Crossroads Dispatches

imagination, information, art, me! wants to be Free

In Spanish, there are two distinct words for free.

There's free as in liberated, or as in an empty seat that's not taken (libre), from Old French liberté "freedom." And then, free, as in no payment necessary, maybe as in gift (gratis), possibly from M. Latin gratuitas "gift," probably from L. gratuitus "free, freely given."

"Practical imagination may be more in line with having beautiful radiant things, but idle imagination is more in line with being beautiful radiant things. But Being, idleness,and productivity coming together these days." - Steven Suggs' comment on "in praise of idle imagination"

Yes! yes, I write back, and: "I sense that imagination needs FREE rein to be as goofy, outrageously unproductive, uncontrived, boundless as it wants to be. And miracles are actually as efficient, and natural, as it gets."

With the New Orleans Jazz Fest starting today, the Times-Picayune front-paged the article, "YouTubeFest" in the Living section. The article tells you how to catch some of the headliners' acts on YouTube. It's accompanied by the sidebar story "Surfer beware: YouTube is a copyright infringement minefield" (newsprint version headlined thus) warning of "guilty pleasure," as many of the posted concert clips are, "strictly defined, stolen."

"Whatever your naive beliefs about information wanting to be free, Murphy is not being a bad guy by doing so. [In contacting a Japanese TV network to ask them to contact YouTube to pull down a video he produced for said network]." - "Surfer beware: YouTube is a copyright infringement minefield", Times-Picayune, April 27, 2007 (sidebar story on pg 12-13)

I don't think that Murphy is doing anything wrong either. I'd love to see more original & indie content - not cut-and-paste, not television - myself.

Pleeez let's not tarnish words.

Naïve?

Etymology: 1654, from Fr. naïve, fem. of naïf, from O.Fr. naif "naive, natural, just born," from L. nativus "not artificial," also "native, rustic," lit. "born, innate, natural" (see native).

Naïve as in: "Spontaneous. Never Ordinary. Completely Genuine." Those are the title words to a Jazz Appreciation Month (April 2007) poster I saw once (maybe at the Alvar Public Library who knows) put out by the Smithsonian.

Naïve is an amazing way to  live...and free, as in liberty, and quite probably, free, as in gifts too. These words, concepts, dance well together.

I'm reminded of a beautiful passage in Dreams Underfoot, where the character Zinc, a seventeen-year-old performance artist/runaway squatting in a downtown building in a fictional city, is musing to himself, after an exchange with his visual artist friend Jilly:

"You didn't make art by capturing an image on paper, or canvas, or in stone. You didn't make it by writing down stories and poems. Music and dance came closest to what real art was - but only as long as you didn't try to record or film it. Musical notation was only so  much dead ink on paper. Choreography was planning, not art.

You could only make art by setting it free. Anything else was just a memory, no matter how you stored it. On film or paper, sculpted or recorded.

Everything that existed, existed in a captured state. Animate or inanimate, everything wanted to be free.

That's what the lights said; that was their secret. Wild lights in the night skies, and domesticated lights, right here on the street, they all told the same tale. It was so plain to see when you knew how to look. Didn't neon and streetlights yearn to be starlight?

To be free." - Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

images Star Bright by Art-; Stairway to Heaven by blue_fam; Dream Logic by MontanaRaven; all these Flickr photos found on this most breath-taking must-see spirally inspired collage, Spiral Gallery

in praise of idle imagination

"Everything in nature contains all the power of nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

That's Forbes.com Thought of the Day today. Quite remarkable, eh? Something to wonder... (Hint: that stuff ain't green strips of crinkly paper nor metal discs.)

Forbes.com? Well if truth be told when other twenty-something girls were reading Cosmopolitan and my cubemates read Byte, I was devouring Fortune. Later I switched to Fast Company and Industry Standard (and even Wired) as soon as those came into being. These days I don't read those either.

Found objects can be media and media can be found objects too; so I just happened to spot Forbes' 90th anniversary issue devoted to networks at a brand new newstand on Decatur Street manned by a brother and sister team.

So something about that Forbes anniversary issue brings me face-to-face with my guilt. These days I play (you might witness activity that resembles work), and I imagine (you might witness activity that resembles innovation).

"Oh, so you're a lightworker," one says.

"Aha, you're a starseed," another says.

Nope, believe it or not, the sun ain't a lightworker either. The sun simply shines. If I believed I was working, I'd quit. (I must cease justifying being. I Am. Period. What's to explain?)

Yet, yet, I want to defend imagination as being USEFUL. Oh, yes, I could write a treatise in defense of imagination. And part of me knows that would be imagination's death knell.

I happened to stumble into the WOMMA Conference. (I kid you not, "my life is science fiction", I did not know it was being held until the night when I run into Jory in the French Quarter.) There, Ron Key from Converseon is giving a talk on Second Life, karmic communication, cultural anthropology, the Second Life Liberation Army among other sundry and related topics. He talks of the backlash against commercial entities on Second Life: "In the context of the fantastic, their brands as they exist in the real world are boring, banal  and unimaginative."

Wow! That line would certainly be in my beginning paragraph...if I were writing a treatise defending imagination's utilitarian, practical purposes.

This imagination series has been tough on me. Inspiration, that I can do.

Imagination brings me the brink of what I'm comfortable discussing openly in society. My own imagination brings me to the brink, period. Unless it's imagination in the service of some utility, uh, it smacks of idleness. What's the purpose? What's the point? What's the bottom line?

Imagination feels more shamelessly wantonly childishly pleasurably ticklishly blatantly wildly

... than inspiration.

"If the Devil finds a Man idle, he'll set him at Work." - J. Kelly, Scottish Proverbs, 1721 (Although I fancy the Turks proverb better: "The devil tempts all other men, but that idle men tempt the devil." - Colton, Lacon, 1820.) (via The Phrase Finder)

B.C. Forbes' words echo on this network issue backpage ("Thoughts on the Business of Life") admonishing us not to let our opportunity slip, ending with this: "Opportunity can be spelt with four letters. These letters are not L-u-c-k. They are W-o-r-k."

I feel queasy counting the number of times phrases from the backpages (memorializing advice from their 1917 "Thoughts on the Business of Life") are bandied about like "well-directed labor", "habit of work", "rid one's self of a sense of discomfort...do something", "the foe is strong and desperate", "the reward of duty", "hit him first and hit him hard", "I saw there was opportunity...so I became interested in oil."

Oil, Mr. Rockerfeller? Four letters and they are not L-u-c-k, Mr. Forbes? Hmmm, could it maybe, just maybe, be

P-l-a-y?

"To me the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make." - Truman Capote

Luck, I think...hmmm, I recall the artist I met last Saturday. She likes to delve into shamanism, and she said some of the oldest shamanistic traditions are in China.

"The Chinese believe in three things," she tells me. "Luck." She pauses for effect. "Heaven. Earth."

I smile. Three things? They are collapsing into all one and the same.

In the Forbes issue, it also says:

One person tells me, "I look at my watch to see the time. I look at my Blackberry to get a sense of my life." - Sherry Turkle, "Can You Hear Me Now?", Forbes, May 7, 2007

"The Internet thus adapts to market principles. Hello, pop-up ads; farewell, open-source programming. The Internet idealists are doubtless benevolent creatures. So, perhaps, was the apatosaurus. Said Adam Smith, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - P.J. O'Rourke, "Adam Smith: Web Junkie", Forbes, May 7, 2007

Benevolence?! That's what drives open source? Oh, my, the Internet may surely be your undoing (as it was mine).

Conversation today (& nearly everyday):

"What do you do?"

"Whatever I want to do." (Try saying that guilt-free.)

"You must have savings."

Try again. I'm not a trust fund baby. Do we bake bread, brew beer or do what we do because we're ordered to by management, or The Market? Do we work in order to pay rent, put our kids through college, and other such "own interest"? Why do we do?

"There are different types of enlightenment, but one of the really important ones is just that: It's going from trying to seek enlightenment, where you are driven by a sense of deficiency, of valuelessness, of lack of fullness - to discovering that ever-present wholeness. Then there is that "enlightened duality," where even though you're aware of the great perfection, you are still driven, not out of lack but out of overflowing." - Ken Wilber, "Creative Friction: Community and the Utopian Impulse in a Post-Modern World", What is Enlightenment, April-June 2007

So, I'm done, really, truly, finally, being apologetic. Or guilty.

I don't need to defend imagination for its own sake. Or beauty for its own sake. Or being for its own sake. I'm so with Yeats:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. - William Butler Yeats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

Bonus: There's a lot more in that Networks issue. Mostly, actually, it's a good issue. Here's some great quotes:

"The Internet has taken place with startingly little planning... The most universal and indispensable network on the planet somehow burgeoned without so much as a board of directors, never mind a mergers-and-acquisitions department." - (from "Other Comments" section of compiled quotes in May 7, 2007 Forbes) James Gleick, New York Times Magazine

"Google is proud of its Ph.D.'s and its eigenvectors. So be it. But mathematics can take you only so far. At some point you need a more human touch - gut instinct or wild imagination." - Jimmy Wales, "Open-Door Policy", Forbes, May 7, 2007

p.s. Hanging out a lot at the Iron Rail Collective and picking up 'zines. Picked up a manifesto by Emma Goldman. "Goldman was taken aside at a dance by a young revolutionary and told it did not become an agitator to dance. Goldman wrote, "I insisted that our cause could not expect me to behave as a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."

The first few times I read Goldman's quote, I thought it read everybody's right to be beautiful, radiant things.

images Picasso's The Bathers reminds me of imagination ("Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."), and these bathers look devilishly idle; and also his Three Musicians and Three Dancers

planting Dreams in the garden of eden

"What a relief to understand finally that all those ideas are not directives," comments Eve, from SparkleLife, on the post "cheat sheet to inspiration."

"If you had any more great ideas about how to take your career to the next level, your head might explode. Write this stuff down because you're actually receiving information that can prove valid over the next several years." -  my horoscope this week by New Orleans astrologer D.K. Brainard

I don't think you need to be a fellow Gemini to relate. If you've wound up on this blog, you're a creator or innovator.

My head might just explode anyhow. Last night Tom Green, a local visual artist/musician that divides his time between New Orleans and Venice, Italy, asked me where did I see the world in ten years.

Those of the sorts of questions I already entertain without prompting, and imagine.

We're all going to have lots of amazing images and ideas pop up into our pretty heads. Don't let that paralyze you. Go ahead and play with them. You can just hold for 20 seconds in your mind's eye (leaning towards the Buddhist's language) or your soul's eye. Then trust that someone will see to fruition of that vision, although it may or may not be for you to follow through.

There is no idle imagination.

We're farmers of dreams. This is the time of year is the time we plant seeds. (Hmmm, I doubt it was any accident that the book I started last May ended up thick with the symbolism of the Garden and its fruits.)

In spite of all the farmer's work and worry,

he can't reach down to where the seed is slowly

transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

This Spring, hold one (or two or three) images without fluctuating, wavering, doubting. Have those be the images that ring the most beautiful, most daring, most true to the deepest vibration of You.

There is one particular song, In the Company of Angels, on the Songs of Magdalene CD by Tom Kenyon that I've listened to practically each day since I arrived in New Orleans in early March. Whenever that voice fills the room, invariably I will stop still. Sometimes I cry, sometimes I chant along alighted in the wings of the song, sometimes I drop down to the earth in devotional prostration, overwhelmed with the outpouring of love's vibration.

This is the sort of sublime ecstatic response you may expect the first time a dream that's meant to be embraced and tended to by you is heard.

p.s. When in doubt, remember the first line to my last post....

"In this time there is only that which is heart speaking. When heart speaks, you speak. When heart is silent, you are silent." - Michele Mayama, A Choice for Love

images Sunflower field photo from SunflowerProject.org; Van Gogh's Two Cut Sunflowers - all inspired by the planting theme and spotting perfect sunflowers last night on the plot of Small Axe Farms community garden in the Marigny neighborhood of Nola

eYeing the image in imagination

friend via GoogleTalk: look around you and describe something beautiful for me please!

me: the woman sitting next to me, tulane student; paintings with blue sworls and red sprites; antique black fan florling

If you are not witnessing to the magic and beauty of the world as it is now, you most likely will not be able to mentally image (imagine) its magical, beautiful spiraling evolution within your soul’s eye either.

Imaging is the crux of imagination. Look!

and See!

"...the nagual which is in everything manifested itself only to the eye of the sorcerer. It was appropriate, therefore, for a sorcerer [we're all sorcerers these days] to say that "looking" consisted in viewing the tonal [the visible, matter, form] which is in everything, and "seeing," on the other hand, consisted in viewing the nagual [the invisible, spirit, formless] which also is in everything." - Carlos Castaneda, The Second Ring of Power

imagine (etymology) 1340, "to form a mental image of," from O.Fr. imaginer, from L. imaginari "to form a mental picture to oneself, imagine"

image (etymology) Meaning "reflection in a mirror" is c.1315.

Last Wednesday I decide where to eat (Bywater BBQ) based on the odds of night blooming jasmine drifting a smattering of five petaled stars onto my gumbo or salad or macaroni and cheese in the courtyard. All because when I walk I am entranced by the jasmine draped on the Blessed Francis X. Seelos Parish Catholic Church wall.

Isn’t the smell divine?, the woman halts in the middle of Dauphine Street, her SUV full of passengers, and awakens me out of my reverie. Amazing, I concur. Amazing indeed.

The church bell tower frames the burning bush in the sky. I must sit down, right here, right where I stand on these grey porch steps and absorb the incandescent sunset.

The miracle is not to fly in the air,
or to walk on the water,
but to walk on the earth.
- Chinese Proverb (thanks Ruby)

Later, after dinner, in the restroom, I notice the Wild Thing Jazz 2002 print reads:

Merrily merrily shall I live now
Under the blossoms that hangs on the bough. - William Shakespeare, Tempest

Eleven minutes earlier, I'd attained surety on my longstanding hypothesis that William Shakespeare was entirely lucidly Awake in this dream of us (All the world's a stage...) as I re-read Puck's final lines (Midsummer Night's Dream) in my new book, Dreams Underfoot.

On my saunter home, I am seeing with my soul's eye. I spot the abandoned Holy Trinity church with the stone Virgin's outstretched palms greeting the expanse of weeds. Sometime hence...Now. Mary's in a garden. The walls whitewashed. The bells ringing. The heart opens.

Wherever I walk, boom, the future blooms before me. This house, this street, this neighborhood bar, this train whistle like a harmonica note held long and steady....

It is like seeing treeness in the seed.

Between the Kaboom bookstore (I adopt "The Star Rover", Jack London; "Dreams Underfoot", Charles de Lint) and the praline shoppe, I look up to see a Blimp fly over the Mississippi, & it blurts:

Put the IF in life. Imaging isn't a brainstorming jam. Not a rambling running tumbling list of what-IFs.

It's clear seeing what is.

My wise friend Ruby reminds, "everything has ALREADY been created, it's up to us to see  it.......but not with our  body's eyes....with our soul's eyes. Everything is already here Now."

"Fortune-telling doesn't reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so you can get a good look at it." - Jilly in Dreams Underfoot, by Charles de Lint

I am in such a good mood I decide to visit The House (to be an everyday artistry center and art colony with a circulating roster of artists-in-residence and communal suppers &) in my soul's eye. There are people on the porch this evening.

We talk, hours. Edmund, Karo ("Cairo, Egypt?" "Nice to me you, Egypt." "No I mean as in Cairo city?" "Karo as in viscous dark sweet syrup"), Josh, Ruby (another), Donovan, Gwen, me.

The house's unfoldment dawns upon me. The image eye's me.

Walking home, I am falling into the sense for the first time of the 'destiny' of New Orleans. It's fine. Absolutely fine. Some may languish in limbo, not entirely sure whether to rebuild, reinvest in a seemingly ephemeral city that nature and time could render into oblivion. With more than half a million in real estate dollars at stake myself, I can appreciate their doubts.

"It's time to bring it back," I think. I spot a sandy-desert MP humvee by the corner grocery store. This has got to be the only city  that you can see that, a train, a riverboat, a clown on a three-story bicycle - or maybe that was a three-story unicorn - and not even bat an eye.

Another voice, clearer, the deva of the city perhaps, corrects: "Naw, it's time to bring me forward."

"As Erich Fromm observed, the artist has become a specialized profession in Western civilization. "We have no word," he points out, for the art of ritual, or folk dance, or community singing, "because art in a wide and general sense, as a part of everybody's life, has lost its place in our world." Zen poet Kenji Miyazawa, who laments the professionalizing of the title "artist," defines the artist as "one who is free to let his or her inner mind speak to him or her." Releasing the "inner mind" is what this new art will do." - Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ

Bonus: What do I mean by everyday artistry? A start...

Otto Rank prophesied that a new era of deep political, economic, and religious change demands the evolution of the soul. Everyday artistry is not art as production, Rank continues. Rank said a global renaissance requires that one pours creative expression towards our own rebirth first: thus it requires one "remould the self-creative type and will be able to put his creative impulse directly in the service of his own personality [hmmm, rather than personality, I'd say unique expression of Self, or soul]."

"They include the art of friendship, the art of making beauty where we dwell, the art of conversation, of massage, of laughter, of preparing food, of hospitality, of the sharing of ideas, of growing food and flowers, of singing songs, of making love, of telling stories, of uniting generations, of putting on skits, of satirizing human folly. The personal arts incluude the arts of listening and of healing, of enjoying oneself with others in simple ways; the art of creating our lifestyles and our communities; the art of conviviality; the art of parenting and of forgiving." - Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ

images Purdue University bell tower by Dave Umberger; Dayton, WY bell tower; the newly discovered Red Square nebula "one of the most beautiful objects in the universe" (hmmm, I agree it's a red cube) via David Wilcock's amazing site

p.s. Y is and in Spanish

heart warriors can't Leap a chasm in two jumps

"In this time there is only that which is heart speaking. When heart speaks, you speak. When heart is silent, you are silent." - Michele Mayama, A Choice for Love

My writing, and my life, tend to be uneven (that's a politically correct way to say "off", or, frankly, "shit") when I don't come fully from my heart. Whenever I slip into a sense of duty and helpfulness (no matter how noble), I truly slip.

Hopefully this may be the last helpful, dutiful post I write for a long long time ;-)

"The Master has given up helping because she knows that there is no one to help. And since she loves and understands her own nature, she realizes that in every action she is serving herself and sitting at her own feet. So there is nothing she gives that she doesn't receive in the same motion, as the same internal experience. Even when she appears not to give, that is what she is giving. The Master is the woman who dented your car, the man who stepped in front of you on line at the supermarket, the old friend who accused you of being selfish and unkind. Do you love the Master yet? There's no peace until you do. This is your work, the only work, the work of the Master.” - Byron Katie, A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things

I know warriors speak of duty and honor. And, yes, this is a time of warriors. I'd been feeling warrior-like way before I saw 300. Before I was further inspired by anarchists, underground artists, gutterpunk gypsies, indigo children this spring. It goes back further still than my invocation of the raw power of Lilith. Before sensing that the time had come to be completely fearless.

It is the time of the ruthless warrior. The time of pure power and impeccability. 

Today's warrior totally trusts joy and freedom as their compass, not duty. Duty dulls the impulse of that which would totally transmute, transform the soul to act with sheer beauty, grace, harmony, enchantment, magic, boundlessness.

Or, as Dante in Purgatorio puts it, "beauty awakens the soul to act."

It may take the rigors of the field to get the hang of following joy and beauty.

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true." - Michael Faraday

"A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song." - Renee Locks, as seen on a Brushdance card

Warriors don't go it alone - even Leonidas had enough sense to gather his most impassioned, most committed comrades. So this isn't the time of the lone wolf.

I have at least one friend (I believe more) that are teaching me, consciously or not, by ignoring any email messages whatsoever that I send that don't come from an undefended heart. When I drop into the heart - and it's no trick - they reply nearly immediately.

So whom you select as your fellow warriors is also of utmost importance. My horoscope this week reminds me of this: ""The people you include in your inner circle are either helping you evolve into ever greater happiness, connectedness and light, or they are hindering you. A warrior knows which is the case and makes appropriate choices."

Too many interpret warrior as one who fights, one who resists. I like this definition better:

“The bravest warrior with the sharpest sword is the one who can cut away all that impedes her/him from unconditional love.” - Juliet Carter

I'm taking a ten-minute play writing class in New Orleans. Over and over the timing forces us to distill and get to the heart of the matter quickly. Ten minutes, and the curtain goes down promptly whether your mouth is hanging open mid-sentence or not.

So we zero in: What does the character want? And we make sure the stakes are high.

Sometimes we go about life as if nothing in the moment at hand matters all that much one way or the other. We go around assuming that the stakes are low. We're not so sure what it is anyhow we deeply want, or care about. We don't know what plopped us here on planet Earth and why we wake up when the alarm sounds or the morning dove coo-coo-coos each morning. One day, perhaps most likely, in the silence that sweeps away the coarse sand like a dragon wind and leaves one with a naked heart, you will know without a doubt that nothing is insignificant, & everything sacred.

It's not only duty and obligation that slips me up. Whenever I slip into any sense of timidity and self-consciousness, I absolutely slip. This proverb comes to mind: You can't leap across a chasm in two jumps.

There is this image that haunts me from time to time of an idyllic lake with kids playing and enjoying themselves. There they are. There the lake is. The placid sky blue lake ringed by the quintessential meadow, glinting sapphires in the sunshine.

Once, I told a boyfriend I saw him standing at the edge of that lake. Watching, and waiting right at the very edge of the shore. Mulling over whether to dive in, or not. Perhaps drawing up a spreadsheet of pros and cons for and against the decision. Lost in hesitation.

And so it was that I broke up with him. And I realized this image was about him, and it was also about me.

At some point, there is an act of commitment. At the edge of an inviting shimmering lake, one dives.

The soul within our individual souls
loves the one who runs and falls down
more than the one who sits and watches.
The soul within soul lives in a lover.
If you want to know God, enjoy the company of lovers.

- Rumi, from The Soul of Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

I'm inspired by the young adults I've had the privilege to meet. Here's just a few of the shooting stars I've encountered: L., who floated down the Mississippi in a raft until he reached New Orleans. He's experimenting in Self and reliance. He only carries a twenty dollar bill for emergencies, which hasn't yet happened in over six months. Then H., the installation artist who teaching his Mom through example how to be radical (radical, as in returning to the Root) and really let go. "We climbed the wall ladder up to the levee. (That's illegal.) Then, later, the police came out to the house because the neighbors complained about the diesel engines and the buckets of acrylic paint in the yard (part of an art project), and she was okay living in the house with the fifteen of us [artists]."

Youth are some of the most stalwart warriors in this day and age. I can tell by the clearness and depth of their eyes...the eyes are definitely the windows to the soul. They are truly the elders. They still play. They dive.

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." - Eleanor Roosevelt

p.s. Earlier this year, my horoscope read thus. I think this is true for all: "I brewed a cup of Yogi Tea while I was writing your horoscope. The little fortune attached to this tea bag reads: "Know that whatever you are doing is the most beautiful thing.""

I discovered astrologer D.K. Brainard in the brass chalice tip jar at Caffea (the cafe that is a second home from home, 3218 Dauphine Street, New Orleans, LA). D.K.'s weekly horoscope print-out is tucked in between menus and crumpled bills. I'm not one for "it's written in the stars" (feel closer to it's written in your Heart), but D.K.'s horoscopes hit the mark consistently. When you can read any week, for any sign, and it's all good applicable sage advice, well you can't go wrong.

Bonus: What about our responsibility? My horoscope earlier this year: "I saw a promo for the FOX News Channel on the airplane this week. It ran: "News doesn't stop. Breaking stories never wait. America needs news." Substitute the word FEAR for news and breaking stories in the above paragraph and you have the mind-control recipe that corporate America is using to make us sick, weak, docile and neurotic. Why do I mention this to you, Gemini? Because Geminis alive at this time carry the responsibility and potential to reshape how we communicate as a species."

Yikes!

In recent comment I wrote how sometimes the overwhelming burden of responsibility paralyzes me: "I realized that I've been in this depression/funk (resistance) ever since I read a teacher's remarks about responsibility around Easter.

I suppose I imagined enlightenment as blissed out leisure. However, the word responsibility can be seen as response-ability. Things actually do not feel daunting when I respond to each moment, and each moment one at a time. Amazingly, I accomplish some near-impossible things when I simply cooperate one moment at a time."

images Night Angel, Tree of Life by Durwaigh (plus other otherwordly, enchanting cards, prints, etc); The Poet Anacreon with his Muses, 1890, by Norbert Schroedl; dolphin diving in Sacred Soul, and Secrets of the Shell, by Michele Gold

my life is science fiction, or what a quaint old notion: the digital age

"Our guests today are a group of American artists from the Manual Age," starts the Tom Wolfe's essay on the Digital Age. The world's premeire illustrators of the 20th century from the Pushpin Studio are the esteemed guests for the current exhibit.

(Oh, shant be too long before we introduce guests from the Digital Age.)

The scene: Wolfe says is "the Suntory Museum, Osaka, Japan, in an auditorium so postmodern it made your teeth vibrate. In the audience were hundreds of Japanese art students."

The time: Since book published in 2000, based on the pace of the publishing world march, guesstimates it as penned in 1998. So too judging by the breathless infatuation of the Internet, and of the digibabble (Wolfe's term). Yup, methinks it's got to be gulping-kool-aid 1998. In another essay Wolfe says of Silicon Valley: "some sort of light shines still" - 1998, for sure. (In Rudy Rucker's sci-fi novel, Realware, Silicon Valley is a Rust Belt and SF is the happening scene.)

"...I wish I had known Japanese and could have talked to all those students as they scrutinized the primeval spectacle before them. They were children of the dawn of - need one spell it out? - the Digital Age. Manual, "freehand" illustrations? How brave of those old men to have perserved, having so little to work with. Here and now in the Digital Age illustrators used - what else? - the digital computer. Creating images from scratch? What a quaint old term, "from scratch," and what a quaint old notion... In the Digital Age, illustrators "morphed" existing pictures into altered forms on the digital screen. The very concept of postmodernity was based on the universal use of the digital computer... whether one was morphing illustrations or synthesizing music or sending rocket probes into space or achieving, on the Internet, instanteous communication and information retrieval among people all over the globe. The world had shrunk, shrink-wrapped in an electronic membrane. No person on earth was more than six mouse clicks away from any other. The Digital Age was fast rendering national boundaries and city limits and other old geographical notions obsolete. Likewise, regional markets, labor pools, and industries. The world was now unified... online. There remained only one "region," and its name was the Digital Universe." - Tom Wolfe, "Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill", Hooking Up

In 1995, people peered at me (I was living in Salt Lake City) as if I were a Venusian when I said every business would one day have a website. I'd been using email since the late 80s, and thoroughly addicted to listservs and Internet by the early 90s, switching from the virtual reality industry to the Internet industry circa 1994.

The second Internet company I worked for IPO'ed on May 22, 1996.

Per Henry Adams predictions, the 17-year Electrical Phase (aka Digital Age) is about up. In many ways, cyberspace is a smooth leap to hyperspace (hyperspace being my preferred term for Adam's Ethereal Phase).

For instance, I hear rumors that Google will be beginning its own metaverse to compete with Second Life.

Second Life's tagline? Your World. Your Imagination.

Your World. Your imagination. Sit with that a long while.

The Ethereal Age has already begun for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Henry Adams envisioned that the Ethereal Phase would "bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities." Expect the unexpected (and I'm not talking about any alternate virtual reality world).

I suppose I write this post by way of introduction, by way of warning, that the leap into imagination will most decidedly be trippy (no psychedelics required). And that trippy will be the way of things for the next few years at least.

Welcome aboard the rollercoaster. You must be willing to be daring & looney to the point of frisson. (Synonyms: shiver, chill, quiver, shudder, thrill, tingle). Yes, a rollercoaster can be exhilarating.

"The children who swallow the star are the poets - like Yeats or Tolkien - who become wanderers between two worlds." - Colin Wilson

Things slowly started getting a heck of a lot weirder for me last year when a book started writing me on May 2. Weird to the point that this sentence makes 100% absolute sense: "My life is science fiction," Terence McKenna assures me.

For forty days straight I wrote about what was vividly occuring within my life, and within my mind. 'Reality', fantasies and flashbacks were all weaved into the unfolding story.

This experience crystallized for me in an unshakeable, visceral, kinetic way that what was going on inside my mind is as tangibly real as what is going on 'out there'.(Hmmm, one day they may start to inextricably blend together.)

I'd tiptoe down the stairs each morning at dawn and open the sliding glass doors to the garden (the sheer spoken word 'garden' transformed the backyard into something much more magically imbued with numinosity) as the earl grey tea with bergamot was seeping and the bread was toasting.

In the beginning, the fantasies that wove into my mind were quite innocent, near normal. They encountered the everyday nature that was on display that beatific May: perhaps I'd see animals and goddesses lounging in the morning clouds and faeries exploring the morning glories climbing the fence.

Nearly simultaneously I'd begun a new romantic relationship with a dear old friend, and sometimes the fantasies would slip into the erotic (in my mind, the beloved and Beloved are fluid). And the erotic spoke of innocence too.

Each day the writing of its own volition started to challenge the conventions of the black-and-white mundane and fantastical categories (not too mention innocent and erotic). Hanging the laundry outdoors one day, I recalled Jack Kornfield's title "After the Ecstasy, the Laundry and immediately the idea popped in, Oh yeah? Hmmph! Laundry can too be ecstastic!!)

Over time fantasies and waking dreams would visit me during the day, not sit patient for dawn and dusk writing time. Symbols in the real world unsheathed their cloaks. It was later I'd learn via the 21st delphic oracle that many of these dreams and symbols were quite ancient and legendary and mythic.

Although well-read because of my insatiable curiousity, the actual fact is my education doesn't have much breadth (alas, engineering school does that to you).  So I had no way of knowing apriori that the things I was independently imagining weren't new at all but dwelt in the universal archetypal Well.

Weirder stuff happened still. And I only mean weird in the sense that if you have a certain fixation of what reality is and how reality should operate and what perception is.

By the time I got to day 40, I was all too ready to set the pen down. Too wild an adventure, even for me. I don't feel that way any longer, yet I forceably turned my back on imagination for months and months afterward.

Though, if you have a shaman's soul, well, it's only a matter of time before it feels familiar.(You can only turn away for so long. She's a charmer, she is.

And gifts aren't meant to be kept. Gifts are meant to be given.)

Near day 40, the wedding at Cana kept arising in my consciousness. (I actually knew little about Biblical stories, well, that was so before I started the book. It's embued with rich Biblical symbology despite my horror and protestations.)

Purportedly, at the wedding feast, Jesus performed his first so-called miracle. (Miracles are simply weird things that happen. And then we get used to weird.)

If you don't know the story, when the hosts were out of wine, Mary turned to Jesus for help. Here's one version that is a perfect telling.

"And Jesus said, Pray what is wine? It is but water with the flavouring of grapes.

And what are grapes? They are but certain kinds of thought made manifest, and I can manifest that thought, and water will be wine.

He called the servants, and he said to them, Bring in six water pots of stone, a pot for each of these, my followers, and fill them up with water to the brims.

The servants brought the water pots, and filled them to their brims.

And Jesus with a mighty thought stirred up the ethers till they reached the manifest, and, lo, the water blushed, and turned to wine." - Chapter 70, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, by Levi H. Dowling (entire text available online), I stumble onto this book at a used bookstore the day before Easter this month

images various mandalas from U of Maryland Experimental Geometry Lab; Flower of Life from Lightsource (myriad of products geared around sacred geometry: "all of creation is moving light"); and the Mandala Hotel

Bonus: The Henry Adams snippet:

"He envisioned a 90,000 year Religious Phase (what we might today call the Age of Modern Humans, Jared Diamond's "Great Leap Forward" of complex linguistic and cultural innovation which began circa 100,000 years ago in Africa, and led to the behaviorally modern Cro-Magnon invasion of Europe 40,000 years ago), followed by a 300 year Mechanical Phase (e.g., Industrial Information and Computer Ages), followed by a 17 year Electrical Phase (e.g., the Symbiotic Age), followed by a 4 year Ethereal Phase (e.g., Autonomy Age), which would subsequently "bring Thought [from the human perspective] to the limit of its possibilities." Given the difficulty of timing the start of each phase, he suggested that the asymptote (the phase change singularity) might occur anywhere between 1921 and 2025." - from A Brief History of the Intellectual Discussion of Accelerating Change, AccelerationWatch.com

trust all bottoming out, all emptying

"Every creative individual owes all that is greatest in his life to fantasy. The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child...Without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth." - Carl Jung

On this day of year when Earth is closest to the moon, should you glimpse the midnight sky you'd see dark.

Only moon in pure potentia.

Nuit. Not even a sliver to hint.

"Moon-silver beauty;

Soft song bringing ancient tears

To the elven-lords."

- Lúthien Tinúviel (a character from Tolkien's The Simarillian. Tolkien had invented three or four languages by age ten. The name Lúthien appears to mean "enchantress" in a Beleriandic dialect of Sindarin... Tinúviel...literally means dusk-singer, which signifies "Nightingale".)

We may begin however to imagine the moon's gradual return (and did she really go anywhere? Can you see the invisible?). So today I shall begin a 22 day series devoted to imagination and the ethereal age.

I get a phone call yesterday from Liz who works for a PAC. We'd once had a lovely conversation about the Italian Renaissance months ago.

"Do you know what preceded the Renaissance? (Pause).

"The dark ages."

[Though middle ages is somehow preferred as dark "is no longer used by academic historians, who reject the pejorative meaning of the phrase." Hmmm, hints of Jungian shadow perhaps; so, why is dark pejorative?]

"Who would dare to speak of a renaissance in our times? Is it a bourgeois dream of an armchair theologian, a romantic cop-out from an academian? Who in their right mind would look at the suffering in today's world and suggest that the human race is, in fact, on the verge of a vast, global renaissance? I suppose it is the mystic in me that dares to suggest such a vision. And why? Because the mystic teaches us to trust all bottoming out, all emptying, all nothingness experiences as the matrix and patrix of new birth. It is precisely the despair of our times that convinces me that a renaissance is right around the corner, that a renaissance is the only answer to the depths of our dilemma. It is either renaissance or planetary extinction. There is no middle ground." - Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ

Only one time here in New Orleans was I actually honest when an artist asked me what my medium was.

"The ether. I work with thoughtform. The imaginal, archetypal and the symbolic realms."

Remarkably, they didn't think I was weird. Remarkably, I didn't think I was weird.

Some manna for Day One:

Evil, that is, has every advantage but one - it is inferior in imagination. - W.H. Auden

"The thing that characterized my life is I have always been extraordinarily obsessive about a certain kind of iridescence, a certain quality that can haunt matter, or people, or a painting. My first obsession was minerals. I went from minerals to butterflys, and from butterflys to science fiction, which I definitely consider a psychedelic drug because it empowers the imagination." - Terence McKenna, from interview "Omega Man: A Profile of Terence McKenna"

...certain people are dreamers and visionaries...they embody values that the community cannot afford to forget. - Colin Wilson, on J.R.R. Tolkien's belief

Bonus: Noting that I tend to self-censor myself on this blog, and be closer to my authentic lunatic fringe self in 1-1 emails. I'm inclined to share a snippet from a personal email that relates to bottoming out, the emptying out, the cleansing, the spiritual winter, the dark moon, the tossing out of old wineskins that precedes rebirth, any true renaissance, This springtime:

i don't understand money & ownership and possession anymore
just friends kindred spirits and gifts and creating and freedom and art and the end of world as we know it

myself been a roving minstrel - gypsy -priestess - and lots more in past lives

this life too been its own wander
rode the whole dot-com wave down & lose my ass and my tidy world
20/20 hindsight best thing to happen tho - that wake call
then the tsunami - thought perhaps that was connection between us -
disaster & apocalypse - rebirth - renaissance

saw your ABCXYZ site [I've edited out URL]
no surprise we are on same wavelength - start a new sort of art colony

my vision reallllllllly close to yours too
tho was anchored in this 3D world which is coming apart
something new being born so evolving it - with brand new world
& you get it
i know you know

everything that doesn't fit the new 5D world is being wretched from us
like a fierce grace
the danger only comes when we cling to the wreckage of the decay and dying

before the Great Flood

before Noah the weather was a pure hazy mist &
there was no division of rain and sunshine

only when the condensation led to the flood and the great flood spread
itself on earth could the rainbow come into being physically

and humanity saw the first rainbow

Extra credit: Pay attention to iridescence: a radiance, glowing in people, places, things.

images Marylou Falstreau's New Beginnings and New Moon Rising and Falling

the future was postponed so long that now the breaking of the longjam is going to look like Apocalyse

"Eternity is in love with the creations of time....[all of them.]" - William Blake

Totally forgot about Web 2.0 Expo until I got a note from Tara, then another from Brian. Ooops! Had every intention of going when I heard about it last year. One of those must attend events, I muttered to myself. (Well I guess not, seeing as reality has me in New Orleans.)

I am less interested in cyberspace these days than I am hyperspace.*

"Apparently McLuhan was right. It's technology that shapes culture more than anything else. The politics, the art, all this is derivative of what technologies are in place." - Terence McKenna

And what are the technologies of hyperspace?, I wonder. (I'm certainly not the first to ponder.)

Mathematics is one. Imagination another. (Ay, there are more...) Though I think both the beauty of mathematics and the imaginal have been languishing far too long in a dark age:

"Grown-ups like numbers. When you tell them about a new friend, they never ask questions about what really matters. They never ask: 'What does his voice sound like?' 'What games does he like best?' 'Does he collect butterflies?' They ask: 'How old is he?' 'How many brothers does he have?' 'How much does he weigh?' 'How much money does his father make?' Only then do they think they know him.

If you tell grown-ups, 'I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof,' they won't be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, 'I saw a house worth a hundred thousand dollars.' Then they exclaim, 'What a pretty house!' That's the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups."  - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

To get you in groove of hyperspace, I'll introduce Terence McKenna chatting about his novelty theory which I recommend brushing up on (the referenced inteview with McKenna is a good start). The future McKenna speaks of may go into hyperdrive in 2012, yet it's happening, happens, happened right Now:

"I'm kind of inclined to the hard positions, I mean, why not, you know? And what a hard position is is not that this is a social transformation, not that this is a political dispensation, but that in fact it's a crisis in physics itself. And that we didn't cause it and we're not responsible for it. We're just being pulled along by something on the scale of an earthquake. And that it affects physical law...

[T]hey [the Singularists] take all these engineering curves--curves of energy release, curves of speed, curves of population, curves of information densification--and reach exactly the same conclusion, that some time between 2010 and 2020, life becomes unrecognizable...

And the trick, I mean, the motivation for my career, why I do this rather than stay home in Hawaii where it's very pleasant, is I think a lot of people are anxious. This causes anxiety, all this. It needn't. It isn't a bad thing. It's scary because the future was postponed for so long that now the breaking of the logjam is going to look like Armageddon. But it isn't Armageddon. [I prefer Apocalyse myself; the etymology of apocalyse meaning Revelation; hmmm, Illumination.] What lies beyond all this I think, is the first authentic human civilization. These are the pre-pre- times. You know Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western Civilization and he said "It sounds like a veddy good idea." So, that's my idea of how the future will look back at this scene." - Terence McKenna in interview, "CYBERDELIC: Hootenanny talks with Terence McKenna" (my best guess is this is a 1998 or 1999 interview)

images from Khunrath’s “Amphitheatrum sapientiae” (1604) and is reproduced as figure 145 in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy,  p. 291 (via paper, "Spiritual Alchemy: Interpreting Representative Texts and Images" by Karen-Claire Voss); wow wow wow, check out how beautiful math is at this blog, Not Quite Perfect, this Spiral Wave is one of tons

p.s. * One def of hyperspace: Multidimensional space beyond the three dimensions that we can easily represent. Another twist: N-dimensional space (hyperspace): Extension of regular three-dimensional space to n-dimensions, reflecting more complex multivariable situations. Hyper- indicates higher dimensional space than 3-d, e.g. hyperplane.

the creator's dilemma: be careful what you wish for, lest it come true

The other day I was walking home late, probably from Frenchman Street, and I noticed a bumper sticker on a car:

E A R T H

The letters A R T in bold red center in otherwise black lettering.

I got it.

The friend I reference in my last post has been like my own mirror.

Fate as our excuse? What hogwash. We both have tasted enough of the omnipotence of Life to know "be careful what you wish for, lest it come true." That's why we stall.

We sense the truth of Goethe's words:

"Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too."

And so I stall. Resistance reigns.

Now do I truly really absolutely clearly undoubtably desire that 1880s Victorian on Dauphine Street for a renaissance center and artists collective? Wouldn't that cramp my skipping and traipsing pursuit of novelty? Too much of an anchor... donchathink? Don't I just hate being a magnet of attention because it intrudes on my "space"? Isn't the Louisiana summer the worst possible timing to start this thing? What on earth is possessing you?

Doubts stampede me this past week because I absolutely know that the second that I commit, the Yes seals it as a done deal.

Doesn't matter that the future has engulfed my periphery already. That I've envisioned the costumed plays in the performance space. That I've smelled G.'s gumbo and collard greens cooking as the guests sit around - local and visiting artists of all ages from 5 to 95 - for communal dinners. That I've named a couple of the rooms. That I know the house choose me, and not the other way around. (I'd been thinking about an arts colony and teahouse for a long, long time, though I thought it might be that Victorian in Los Gatos, but nope, it's here in New Orleans.)

Oh, I can believe I can drag my feet a bit longer before the inevitability of it all whisks me over the threshold to life.

"One day in winter, Saint Francis of Assisi was practicing mindful walking and he came upon an almond tree. He stopped before the tree, breathed, and prayed. "Almond tree, tell me about God." And then, quite naturally the almond tree blossomed into flower, even in the biting cold of winter." - Thich Nhat Hanh, The Energy of Prayer

Whenever I read that passage, I cry.

images Jia Lu's In Thought

Bonus: In the words of Paul Saffo, my opinions are strong, yet lightly held. This is what I'm musing around free will and fate circa April 16, 2007 or so. Tomorrow is another day:

It feels like there is Life's will, and that's that oft times. Maybe like I am a branch on a tree, and to choose not to participate in the tree is choosing my own death. That is a free will choice. And to partipate means I cooperate with this Tree of Life, and I do get to choose how this branch grows in its unique expression, maybe I will be curly, or blue, or glittery or taste like ginger or wind-whisper of almond scents.

Anyhow, 'free will' feels like we get the choice of rejecting, resisting, repressing, refusing Life and its myriad of expressions should we chose No. And a Yes is the expression of the Life that flows through the branches and roots and every fiber of the Tree. Whether "I" (an entity that identifies as Evelyn) consciously choses the expresion, ah, it hardly feels like it anymore. Whatever "I" is identifies less as the branch and more as the Tree.

Anthony de Mello said that enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable. I see that as the inevitability of life itself.

(Far, far too long on this planet have we chosen against life.)

Bonus 2: My friend Mo showed me this video (below) last night from online music station StimTV Music. This interview with Australian indie rocker Ben Lee echoes so much of our own philosophy. He just got up and started his band the day after he heard Nirvana play.

"Punk isn't about anger. It's about empowerment." When he plays he says he likes to enter "empty", with no expectations, and let the Universe through.

welcome to earth. it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”" - Echdine quotes from Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (via Alas a Blog)

We don't come with a lot of operating instructions, or do we? Little questions, little  decisions, like, should I post for catharsis - mine, yours?, can wreak havoc with the tattered reliability of our confusion quilt. 

"catharsis (or cathartic effect) - the idea originated with the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who believed that the experience of watching tragedy is cathartic, i.e. it purges the spectator of certain strong emotions." - Mass media effects glossary

Then there are the biggies like do we have free will? Is there anything to fate and destiny? Is it all written in the stars? Don't expect me to answer these for you.

(I don't have more time on my hands than you do. And these are not idle questions on a blog for creators and innovators.)

I search my Google mail for "fate" and first find:

"There is NO FATE, we are the creators." (Thanks Peter.)

Not what I was looking for. Or so I think...Have I mentioned that I consider Google my 21st century Delphic oracle? So absolutely must have been what I was seeking.

I thought I was trying to find another note from a friend that left me pondering how one of the most powerful seers and creators that have crossed my path in ages is hobbled by second-hand beliefs.

Purge everything you have ever learned, throw away any manuals they gave you, and ask more open-ended questions. If you're curious and earnest, you will get real answers and then yet another layer of questions. Question everything, especially what I write.

I have to leave out the details, but this gives you a sense of the opening and ending of the email I thought I was Googling for:

fate turned on me...

everything I built, i couldn't even see depart

I'm one of those friends that won't give you pity. Since I couldn't physically shake my friend to their senses, part of what I wrote back was:

do you believe in fate?

the end of the world i'm sensing is actually the end of fate & destiny
& cause and effect of such
thank god
& that means literally that we can create whatever we dare to -
completely unbounded

i don't know what "everything you built" is
but i suspect that you won't need it
the people that thrive in the new world are those that are
in love with creating from a blank page, blank canvas, blank slate

Sometimes it feels rather pointless for me to speak and write of inspiration and imagination and creativity and creations if we're still at the mercy and whim of fate.

Really ask yourself, do you believe in fate? The authentic answer may or may not come immediately.

The back of a pamphlet I pick up at the Iron Rail Collective reads: the future is unwritten. That's another view. Ask yourself, hmmm, does that ring true?

Is there any link between predestination, and predispensations, presuppositions, presumptions, preconceptions?

A friend of mine last year tossed out, "We're so free we can choose prison." And what he said has never left my mind. In many ways, it attunes to Vonnegut's conception (Sirens of Titan) of the Church of God Utterly Indifferent, which sounds callous, but if you've ever been stifled and constrained in the name of "caring concern" and "no you can't, we know what's best for you dear", you might begin to appreciate indifference as undifferentiated unconditional love and utter freedom.

p.s. Mr. Rosewater, or Mr. Vonnegut, and who says we have only a hundred years on the outside?

images The Enchantress, Arthur Waddle (1901); La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Frank Cadogan Cowper (1905)