I say I adore the party inside my head
And the threat of a madman to knock it all down
Is less possible than the party that's inside your head
You actually have a madman at that party
And he is coming in with a candle to light them to bed
And he is coming with a chopper to chop off your head!
No. Not me, I'm cool, calm, and collected
Laughing over here with a bunch of chimpanzees
It's the only way that will save me.

Part II: Animals

Be kind to animals
In the end that is all I could say
"you have only to let the small, soft animal of your body
love what it loves."
And everyone speaks and just about groans
About how these are easy words
But hard to follow
And it takes another twenty years to follow them
And during that time you forgot
That you were once a precious one,
That you once knew your way
Oh precious one, O babe!

The man in the eight of cups turns away
His shroud sail of red, the color of blood
The color of, well, menstrual blood
These ships sails a warning and a wounding
The blood of a circumcision,
Of more than one hymen-sail
Of more than one uterine lining
Has stained these sheets
And the purity of thought that stood behind them
The purity of thought is lost behind the red sails
Liars call liars liars
In the abyss of cynicism
The philosopher in hell is this, let us be clear
The philosopher falling without a ground
All because of the red sail
And all this fucking compromise!
The philosopher seeking desperately to be a good and honest man
But the honest man is long behind him,
Eradicated in the experience of human tormenting human being
Blown away by the howling cyclone of a wind
From the philosopher's falling
Such descent could last forever
But even in this descent of words
There is still a swerve
There is me looking up at you saying
I don't believe it is you that sees us in this life
But there you are anyway!

Part III: Comedy

All things can be comic with a swerve
And this comedy still saves us from the abyss. Der Abgrund.
Fathers abyss contains a lot of space and simply exceeds our limited mortality
But I am not yet ready to join the comic
I am not yet ready to just sit there and poke fun at it all
Maybe this is why I write, because some of me still takes this seriously

Part IV: The Impossible is just the Beginning

Yes, well you write until you expire
And then you will write no more.
Isn't that what ghosts are about?
These things in our being that make traces
Mists and ghosts
The mists of Avalon
Arthur rode on those mists
And that is how we begin our tale
Woven of the colloidal stuff of weeping regret and remorse
And he found the one sword.
Must have picked up his weapon
And defeated quite a bad man.
One part of him died, to be sure, there were two on one
One died and one lived to survive the battle of the good and evil side of he
One part hot, one part cold
One of them died in order to set him in this place
One of them did battle with a horrible opponent and lost
Another did battle with a horrible opponent
The master of his field
And won.
And that is Arthur.

Oh Arthur, hold your one sword: the sword of the king
Don't be shy, don't be timid Arthur!
Ride upon those mists!
Ride upon that impossibility, real suicide,
And the chance that out of our stories
Out of our dreams
Out of our fervent desires
You arrived on the other shore

Part V: Merlin, the Healer and the Abuser: The Cloak of Ouranos

Fox, beloved fox, you are there, aren't you
Tricky Merlin, force of goodness
Son of a fucking incubus!
How could such light come from such evil?
Merlin the magician, who called forth the mists for Arthur to ride upon!
The healing power of the universe
Is to listen and to receive through your magical ears
Indeed I love you, Merlin.
If in the end
You can turn your magick cloak
Of the moons and the planets, and all the stars
Turn it over to an aching emptiness that is so kind
Some of them call it "God."
I will love you, Merlin
If you will not abuse me with the Ouranos shroud
The shroud sail finally that is the cloak of all stars and the various nebulae of the heavens
Black holes and whirling gravity pools of negative matter
This scintillating and pulsating shroud

Part VI: Lament for the Terrible Hurricane of Abuse

I have seen too many boys abused in the process
Forced to copulate with the father
They become his bitch, somehow feminized toward him
And then they spend the rest of their lives on some macho trip
And then they do the same to their children
Thus the force of the abusive wind of Ouranos' shroud

The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul

"Go not gently into that good night"
All the words of all the poets tell us to linger
"Rage against the dying of the light"
But that the storm is coming

I have a feeling that there is a whole storm of ignorance and knowing that is about to wash over me. And I can only hang on and pray that there is solidity in a friendship, that we will stick it out for the longer ride. Isn't that what we do? We stick it out for the longer ride.

Part VII: Friends

Friends stay with the other friend in the boat, called onward, by the harrowing shroud-sail
By Artemis breeze.
OK, so innocence, drive me onward
After I propitiated thee with my own daughter
("the man is fucked! the man is fucked!" we, the Greek chorus all say half laughing and half crying with our faces in our hands, Agamemnon the master of all these people: "the man is fucked!")

Nobody will read this far in the insane web-log of my soul, of what i am saying because somehow I must write anew all that is me on some kind of electronic page, and burst forth with energy and intensity into a universe of half-empty bars and dingy pinball and cigarette machines. Cigarettes cost five dollars! I'll bet in five years they will cost us ten!"
Inflation will leave us a sad and sorry debtor nation, more than we already are.

Oh, maybe someone will read this far. As I come on thinking of all the anthropologists and the archaeologists of the future: five or ten thousand years from now... after five-thousand years more of people writing and seeking for some truth, and digging and narrowing out and hauling out five-thousand years more of this earth. Then will we say finally that we have given up digging? Will we in five thousand years finally give up the ability to dream? Of course it is a prison! Of course it is a perfect prison, as much of a punch in the nose as any close experience of reality can get. Reality is a punch in the nose. And you are lucky if you can walk away without it broken. No, reality is a breaking punch in the nose, one you see in the movies where the one man sends his fist all the way through the other man's head... Reality is like this. And that is a pretty dangerous place to have to at least consider and still live in a place where one even tries to be kind to his fellow man.

Part VIII: The Archaeologists of the Future

Will this be all we can truly say to the archaeologists of the future? That reality was a bloody punch in the nose, and we are lucky if we don't get our face caved in by this impact? All the churches, Notre Dame and Chartres... all the mysteries, all the symbols of all time in bronze in magical fire light, the magical fire which is the source of all our listening, that consumes us: the magical fire that consumes us.

All cultivation of civilization, of vitality beyond cynicism
All the final most beautiful verses of the Upanishads:
And enlightenment comes as a bloody punch in the nose?
The fop gets his nose bloodied
That's all there is
Raskolnikov waiting to deal another bloody blow
Now what a fucking idiot!
He gets to give me a punch and then run away and hide
Well so be it
I will take my punishment
And when he is trough
If I am still there, if I abide, if I survive,
Right there

This was not done in Jesus lifetime
To be able to see that humankind is filled
With so much good and so much evil
We focused on the compassionate man
We left the devil in the dust, we trampled him!
And in point of fact we flourished
We created greater and greater wars after this idea:
"the one holy and roman catholic faith"
"the one holy Islamic religion"
Our religions still were one, and so we had to take all others as the crushed souls
At the bottom of Shiva's toes: the vanquished one
And some of us still say "I am the vanquished one"
The impossible is just the beginning
And Arthur sets out upon pure mists of the old dragon?
And the fishermen set out in the middle of a storm on the red sea
And the impossible happened and we were awoken to the power of faith
That we could walk on water, that we could be still on the empty waters of oblivion and absorption
That we could ride over the bleakness of mortal suicide.
All this, this is at the threshold of our writing: that we must write to tell the story of how somehow we survived and lived to tell the tale of our existence.
That is all in writing: a survivor's tale:
From the empty books written in psychiatric clinics
To the stock market ticker-tape
To the poems set up to the terrible angels
All these just a part of the poem of our survival, that we survived a moment longer?

Part IX: The Magical Box: Beyond Survival

And what will these archaeologists say five-thousand years from now? When they read the obsessive logging of our survival: web-logs on cooking and puppy dog training, web-logs on how to do your taxes, web logs for dating services, web logs for philosophic contemplation of all these web-logs including (self-reflectively) even themselves. Web logs of ancient Chinese secrets: of gardens with forking paths: of red lacquered boxes with pages of manuscripts, with drawers that open and close, one dependent on another, in a sequence determined by some obscure and tantric mechanism in the box itself. Our mandarin box, with our Miraculous Mandarin, a terrible and un-dieing machine that keeps jerking out of it: Das Unheimliche, yes, well you know all that: this mandarin box, and yes the people who kept pulling the drawers open and writing their own sentences on all the lose pages that came floating down: some of the people, while in the midst of creating the web log of their survival encrypted the most beautiful ideograms of existence, a bold and brilliant calligraphy of everything and nothing.

Time and the Demon and the Waste of Time

It is only the judge who says ever that time is being wasted, the rest of the time we are just dreaming of something. The truth that happens when all the colors have run dry is that we simply carry on. Time and the Demon, the Daimon: Milosz writes, again:

That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though it's an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.

Poetry that is without soul is poetry that lacks experience, innocent though it may be of its own fleeting magic, we still have to wake up from this sort of dream. "Look, I'm waking. Into what? Being in overwhelming abundance wells up in my heart." (a paraphrase of Rilke's Ninth Duino Elegie, which I would say in itself is insufficient, but it is the best I have to offer in this circumstance as a connecting web, so just please forgive me). We only wake when we know that there is something out there saying to us that we are wasting our time: that we have got to get up and pull that pick axe up again and hoist it high enough to till the ground or to mine for minerals, or something that has to do with our labor: sometimes we wake up and it is hard work. Then there is no more wasting time in some pleasant and perfumed garden. Plunder and murder, the lot of man then is pure labor, it is unforgiving work and it condemns the man who makes it to another twenty years with a pick-axe... now that is hard labor!

But soul makes things more simple: soul makes a dream that comes from the pain. This much is right out of Peter Gabriel:

From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision
From the vision come the people
From the people come the power
From this power come the change

"I do not have the strength to bring these words nor the world quite round," now that is another quote from Wallace Stephens, I seem to be filled with a lot of quotes from a lot of great people, but it is all to say that it is another riff on just how much we have to go, on how long we have to go to make any change whatsoever, and this "change" itself may be too optimistic. How do we know if it is the real change? And what if it is only your change? Then we have the dilemma of so much suffering, that I myself have to find my own way to be liberated, liberated without your change, or your wish or your invocation that welcomes the world about you to change... once again: "oh ever into ourselves, whoever we turn out to be in the end." Yes, whomever we turn out to be. That is a mystery, that is my blues song for the evening, frought with broken glass and the sound of these brass pipes that keep unloading something into my consciousness, this broken consciousness, "ungluckliche Bewustsein" that much Hegel was right: with "unhappy consciousness" even Hegel got the blues.

This is enough, even a Hegel got the blues is a good sign, from now until we set forth into some other starry firmament, some other continent, we will go on living, and writing, and to some this will be a complete waste of time, because it's only writing and it's only thinking. A thought can be part of the waking, that is all.

Faith and Imagination and Annihilation

Faith IS imagination. In the imagination of the Jews, escaping from Pharo, after they had got something in Egypt... after Joseph had been a teller of dreams, one who infused the random, rambling images of dreams with his own faith, and a juxtaposition of them in reality. Joseph's people got something, and it is more than just safe harbor.

What was it? The tools that infuse modern culture? Money and writing?

02:013:019 And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had
straitly sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely
visit you; and ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you.

Moses' account is epic. It is the founding of history in the manner that Noah or Adam could not yet imagine. That is why Noah and Adam belong to a past before a history of a land and a state of Israel. Even father Abraham rests before this. All this is before the founding of the state of Israel. It took Moses' great magic to take the people and displace them, a forced migration away from the land that was the land of the Pharo in Egypt. And he wandered the desert for 40 years, looking for something, looking for the promised land. Thus speaks our earliest myth, the myth of the people of the cloth.

Is it our earliest myth?

In reality there is great compulsion to view into the myths of Innana in Summeria, or the myths of the Gods of India as somehow earlier. But Moses' myth is a myth about faith in the face of total annihilation. It is a myth about mortal humankind. It is a myth about mortals wandering in the desert. It is not a myth of heroes: it is a myth of a group of men and women. These mortals struggle through their own self-deception, their own lack of faith, their raising of the golden calf. If it is not the spears and lances of Pharo's army, then it is the spears and lances of lascivious nature, that wishes to dance and become inflamed upon the gleaming skin of a golden idol.

Moses first was driven down to the ocean, and he and the people who thought he had a good idea and saw fit to follow him were threatened with annihilation.

02:014:021 And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD
caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that
night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

This is when faith ACTS. Faith is the slenderest chord of all. It is the imagination set forth into the daunting sphere of this corruptible world. The waters of the deep, the unconscious, are parted; the people escape, and the armies of the Pharo were drowned.

The message is that simple: have faith and in the hour of need there will be some UNREALITY some miracle will happen which will dismay the faces of the man of common sense and reason. Unreality will happen. If it does not then we are doomed.

Now unreality could be from the wealth of the abundance of the universe that we have not yet imagined could exist. It could happen because there are conditions we have not yet imagined a priori. The categories (literally "accusations" or "indictments" as the word is used first in Socrates Trial and then in Aristotle's metaphysics...

ὅτι μὲν ὑμεῖς, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, πεπόνθατε ὑπὸ τῶν ἐμῶν κατηγόρων, οὐκ οἶδα·

The Aristotelian categories are a tangle of the variant possibilities of ways of working things out: always the possible ways that are known: the idea behind the category is that in some way it pre-figures or acts as a template of a greater cosmic condition: the world we see through these categories (as in the parameters of a stain glass window) color the valence and rhythm of our experience. Accusations are the facts, and strictly the facts (ma'am).

But accusations always come at one as one is standing down by the ocean, with one's back up against a wall of impossibility or death. You cannot go there any longer. There is nothing there if you would like to go there. Impossibility is death.

With face pressed up against the window pane of death
Nothing but blackness outside
Your breath against this window-pane
Leaves a fog
Extend your finger to leave a trace.
Where is the miracle on this side of the window?

The miracle is that we were able to tell a story, whether you believe it or not, of someone getting through:

"When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: 'Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer.' And again, the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: 'I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.' It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished. Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: 'I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer. I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and this must be sufficient.' And it was." (I originally attributed this to Ellie Wiesel's "Gates of the Forest" but it's origin seems to come from the Midrash. Here is the link for comparison:
http://www.uscj.org/Vayikra6631.html
Note that there is one last phrase in "Gates of the Forest": "God made humankind because He loves stories." (I really loathe the sexist, possibly racist, language round this, but we will just have to imagine our way to a better place than "humankind" because there has to be some way of phrasing our condition: maybe it would have been better to say: "The Holy One brought us here because we are the love that is mortal, we burn with the love, and the holy one loves us because we become consumed with the light of our own stories turning into love, the stories of our soul-substance (hupokeimeinon) as it is consumed in compassion and love.")

May your story become a light (Zohar).

The Kabbalist Michael Shapiro related a story of entering into a hospital room of Arab people and offering to play a song for them. He said he asked for help. He said that he and the people in that room were delivered. It was deliverance that he uttered when he sang. He and the people of that room were delivered from annihilation by some kind of grace. He says that this kind of grace comes into our language as "Fear of the kingdom of Heaven." (http://www.scottsdaletorahinstitute.org/). We (I) speak too easily about grace. God help me! But in point of fact you must go on helping yourself until you can help yourself no more. What would it mean to help oneself? As to help oneself to a feast really means to offer oneself to the feast, and thus to become the feast.

This kind of kingdom of heaven comes when the ego is almost totally annihilated in a given situation, and certainly not of its own willing accord (laughing! as all my great and annihhilated yogi teachers would explain!).
We were speaking of the mosaic faith, its particular place in the imagination as leading one out from sheer annihilation. Now we have added the yogic faith: that through practice of increasing rings of renunciation one could somehow attain ...the truest survival. The point for Buddhism however is to be on our way out: it is looking for ultimate release: the great wind: "WE" Nirvanna. The beauty of the Mosaic myth is that it preserves the fragile, and less than admirable, human condition: its is not the perfected Buddha but these "Miserable Schmucks" that get saved!

And this part I admire: this part about a band of less than perfect believers, with their less than perfect imagination. What is there to believe in? I mean the Golden Calf is pretty damn voluptuous

(Depiction from Emil Nolde: Worship of the Golden Calf)

02:032:019 And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

02:032:020 And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.

This worship of the voluptuous is no more dangerous than the present. It may be that there is out there in the desert some tremendous clash between the voluptuous nature of the imagination, literally a conflict between the feminine and the masculine: the priestess and the heirophant. It is not the priestess who is abandoned when the people are led through. She and her ready "perversions" are ready to be "delivered" from Pharo's army of accusators. But there in the desert she sets up sedition against the mosaic God. And this sedition is in one sense profound: if one can be loving and faithful enough. The image of the bacchanal is an imediate imperilment to the god of order and transcendence. And I feel horrified and impelled to conjecture about the proportional cost of what is done to "purify" the people:

02:032:028 "And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men."

Such an act of genocidal intent toward the people worshipping the goddess is itself more repugnant and an abomination than the lewd and lascivious acts that prompted it. This loving of death over the vulnerable/broken/corruptable forces of life brings an intense indictment (category) down upon the Judeo-Christian faith: is it a religion of ultimate intolerance and slaughter? What is it about this worship that we should resist, and what should we remember? The "golden calf" stereotypically is related to capitalism: to the driving engine of a society based on greed and the selfish accumulation of wealth. This hording is where the problems begin. Compare to this the sanctity of devoted marriage, in these days to a single wife, always seeing the many sacrificed into the one, yes I understand the meaning of this sacrifice if only it offers up some piece of selfishness for the sake of suffering through years of resentment to enable us for one moment in this to maybe be kind: we embrace such devoted marriage to the one, without infidelity because we somehow seek to be compassionate.

David Whyte writes about faith:

I want to write about faith:

About the way the moon rises over cold snow,
Night after night
Faithful
Even in its fading from fullness
Slowly becoming that last curling and impossible
Sliver of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself.
I do not give it the smallest entry.

Let this, then, my small poem
Like a new moon, slender and barely open
Be the first prayer
That opens me to faith.

Image taken from an Islamic website of the lunar crescent:
http://www.icoproject.org/icop/ram27.html

And here we see the syncretism of the faith of Islam and Israel: the horn of the golden calf? The calf has no horn, that is the bull, Taurus, that carries the horns of fully developed instinct. But the crescent of Islam belongs in myth to Artemis, the virgin.

According to legend in 339 BC the city of Byzantium, (later known as Constantinople and then Istanbul), won a decisive battle under a brilliant waxing moon which they attributed to their patron Goddess Artemis (Diana in Roman mythology) whose symbol was the crescent moon.^[1] In honor of Artemis the citizens adopted the crescent moon as their symbol (though some legends attribute the adoption to a Roman victory against the Goths on the first day of the lunar month). When the city became the Christian Roman Constantinople in 330 AD, Constantine also added the Virgin Mary's star on the flag.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_and_crescent

Moses (Heirophant, borne under the sign of Taurus, ruled by Luna) does away with the golden calf of material (and maternal?) desire, but the cost in terms of the woman's religion may not entirely be right. In the dark of the moon we face at best the cold emptiness of the black sky and endless night. The return of the faintest waxing crescent is the barest trace of the feminine, and one must remember the principle effect of the moon upon the tides: this ability of the moon to part the waters and to use them to fullest effect. May we have some way to enter into a relation to the feminine? The lyrics to "Teardrop" by the musical collective "Massive Attack" enter my mind and heart (I am not certain if in a matter of a week or a year I will be able to tolerate this song, it may become cliche too quickly, but I am hoping...) for some form to hold in the form of Elizabeth Frazier's voice:

Love, love is a verb/ Love is a doing word/ Fearless on my breath/ Gentle impulsion/ Shakes me makes me lighter/ Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire/ Fearless on my breath
Nine night of matter/ Black flowers blossom/ Fearless on my breath/ Black flowers blossom Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire/ Fearless on my breath
Water is my eye/ Most faithful mirror/ Fearless on my breath/ Teardrop on the fire of a confession/ Fearless on my breath/ Most faithful mirror/ Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire/ Fearless on my breath
Stumbling a little/ Stumbling a little

Here the image shifts and becomes shifty: blurred cigarette smoke? moonlight reflected and diffused through water? latex gloves? reflection of moonlight? We can only pray that this light bears hands of deliverance and help. Faith? The stumbling keeps us in this difficult form of who we are, vulnerable...

Even more disturbing is the reference to the somewhat obscure (at least for me) term "Nine Night" from Jamaica:

"Song is central to the nine night ceremony. Most songs are taken from a hymnal known locally as the "sankey," and the singing takes place three days after the death and nine nights after the death. The night before the burial, tradition dictates a "set up" (wake), and 40 days after the death another singing must take place. This rite of passage is to placate the spirit of the deceased, which roams for 40 days and nights before finally resting. "
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1546/is_n5_v11/ai_18965680/pg_1

I suppose that facing death it is part of the course, and yet there may be raised a song so beautiful, bless the stumbling, bless the hands that come from some divine fire in our heart that catch us as we are consumed in the flame of life. C.G. Jung quotes C. Kerenyi: the sculpted bands of Neriads on ancient Greek sarcophagai reveal the essential relation: epithalmic to sepulchral. "For basic to the ancient mysteries ... is the identity of marriage and death on the one hand, and birth and the eternal resurgence of life from death on the other." This is to say that the dance and celebration of Nine Night itself dances the stiffened brittle corpse back into the supple dance of existence itself. We dance the dead into the universe.

This fire that consumes us (in a culture obsessed with fire) has the capacity to cause these annihilating waters to draw back, it lights the way, even for a moment, the onslaught of the waters, the overwhelming current, the water of grief which has no end to its depth. The hand that offers life and sustenance, carries the flame that consumes its soul substance, the love in us remains, the rest is some other person's dream.