Sunday, October 09, 2005

FRESH SCISSOR DANCE IF YOUR MOTHER WERE HERE (CLICK IMAGE) 11:43:03 PM    comment []

FRESH SCISSOR DANCE THE EMPTY SUITS ON PARADE AT THE RIVER OF SOULS (CLICK IMAGE) 11:14:54 PM    comment []

Originally posted on feral/SAFE HAVEN FOR BROKEN BLOGS Wednesday, October 5, 2005 FATHER EARTH, MOTHER SKY In her post of August 24 Kate Ingold at Broken Windows wrote: Around the time of my step-father's illness and death, I began to travel around the midwest researching and photographing Native American earth and burial mounds. The mounds, some earthen wombs for the dead, nearly all planted near waterways, somehow helped me through the loss of my step-father, a man who had been a father to me for thirteen years before he died. And mentions: My master's thesis was a chapbook of photographs, poems, and essays about the mounds titled "Sky-Map: An Earthwork Diary". I was able to publish 100 color copies when I was awarded a grant by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, most of which are still sitting in a cardboard box at the bottom of our downstairs closet four years later. I asked for and she sent me a copy of that chapbook. As I said in a comment on my last post, it was just my sort of thing and I loved it, text and photos both. In SKY/MAP: AN EARTHWORK DIARY, Kate writes, in the section on Nazca, Peru: In traditional western astronomy, we see constellations as connect-the-dot line drawings. We see reenactments of Greek and Roman myths through the linear connection of bright star to bright star. The Andeans see things differently. Their constellations are in the shadows. They see animals and plants in the contours of the dark space between the bright star clusters that make up the Milky Way. These silhouettes, shadow images, are signifiers of seasonal change and representations of creation stories and myths. Along with all of Kate's words and pictures, these sentences in particular carried me like a river, like the shadow constellations that hide in the brightness of the star river, the Milky Way to my backyard and begin gathering brick and stone for my homemade labyrinth. You can't see the Milky Way from my backyard, but you can see more stars on a clear night than usual in a city like Tulsa; some big trees hold back the haze of street lights. To get a good view of the night sky I have to drive a good way out of town. Everywhere people are, there are lights to hold back the darkness of the night. To see the stars, you must go out into the dark. Go out into the dark, linger, and look. As I've written in a poem, the stars with their long needles will sew your foot to the dark river. In SKY/MAP, Kate writes: Myths seem like guide books or instruction manuals to me.... They are instructions on how to see our connections among one another and the land we live on. She also says, There is no separation between the mounds and myth. The mounds are made from myth, surrounded by myth. Our ancestral urge to make sense of things, to shape our experience into stories must be linked to the atavistic urge to shape the earth with our hands, to dig, pile up and pat dirt into a mound of meaning. Kate speaks of becoming "obsessed with the stars and the universe" after her step-father's death. After my mother's death when I was still a young man, on clear nights I would sometimes drive out to the cemetery where her body was buried. I would go and lie down on her grave. On my back, I smelled the earth, felt cut grass prickling and the air flowing over me, listened to insects singing, distant dogs barking, cars dopplering by, and looked up at the stars that my mother's closed eyes would see if they could see anything. A few years ago when my grandmother died at age 90, she was buried in the same cemetery. After the graveside service for Grandma was over. I walked over and laid down on my back, on my mother's grave, and looked up into the deep blue sky, decorated with a few wisps of cirrus cloud. (My family is used to this sort of thing.)  As Kate says, many of the Native American earthworks were burial mounds. Some of the mounds on the Arkansas River near Spiro, Oklahoma contained burials, and one of those, called Craig Mound, contained over 600 burials. Craig Mound was publicly looted for its rich trove of grave goods in the 1930s, until the state forced the looters out, then it was excavated and by archaeologists from the University of Oklahoma, with the help of the WPA. The present mound is a reconstruction, what was left of the original pushed back together, more or less. The Spiro site is the only one I have visited in person. Not impressive to the eye, you have to walk around until you can feel, or imagine you feel, a power placed there in the dirt long ago by many hands. The Spiro site is now a State Park and closes before sunset, but I'd like to lie on my back on top of a mound on a clear night, to see their stars, and the spaces between their stars, the stars the long dead people mapped their myths on. Surely, some of our stars are the same, and some of our dark spaces, too. 10:30:07 PM    comment []

Originally posted on feral/SAFE HAVEN FOR BROKEN BLOGS Monday, October 3, 2005 SIMPLE GIFTS: BUILD YOUR OWN STONE AGE RITUAL SITE Have you ever walked a labyrinth? Not a maze, a labyrinth. A maze has false turnings and dead ends; the way in and the way out are hidden by walls or hedges. A maze is a puzzle or a trap; a sort of crossword for the feet. The purpose of a maze is to get lost. A labyrinth does not need concealment; it has curves and turnings that in the end bring the walker to the center of the pattern. The way out is the same as the way in. Turn about and follow the same meanders coiled on themselves. Step over threshold and exit where you entered. Like all forms of meditation or prayer the only change is the self of the one walks the path. The purpose of the labryrinth is to be found. I'm building one in my backyard. It is a classical seven course labyrinth, a pattern that comes down to us from prehistory. I laid it out the courses with white duct tape and plain old masking tape, after I ran out of duct tape. The center is made out of scavenged bricks and pieces of brick, tiles, and glass insulators from old telephone poles. For the outer circuits I am using chunks of native sandstone and limestone, the goaf left over from my fossil fossicking, whacked to pieces with hammer and chisel.  This afternoon and evening, I put down rocks and took up tape, finishing the fifth course just in time to walk the labyrinth as the sun was setting. The two outermost circuits are still in tape, but I need more stone. The entrance to the labyrinth is flanked by two stones that stand about 12 inches high that I think of them as mini-menhirs, and between them is a flat stone. This is the threshold. I step onto the flat stone, take a breath, let it out, and step into the labyrinth. I walk with my head inclined, because the lanes are not all that wide, and I need to watch where I put my feet. When I reach the end of the turning path, the off center center of the labyrinth, I look down at the large porcelain power line insulator that marks the spot, take a breath, let it out, turn on my heel, and wind my way back to the threshold, step onto the flat rock, take a breath, let it out, and step off into my backyard, standing in front of the old brick fireplace/grill that we use at solstice for the fire ceremony. I think I will have completed laying stone for the last two courses by then, and my homely homemade labyrinth will become part of our homemade solstice ceremony. I first walked a labyrinth one evening by candlelight, with my wife and several hundred other people, at a war protest, back when it was still an invasion and not an occupation, a mission that could be accomplished according to the man who set it all in motion. It was a temporary labyrinth staked out on the lawn in front of the local United Church of Christ (The "Don't put a period where God put a comma," people). I think that labyrinth was on the Chartres pattern, much more complex than the one I'm making. Walking that labyrinth was like being wrapped in a prayer; we all committed magic without a license as cars whizzed by on Harvard Blvd. I know it may seem absurd to some pilgrims and seekers for an atheist (with a Goddess Archetype on his back) to speak of prayer or of having spiritual experiences; but I do pray, I do have spiritual experiences, and I don't believe in god. So there. The experience of that labyrinth moved me, and moved with me. I wanted to do it again. I walk my heterogenous little backyard labyrinth every day, morning and evening if I can. I go out and walk it when I come home from work or when Elspeth is pissing me off, because I find the simple ritual very calming. I step off the flat rock between the mini-menhirs, and I come down where I ought be, as the Shaker hymn has it: 'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free, 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gain'd To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd, To turn, turn will be our delight 'Till by turning, turning we come round right. 10:14:30 PM    comment []

Originally posted on feral/SAFE HAVEN FOR BROKEN BLOGS Monday, September 26, 2005 HOME PSY-OPS PROJECT CODE NAME: MONKEY BOY Go to Toys-R-Us or a similar box store at your local metastasizing suburban retail strip tumor (Tulsa's TrU is located at what we Midtowners refer to fondly as "71st and Hell," and buy one or several of a toy product known as "Barrel of Monkeys." Inside the blue plastic barrel you will a number of flat, red, monkeys (I know, we've already reached irony but we must be brave and forge onwards) with curving arms that form a sort of sideways S. Now go to the Office Depot or Staples a few box stores down the street, and buy peel and stick Velcro, peel and stick magnet strip, heavy duty double-sided foam tape, and a paint pen in your choice of color (I prefer silver, it contrasts nicely with the red plastic of the monkey. Attach your choice of Velcro or magnetic strip to the back of the monkey, using the foam tape betwixt the Velcro or magnet strip and your little simian, as it makes a better adhesive to the monkey. Then use your paint pen to scribe a neatly drawn "W" on the chest and your MONKEY BOY is complete. Carry a supply of Monkey Boys at all times. When you happen to be in a parking lot and see a great honking SUV with a yellow ribbon you casually slap on a Magnetic Monkey Boy next to the sticker as you walk by. The Velcro Monkey Boy will stick to the fabric of cubicle walls, if you happen to work in Cubicleville. I bet it might even adhere to tweed, if you back-slapped a Fundy and/or wingnut who favors tweed jackets. A picture is worth 10,000 words (inflation, you know), but alas my dcam has died, my hard disk is in a coma, and I can't use my scanner since I'm using a Linux OS on a CD to access the internet. Otherwise I could have jpegs of the Monkey Boys I made and applied in situ, to go with the words. I also have completed two new Scissor Dances, one called "The Empty Suits Parade at the River of Souls" and the other titled "If Your Mother Was Here / How Many Pecks Can a Woodpecker Peck?" I've been doing scissor dance post cards, some with a New Orleans theme, as well. My Hoo has been Booed. I'll get 'em out there when I can. I haven't spoken of it here, but I have resumed my Black Ribbon and Chalk activities. I pick a neighborhood; Annie Beagle and I go walkies at the sunset. I'm just a middle-aged bald guy walking his dog. But my shirt pocket is full of Black Ribbon leaflets and Monkey Boys, and my baggie shorts pocket is full of chalk. Annie is perfect camo; they see me but don't see me. I talk the talkie, I try to walk the walkie. Note: Dr. Omed has regained full use of his hard disk and OS--Well, more or less. I can now post images: MONKEY BOYS 9:31:42 PM    comment []

Originally posted on feral/SAFE HAVEN FOR BROKEN BLOGS Sunday, September 25, 2005 EARLY AUTUMN METAPHYSICAL HAIKU Mowing the front lawn. Fooled eyes see a dead leaf leap like a frog: Basho! 9:01:55 PM    comment []

Originally posted on feral/SAFE HAVEN FOR BROKEN BLOGS Thursday, September 22, 2005 Well, it's a long, long time From May to December But the days grow short, When you reach September. And the autumn weather Turns the leaves to gray And I haven't got time For the waiting game. And the days dwindle down To a precious few . . . September, November . . . And these few precious days I spend with you. These precious days I spend with you. Music by Kurt Weill, lyrics by Berthold Brecht, translated by Maxwell Anderson, and best sung by Lotte Lenya. Today is the Autumnal Equinox; 12 hours of daylight, 12 hour of night. As the song says, the days grow short(er) until the Winter Solstice. Among our circle of friends we have a fire ceremony which I made up off the top of my head for a Winter Solstice party a few years back, and which we perform at both the Solstices and the Equinoxes of the solar year. A once impromptu ritual is now an ingrained tradition, and if I forget part of it or get it wrong, I will immediately be reminded and corrected by the congregation. It's very simple and entirely ecumenical; doesn't matter what you believe or whether you believe anything at all: the best kind of religious service, as far as I'm concerned. It goes like this. As the sun is going down, build a fire and light it, keep it burning. Go have something to eat and drink. Each congregant sits down at some point in the evening and makes two lists on separate pieces of paper (we like to use Chinese joss paper). On one piece of paper write down a list of "Begones," which anything or anybody you wish to pass out of your life. On the other write out a list of "Will-Be-Dones," which anything or anybody you wish to come into your life. When all congregants have completed their lists (some people spend a lot of time on their lists, particularly the Begones). We all go out to the fire. Each person picks a small piece of preferably aromatic wood out of a basket, and is given Chinese joss money to burn. Each person puts their piece of wood on the fire, one by one. Then the lists. Begones go first. As each person puts their list on the fire, everyone yells "BEGONE!" as loud as they please. Then go the Will-Be-Dones; all yell "WILL-BE-DONE!" with, of course, a will. Then everyone throws their joss money on the fire and yells "LET IT BURN!" That's about it, really. If you have a pope, which we do, he or she will pronounce a blessing, and give a short (short) homily. Then go back in the house and have another drink. Let the Begones be gone, let the Will-Be-Dones be done, and let us have money to burn. Prost! Nihil Obstat ox His Loveliness, the Right Reverend and Doctor Omed. 8:58:48 PM    comment []

Originally posted on feral/SAFE HAVEN FOR BROKEN BLOGS Tuesday, September 20, 2005 Introductory Note: This sermonette is a cobbled together revised and expanded version of comments I posted in response to something Sam said in her post of Friday, September 9th, "How can we find meaning in our lives after witnessing such calamity? After feeling so helpless? We all must counsel each other, must gather with and embrace and appreciate as many others as we can, to keep each other sane, to keep each other going." The back and forth between Sam and yours truly provides inspiration to me at least. Thanks for being and bearing with being one of my muses my Fred uses, Sam. DR. OMED'S LATE MORNIN' NOON AND NITE SERMONETTE: THE FUTURE OF MY DREAMS AND PROPHECY IN THE NEWS. La grande peste de cité maritime Ne cessera que mort ne soit vengee : Du iuste sang par pris damne sans crime, De la grand' dame par fainte n'outragee. The great plague of the maritime city Will not cease until the death be avenged Of the just blood, condemned for a price without crime, Of the great lady not outraged by pretense.              Michel Nostradamus , Century II, quatrain 53 I've become my own terrorist. I've terrified myself. I've been too terrified to speak. Not terrified in a personal sense, but terrified for the world around me prickling me all over my skin, like a case of terminal goosebumps. For a couple of months I didn't watch or listen to the news. For the most part during that time I didn't blog, read blogs, or surf the net. I get my news direct from the Collective, direct from the future, and it's even less pretty than what's happening right now. I see it with my eyes closed. I see it with my eyes open. It's an "image out of the Spiritus Mundi that troubles my sight," and I'm not so sure Yeats would have had the cojones to write such a pretty little poem about it if he saw what I'm seeing. But truly, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.              William Butler Yeats, from "The Second Coming" I'm not sure whether I'm scaring myself, whether I'm scaring myself with it; or whether it's scaring itself with me. I'm pretty scary right now. Ask Elspeth, my wife. I walk in the world, and I no longer feel like a ghost as I often do; the world feels like the ghost. I see dead people. But they're not dead. Yet. Yet I see the marks, ...mark in every face I meet, Marks of weakness, marks of woe. In every cry of every man, In every infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear: How the chimney-sweeper's cry Every blackening church appals, And the hapless soldier's sigh Runs in blood down palace-walls.              William Blake , from the poem "London" Blake saw it, not Yeats, because he was crazy, like me. I can't be kept sane. I can't not keep going. It is not given me to stop the going. We just keep going and going, like the Energizer Bunny. In a scene in Goethe's play Faust, Mephistopheles puts on Faust's robe and pretends to be Faust when a fawning student comes in. The student begs "Faust" to enscribe his book for him. Mephistopheles writes "Eritis sicut deus, scientes bonum et malum." This is a quote from the Book of Genesis in the Latin Vulgate Bible, the wise old serpent saying, "You shall be as God, knowing good and evil." After the student leaves, Mephistopheles says (Approximately, the play is in German, OK?), "Follow that old proverb and listen to my cousin the snake, and someday you'll terrify yourself with your likeness to God. Goethe had it right--We have faithfully followed that verse from Genesis and now terrify ourselves with our likeness to God. Many of the things I have dreamt of in the future tense have not come to pass and never will. I don't think of future tense dreams as "visions" or "prophecies" even though I've had them since I was a child and many things I have dreamt over the years have come true. It is rather like playing chess, Chess with Fred. Fred is my friend Kathy Wentworth's term for one's personal unconscious. Think of Fred as a psychopomp, a liminal guide, in many guises, of your soul to the underworld, the shadow you cast into the collective. the you that is not you in dreams, perhaps something like what ancient Egyptians called it their "Ka," usually depicted as a hawk. Playing chess with Fred is an intimate affair, he's seen your moves, you've seen his. Fred is a better player than you'll ever be, even when he isn't cheating. Often when I play with Fred, it seems I can see to the end of every possible game, and every possible checkmate belongs to Fred. After all, Fred makes up the rules as we go along. Yet there is something incalculable, always the possibility of a crazy mistaken move, that wins the game for the poorer player because even Fred wasn't looking for a move that mistaken. Like that Bergman film in which a medieval knight, back from the Crusades during the time of the Plague, plays chess with Death. When Michel Nostradamus came to Paris in the summer of 1556 to advise Catherine Di Medici on cosmetics and the future of France, as well as cast diplomatically hopeful horoscopes for her children, some court wit (either the poet Etienne Jodelle or Jean Calvin's right hand man Theodore de Beze) penned the following Latin couplet: Nostra damus com falsa damas, nam fallere nostrum est; Et cum falsa damas, nil nisi nostra damas. In English it runs without the puns thusly: "We give that which is our own when we give false things: for it is in our nature to deceive, and when we give false things, we give but our own things." Let the dreamer beware. All we know is "rounded by a sleep," as Shakespeare has Prospero say in The Tempest. There is an equivalent of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in the arithmetic of dreams and the calculus of prophecy. You cannot choose a future, no future is or can be chosen for you, you cannot mean it into existence, it is not meant for you, it has no meaning. There is no correction because there is nothing to correct: There is not that kind of action. Some of you may know that Omed in Hebrew means "to stand." As in the verse from Deuteronomy: Da lifnei mi atah omed; "Know before whom you stand." As for the future according to Fred, it matters not how many powers, principalities, thrones, and dominions my Fred may have had the dance of, or whether I call on Raphael, Uriel, or Samael, I cannot by any name bind it, "Stand!" Instead, we dance. The elders stomp and sway soft and slow, in a circle, to find the way into the ancient future. This is why my church, the Seventh Day Atheist Aztec Baptist Synod, has elders, and this is why they dance: which ever way the elders lurch is the way. The whole tribe makes a circle shuffle and stamp, longmothers, ghostdancers, and holy clowns, we are finding the rhythm, we may begin to be human tonight, for a dance is promised and we are the dancers. There is a music that runs through it all that changes everything and the music flows on for a dance is promised and we are the dancers. 8:53:03 PM    comment []

Originally posted on feral/SAFE HAVEN FOR BROKEN BLOGS Monday, September 19, 2005 A HASIDIC TALE AS TOLD BY ELIE WIESEL 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 to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." And it was sufficient. God made man because he loves stories. DR. OMED TO THE LAMED VOV TIMES TEN TO THE SIXTH POWER: YOU DON'T KNOW WHO YOU ARE. You don't need to read the Book of Revelations or a "LEFT BEHIND" novel to see Apocalypses-for-hire everywhere you look. What you need is a flying monkey to come and shake your hourglass, Dorothy. Well, here I am. The ghost of Archimedes is dancing on the fulcrum of the "tipping point." Doesn't matter whether you call it the Thousand Days or the 11th Hour. The time has come. What do you do? "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 to tell the story, and this must be sufficient." It may not be sufficient. God made man if God made man because the Lord loves a liar, that's the way I tell it. Man made God 'cause Man loves telling fish stories about the big one that got away. I must do it anyway. You must do it anyway. We must testify. Tell the story. Bottom-up change can and is occurring because of citizen journalists and citizen shamans of the blogosphere telling the World Tribe stories of the evolving worldlines and the dreamtime of our apocalyptic present and our aboriginal future. The Lamed Vov (10x6 to the 10th power) will move the world without knowing who they are or how they move, find the place in the forest, light the fire, say the prayer, tell the story. Elie Wiesel also said, "Some stories are true that never happened." These are the stories we will tell true. 8:43:42 PM    comment []

DA LIFNEI MI ATAH OMED 6:59:46 PM    comment []