It is a powerful omen that the web of consciousness would be flooded by Double Rainbow energy during this portentous moment on Earth.
via Jake Kotze
(via luftschloss)
Just as we were about to step out the door to head off on our trip, a butterfly flew past the living room window. I’d never seen one up here on the 22nd floor—until that moment, I hadn’t known they could fly so high.
“Look!” we both said at the same time.
It turned out there were butterflies throughout the trip. That first one seemed to be announcing the appearance of his upstate brothers and sisters. White, yellow and orange ones flitting about by the waterfall. There was a gigantic blue one in a glass frame overseeing the activities of the busy kitchen, and a small framed painting of one leaning against the mantle in the sitting room upstairs, where Charles Eisenstein gave a talk about gift economies and the ability to create our own realities…
They never came close—swooping over our heads and then going back to flying around the periphery—I saw them out of the corner of my eye as we sat on long flat rocks or in a field of grass.
There was a butterfly design on a child’s t-shirt as the play fighting between he and his older brother turned rough.
But only for a few seconds or less.
The appearance of the butterflies seemed to announce times I should stop and pay attention:
observations, the view of what was around me, the smells, sights, sounds and tastes of it
And slowly I started to know—
Not through understanding but by gathering things together—
A turn, a flicker—a lightning strike…a gutted carcass by the side of the trail
Our death and rebirth—sickness and regret, sadness and hope…
No matter how wonderful or awful an act may be, no matter how blood thirsty or charged by flames and hunger one finds oneself becoming…
(Filled with disease—molting from deep inside like fat white worms).
None of it ever stops being LOVE.
I worked on my latest feature for Reality Sandwich on and off for a year. It’s utterly changed since it’s first iteration, the editorial process itself being a journey of discovery in which once again I had to learn to put my own expectations aside and remain open to whatever I was being led to create. It seemed that the closer I got the greater the obstacles became towards completing the piece. Just when I was getting ready to throw in the towel, I recalled a story told by an old writing professor about a sculptor who was trying to create a sculpture of a beautiful woman. It wasn’t going well, as was evident one day when a friend came over and complimented him on the wonderful squirrel he was sculpting. At that point, the artist had a choice—he could either scrap the project and call his sculpture of a woman a failure, or he could go on and create the best squirrel possible.
With that in mind, please enjoy this magical mystery tour led by a synch-tripping squirrel wizard :)
Etching by Eric Desmazieres for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges
“The universe (which other calls the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal book case. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral — stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, Boston: David R. Godine, 200, Ficcionnes (1949), Rayo 2008 (source: boiteaoutils)
(via commondense, ethel-baraona)
When the world cracked open and began exploding itself anew, I was on the A train to Brooklyn, distractedly clicking through my iPod. Bits of songs came and went in synch with the snippets of light that flashed outside the windows. All of my thoughts were simultaneously too far away and too close. I looked out the corner of my eyes in that New York City way. Across from me was a black chick rocking a geeky 80’s throwback look so expertly I wasn’t sure if it was conscious or not. Every detail was either carefully thought out or she’d been wearing the same pigtails and too-big, thick framed glasses since grade school. Her bland black windbreaker and no-name jeans formed an anti-style cover too deep to parse. The pristine, black patent leather Nikes were a little too deliberate however, and seemed to out her as a vintage cool collector.
I waited for her to do or say something that revealed her one way or another—but she neither pulled out an iPhone or acted outwardly autistic. Her enigma was further enhanced by the way she sat with her arms crossed and her mouth in a tight line.
On Broadway Nassau a tall, impossibly skinny white girl got on and sat next to me, her long body folded up against the wall. My immediate guess was confirmed as I saw that the white binder in her lap said “Fords” across the top.
She was in entirely black and white—from the classic chucks on her feet to the grungy white cardigan and exquisitely messy jet black mane that crowned her chiseled, ivory white face. Her beauty made her a Queen to whom all of A-list New York would step aside and bow to, but she was still too young and new to know this. The effect of whatever small place she came from made her uncertain as to the extent of her powers. I could feel her looking questioningly at me and then over at the black chick. She wanted our approval.
I gave it to her—I felt the throwback chick do it as well. There were no words or overt gestures, just a vibe that zig-zagged between us—unspoken but not unknown. The black chick uncrossed her arms and the model leaned in my direction. We made a great 3 girl crew: her beauty, my brains and the streetwise wit of our homegirl sitting across from us—making plans and watching the door. Everything turned HD as I imagined the scene—the three of us running through explosions—the soundtrack made out of mixes we’d made on our laptops. I could feel the possibilities expand around us as the train hurtled across the river. I saw the words printed out before me—I saw the opening titles on the movie screen. I saw the model’s face rising above the river as the black chick and I lit fireworks in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge.
It was right there for the taking—a new world revealed in a lightning strike. But instead of jumping up and high-fiving we each remained quietly slumped in our seats. My iPod settled on Wide Open, by the Crystal Method. I felt the power of the magic shuffle, taking me further down the path at last:
“But you don’t get open, you just ARE open.
Open like a child’s mind.
But then you start talking.”
kiyo:
Photo: www.richmondparklondon.co.uk.
It’s spring. What better time than to restart my blog as I continue along a path greater than my writing—greater than me. What better day to drop the needle on the record (endlessly spinning) than on the day after his birthday? The day after I’m done celebrating the man whose love (re) opened me to the love of the Universe—the love of God.
One true love equals all other loves—feeling one allows you to flow into the others the way the multitude of tiny streams flow into rivers that flow into the ocean. It’s not correct to say the stream is the ocean but it’s not correct to say it’s not, either. My love for him shot through and over it all—I had no more pride or self-defense. I was destroyed and built back up again—and it felt great. It hurt so good. I was alive. Impulsive, silly…seductive.
Before we got together I wrote about him often, but once we started, the words disappeared. They came back when we were apart, which was when I realized that’s what words are for—they are the tiny bridges that lead us from meaning to meaning. They fill up the moments of without. I half-hated their role as substitute for his presence, but poetry was the only thing that compared to our love affair as a sublime force I helped orchestrate.
By arranging my words just so, I can have them reveal the void that makes up their center. I can show them for the fake out liars that they are. I can make them fall against one another and fade into nothingness, my meaning as wisp-like as a crescent moon, escaping into space.
My words bide time, they entertain and occupy and chew the fat until its gone.
As they wait for The One who Understands.
Collage by Max Ernst
from his graphic novel Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Kindness)
“The novel was first published in Paris in 1934, as a series of five pamphlets of 816 copies each. The novel consists of found images from Victorian encyclopedias and novels, cut up and re-organized into 182 montages which represent a kind of dark, surreal world.”
via wikiP
Folk singer Vic Chesnutt died on Christmas after going into a coma from a suicidal overdose of muscle relaxers a few days earlier. It seems his desire to die was caused, at least in part, by him being overwhelmed by debt from doctors’ bills—over $70,000 according to reports. Vic was a quadriplegic from a car accident in his teens—in addition to the money he already owed, he couldn’t afford to pay for other operations that he needed. It’s another tragic case to add to the fucked-up chronicles of America’s long broken system, as reported by the Guardian UK:
At the risk of turning a personal tragedy into a political issue, it’s hard not to draw lines between the details of Chesnutt’s passing with the shortcomings of the current US healthcare system. While insured, Chesnutt reportedly owed $70,000 in unpaid medical bills and had recently been served with a lawsuit by a Georgia hospital. On the Constellation Records homepage, Jem Cohen, a filmmaker and producer of Chesnutt’s North Star Deserter vented his spleen at the United States’ “broken health care system depriving so many of the help they need to stay around and stay sane, and a society that never balks at providing more money for more wars but fights tooth and nail against decent care for its citizens. Vic’s death, just so you all know, did not come at the end of some cliché downward spiral. He was battling deep depression but also at the peak of his powers, and with the help of friends and family he was in the middle of a desperate search for help. The system failed to provide it.”
Although I hadn’t kept up with his latest albums, I’ve been a fan of Vic’s since the 90s, and was lucky enough to meet him once backstage after a show at Joe’s Pub in the City. He was very kind and charming, with a calm demeanor offset by intensely bright eyes. Those eyes lent a haunting glow to the dark oscillations (to paraphrase one of his lyrics) Chesnutt channeled through his poetic lyrics and evocative, nylon string guitar strumming. The show at Joe’s Pub had been a mix of new and old songs, including a selection from West of Rome, which had just been remastered and re-released. I’d discovered that album in college, and consider it a masterpiece of artistic vision and spiritual disasters. Despite it’s title the album was a definitive product of the Southeast United States—“smoked and honey-cured” gothic indie rock—you could hear it in Vic’s twang and picture it through the descriptions of dusty settings described in the songs. I’d go somewhere else when I listened to the album—somewhere in between my books and notebooks filled with my scraggly attempts to sound like the great writers I read in my literature classes—a place at an undefined clearing up ahead where I was brave and free enough to represent my own style of writing just like Vic represented own style of rock n’ roll.
The following is a blog post from the beginning of the end of the first version of this blog, in which the narrator, long since outed as playing all three characters at once, attempts to invoke the fictional threesome to allay her own impending sense of doom—imagining a scene in which a similarly depressed TRUE describes her feelings of loneliness and loss by invoking the the art of Vic Chesnutt:
04.15.2007
Become Famous 4 Me
I need the characters…the Magick 3. I need to call upon them again. TRUE, Sterling and Fitz. For the best time and also for the last time. I need them to help me get this right. I need to parcel out just the right words using their eyes as measures. As I’m walking down the street I imagine them pulling up alongside me in a car with tinted windows and a secret symbol stenciled across the windshield in iridescent ink. There they’d be—a few years older but still light years ahead. They had the attitudes and the style, miles of style, so much style it was waaaasted…
***
TRUE and I listened to “Little”, by Vic Chesnutt. She was lying across the couch—sick—but nearly recovered from a nasty summer cold. I was supposed to be taking care of her. Meanwhile my stomach ache got worse by the second. I’m always harboring these crazy longings to have a chilled-out time with just the two of us, but when it finally happens I can’t pull it together.
She sang along to the music, sweetly mimicking Vic’s loopy Georgia drawl.
“’A cup a day to curb visibility…’”
She closed her eyes and shuddered.
“Tea time,” I announced, hating the shrill note in my voice.
I pushed off from Fitz’s prized easy chair and headed to the antiseptic kitchen. He was still in Chicago, picking up sad and skinny indie rockers. “Can’t get enough of those assymmetrical bangs,” he liked to say.
“Hey.”
TRUE’s hand suddenly shot out and grabbed my wrist. I jumped and stopped in my tracks.
“Sterling.”
I looked deep into her blue eyes. For once they weren’t glassy.
“What is it?”
“Have I taken it too far?”
I peered down at her hand. Her grip was tight.
“How do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Tell me.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but I liked the conspiratorial tone she was using. It made me feel a part of something.
“I think it’s art for art’s sake.”
“Really?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Oh, come on!”
“What?”
“You only fuck around like you know what I’m on about.”
“That’s right. What are you on about?”
“You haven’t got a clue, do you?’
“I might have half a clue.”
“Oh, yeah?” she shook my hand free. Her eyes grew heavy.
“Maybe you do, what the fuck.”
“You’ve got to rest. I’m going to make the tea.”
“Fine, fine,” she arched her back and collapsed with a sigh against the pillow. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her so tired.
“Just tell me one thing…”
“Yes?” I said.
“Are we still recording?”
***
(via supersonicelectronic)
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung thought that astrology was an intuitive projection of man’s collective unconscious—connecting his psychology to the stars at such a deep level that no causal link can be found:
It is indeed very difficult to explain the astrological phenomenon. I am not in the least disposed to an either-or explanation. I always say that with a psychological explanation there is only the alternative: either and or! This seems to me to be the case with astrology too. - C.G. Jung in a letter to Hans Bender, April 10, 1958, C.G. Jung Letters, Volume 2, 1951-1961, p. 428.
It was this analogous, acausal connection (“either and or”) that made Jung believe that societal changes could be influenced by astrology even in a world in which its study was marginalized. In the 1950s he predicted that humanity would begin a new era “when the spring-point enters Aquarius.” Jung was not specific about the date, but according to astrologers the fabled Age of Aquarius began during the early morning hours of this past Valentine’s Day. The fact that this major astrological event is occurring along with seismic shifts in the plate tectonics of world culture could be the meaningful coincidence—or synchronicity—that fuels a “magical” change in the world. This Age of Aquarius that we find ourselves in is a time of a major paradigm shift—not in the clean slate way that he thought it would be, but with the same dramatic implications for the collective psyche. The two pressing reasons for why we have to make a choice: we can either go with the ecstatic flow of extraordinary events or stubbornly hold on to the old reality and risk being pulled under by annihilating forces.
The global financial meltdown and the environmental crisis are evidence of a paradigm shift. We are living in a time in which new myths are being created. The stories bubble up to the surface from in between the seismic collisions of world culture—ecstatic “mega-ritual” events that take us out of our everyday understanding of the world—defying the language and the logic of average existence.
(via supersonicelectronic)
The freedom from this distinction was among Andy’s greatest gifts. Not knowing what is real and what is fake creates a sense of all-permeating, existential dread coupled with the hilarity of ultimate freedom: like being lost in an artistic funhouse. Nothing is what its seems and yet it is exactly as it was meant to be.
