just a dream

In case anyone still hasn't heard, the Lakota have just declared independence from the United States, and if all goes according to plan they will be a separate nation, potentially followed by a dozen other American Indian tribes!

Over the summer, Sophie encouraged me to try a writing exercise of typing free-association images for a given number of minutes each day, and then putting them away unread to be used for a poem later on. I forgot all about them with the advent of school, and found them today while going through my boxes and files during the process of moving. I immediately had to write a poem, which I realized I haven't done in at least a year now.


Nothing but Annihilation

A dark wolf stalks the forest of tin cans and wire,
Slouching over the guardrail and wood-grain of the night.
A solemn golem hunting the hawk-winged angel; Poisoned
Primroses pinned to his suit jacket, shotgun slung over one clay shoulder,
His howls darkling the streetlamps in this tar-pool rain.
Leopard skin bankbook glistening with the fat sweat of his pleated palms,
His tie a hangman’s noose, a serpent woven from liquid gold and ashes
Poised for flight on an arrow of wooden slats and silver dollars.
The lions of greed drink from these dark labyrinths of blood and roses,
An abyss of birds and buildings, clocks falling into the river.
A small dog in a trashcan sinking into the night’s warmth, trailing
The riverbed sewn with hatchets and revolvers, buttons and petrified sinew.
Language is a body dying in the window of the beast called mouth,
Tongues of flame and honey, a shoe forgotten in the gutter’s memory.

She sleeps on a bed of crushed velvet and scavenged newspapers,
A ladder made of bones, the morbid sacrality of moist lungs and halos.
The angel’s thigh, draped in white garments stained a pale rose.
She dreams of dollar-fled fields and pounds of corpulent text,
A child’s face of pure joy, illuminated by the subtlest matrices,
A destroyer of time as her hair sweeps the prismatic streets clean.
Stars fall bleeding to the pavement, crying softly at night to go home,
Small lightning bugs of molten metal and mutilated machinery
Dance like jeweled scarves and cinnamon sticks under the half-eaten moon,
Beneath the weight of a thousand plastic worlds twirling on tilted poles.
The beast weeps at his own reflection, falters the gun into the wasteland,
The sky askew and smoke smiting the city with razor-wire clouds,
He weeps alone, binding the hours till sunrise, presents for a time
When the whole feathered mechanism bursts into flames and hosannas.

When I first read Roland Barthe’s essay “The Death of the Author” I thought it reeked of repressed Nietzschean overtones to somehow kill off the exact creator on which literary criticism thrived. As a writer myself, I felt that my intentions did indeed matter to what I was trying to say, regardless of how a reader might take my utterings...

...Read more at The Absent Narrative

I have an immense respect for other people's narratives and beliefs, regardless if they can be proven objectively true, because what is most important is the way that people live based on these stories.



Read more in... The Absent Narrative

The other night Sophie and I went to go see the new movie "Across the Universe," a love story set in the turbulence of the 60s and narrated through the songs of the Beatles. Though the use of visual overlays in some scenes was a little cheesy, the selection of songs was impressive, and for most of the flick I was close to tears, which I will admit takes a really good movie to bring me to.

The movie also brought up my interest of looking for modern mythemes, as the Beatles' cultural influence has been coming up recently each time I play them at work.
Read more... at The Absent Narrative.

"Myth (may be) a symbol system expressed in story form generally modeled from the given factors of the human situation and expressing a people's or possibly an individual's view of reality by chronicling past events perceived to be definitive and authenticating and ascribing them an aura of ultimate significance so that the story often serves as a paradigm for human activity." -Dr. Fred Clothey's final words on myth, from his lectures on Myth, Symbol, and Ritual

I finished writing my research paper in time to hand it in at class this evening, though when I laid down to sleep I started thinking about particular themes and symbols from the myth that I wasn't able to touch on in the paper, nor frankly was sure just how to interpret. I realized that though I felt I did a good job trying to show how Indra-Vṛtrahan may have been a manifestation of the power of the Vedic nobility, I may never really know what some of the symbols mean, nor for that matter what the entire myth actually meant for its culture. Which returns to Dr. Clothey's perspective that interpretation, and theories in general, are themselves a form of mythmaking, and we can never quite keep from brining our own subjective givens to whatever we look at.

We transitioned into our discussion on symbol tonight and Clothey stressed the distinction between direct signification and the potentiality of meanings possible in symbols, in that signs act like religious dogmas that delimit and exclude other perspectives, and symbols openly invite thought and community. To illustrate this he contrasted Western discourse's use of A/not-A logic to the Jain philosophical arguments of "Viewpoints" (nayavāda) and "Maybe" (syādvādha), which are taken together as the "Doctrine of Manysidedness" (anekāntavāda) in which discourse can have a conception of possibilities that recognizes the finitude of individual perspectives. I asked why, if such open and flexible discourse is possible, is Western Culture still stuck on A/not-A? Dr. Clothey, who had just been very animated in his discussion, suddenly grew quiet and after pointing at Plato as the origins admitted he didn't know. Then he went on tell how in all his years studying religion and trying to promote open dialogues in religious communities around the world, he had seen that whenever violence was done in the name of religion it often stemmed from a fundamental ignorance of the other guy's position, and an inability to recognize the finitude of one's own. Holding back both evident tears and growing rage he said that often, if not always, you can't understand your own perspective until you look someone else in the eyes and take their perspective seriously. After which he apologized for ranting, asked for our papers, and told us to go home.

I've been doing long hours typing up my paper for class on the Ṛigveda myth of Indra slaying Vṛtra and freeing the waters and lights. I don't really want to write about it since it's about all that's been in my brain for weeks now, I'm sweating vajras and soma. And it's occluding everything I'd rather discuss about mythology that's come up recently, such as modern myths about race or the Native American geographical myths we trekked through out west this summer. Hopefully I'll have more time to write about this stuff as I wrap up the paper for thursday, and the other paper that's due, and the personal myth I still have to edit.

Despite this (or perhaps because I needed a break) I decided to do a bit of interweb housecleaning, finally getting a gmail account, and starting a new blog which I can use to focus on my studies of cultural and literary myth-making, and keep my "academic" interests more clearly distinguished from my own personal story line.

It's called The Absent Narrative if anyone's interested.

Seussian nightmares.

The other day I was walking up the street and looked down to see a dead bird in the gutter. This wasn't disturbing in itself, even with its guts splayed open to the morning sun, but there swarming about in the bird's chest was a handful of bees, not just flitting about with an idle buzz but actively digging into the avian. It was actually kind of beautiful, and if I hadn't been so shocked and on my way to school I would have gotten my camera to take a picture of it. In hindsight it seemed an odd thing for bees to be doing, last time I checked I didn't think bees ate flesh, and beyond colony-collapse disorder I wonder just how else the environment is effecting wildlife.

Perhaps more disturbing was a news report I stumbled on (via posthuman blues) about brain-eating amoebas that have killed 6 people in southern lakes this year, an unprecedented spike in the number of deaths by the brain-eating amoeba, which if you splash in a still, algae-covered lake and get water up your nose, will crawl up to your brain and eat till you die, in two deliriously painful weeks. That this is real disturbs me, that the amoeba's thrive in hot water and the scientist studying them thinks we'll only see more of this as global warming continues disturbs me. That the symptoms of having your brain eaten by an amoeba are a stiff neck and headaches disturbs me (because that's how I've been feeling for the past week, though I think I'm suffering more from spending too much time looking back and forth between my computer and books for this research paper). I think what disturbs me the most is trying not to imagine these creatures somehow getting into a city's water supply. Actually I am more frightened by the possibility of spiders crawling into my ears and laying eggs, which I'm not sure is really possible but I still don't know what happened to that big mother who was crawling around the corners of my room all last week.

I actually have more important things to say, but they are being quietly consumed by the massive amount of research I'm doing to interpret the Ṛigveda myth of Indra slaying Vṛta for class. Having not done a research paper in years I'm actually quite excited. It's like an enormous jigsaw puzzle using information as the pieces, and with no final picture but what you want to make it. Of course, I also love organizing information, a trait that seems to run in my family, and hopefully I'll actually get around to writing the paper before it's due in a week and a half.

I finally nerved myself up to talk to Dr. Clothey in person, which if anything will allow me to finally get some sleep and stop imagining what I might say to him. Admittedly I was a bit surprised by how unresponsive he was to the work I've done and plans for studying dreams and myth, but perhaps that was mostly due to being a bit more nervous than I expected to be and not presenting myself clearly. And when it comes to dreams, Clothey claims to not treat them as all that important, rather looking down on Jungian ideas (as well as on Campbell, for the understandable reason that Campbell has tried to draw too many broad parallels in myth without considering individual cultural differences).

However when I started asking specific questions Clothey got much more animated, particularly when it came to the topic of modern myth. I was surprised and a little pleased later to find him recycle much of our conversation into his class discussion, even touching briefly on eschatological myths. As far as modern mythemes that are active in the American landscape (his term, I'd perhaps say mindscape, or symbolscape), he tried to draw a thread from the Mesopotamian myth of Marduke slaying Tiamat and creating the world from her body, a justification of war, land ownership/division, and the concentration of power in the city-state, to our modern mythology of manifest destiny. John Wayne and the Wild West, the demonization of nature and Native Americans, the valorization of war and concretization of power in a figurehead, as we see with George Bush and Iraq, one more conquering saint against his draconic nemesis. Also interesting was Clothey's insistence on the modern myth of the "incompetent male," where once men where supposed to be like John Wayne, now they are portrayed in the media as idiots, yahoos, sexually and culturally impotent, with recourse only in "viagra and guns." Which of course made me want to consider what other sorts of mythemes might be at work to counter such a grim Babylonian vision of America. The environmental and anti-war movements were his two suggestions, though I imagine there could be much deeper mythological themes that could be brought to bear, and may be necessary in order to reorient the direction our culture is heading in...

Today Sophie asked if comic book superheroes might be part of our modern mythology, an idea that I've been pondering for years. She suggested that maybe they related to Nietzsche's idea of the 'superman,' which I thought more suggestive of the Taoist 'supreme man,' a state of self-transcendence. A good number of superheroes on the other hand repair to this world in order to save humanity or establish a new order or morality. The story of Superman paralleling the myth of Jesus, even down to them dying, extolls the need for an external salvation. Of course, many other superheroes were normal people who somehow became more than just that, and in doing a spot of research I came upon a review of a book called "The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Popular Culture," where one of the essayists actually does compare Batman as the Nietzschean 'ubermensch,' and as mythologically important for the modern individual. We are asked to be no longer John, but Bruce Wayne.

Ironic, or synchronistic to all this was an odd dream last night of attending Sophie on some sort of similarly superheroesque quest she was on, complete with a large number of costume or disguise changes. Also during class yesterday Sophie called just as we were discussing the creation mytheme of demiurges and all the incarnations of the goddess Sophia.


[Edit: I'd get some sleep if I wasn't now too busy trying to track down obscure Easter Island and Aztec mythologies to figure out what to focus my paper on. No rest for the curious.]

I wanted to write something about psycho-spiritual crises, about my reasons for dreaming, studying myths and literature, about what I am looking for in myself, in the world...

...but Alejandro Jodorowsky's words (from a recent interview) might have to suffice.

"Do you pray? And if so, to who or to what?"

No, I don’t believe in praying to an external god, but I think in the interior of ourselves, we have what I call the interior world. A world which is a clear point of light, which is not you, but it is the fountain of life within yourself. When they discovered America, there was a fountain where you wash and get young – the fountain of youth. The fountain of health is inside you. And every night, I try to approach there. That for me is to pray, to make emptiness and to come to the centre of yourself, to try to go there.

...

You have no fear of death?

Not anymore. I am completely prepared to die – spiritually, not corporally. My body wants to live. The body always wants to be immortal, not to die. And the soul accepts death - that is good. But it’s not good if my body wants to die, because my life is shorter. You menace me with a knife, and I will defend myself, I will ask somebody to protect me, no? Even if I say [to myself], “I can die.” I understand that.

Do have any beliefs about what happens afterwards?

Why? Why be curious about what will happen, it will happen anyway, it will happen! Either I’ll go there or there – everything will happen. It’s fantastic – the future is fantastic! Anything that will happen will happen!"

For my Myth Symbol and Ritual class I was asked to keep in eye on the media for themes of a mythic quality to share in class later today. Though this article is much more related to an instance of ritual than myth, I thought it perhaps a perfect example of how ancient beliefs are still alive in the modern world.

Goats sacrificed to fix Nepal jet. (via Monkeyfilter)

Two goats were sacrificed in front of a Boeing 757 at the Kathmandu Airport to the Hindu deity Akash Bhairav. After the sacrifice, the plane, which had been grounded due to electrical problems, was reportedly fixed and is back in flight. The irony perhaps is that the article describes Bhairav as being a deity of sky protection whose image is emblazoned on the side of the plane, whereas the god is linguistically a transformation of Bhairava, a manifestation of Shiva associated with destruction and prayed to in order to destroy enemies, which makes me wonder just what the Nepalese have in mind for their flights.

Also somewhat mythic is the legendary chupacabra supposedly caught by a hunter in South Texas, which regardless if it turns out to just be a mangy grey fox and not the "goat-sucking" monster, still shows people's willingness to believe in the mythic and supernatural. Though I've never heard of foxes sucking the blood out of live chickens... DNA tests still pending.

I also, true to form, read ahead in my texts for class so that I can be better prepared for the discussions. Reading Levi-Strauss' "Structural Analysis of Myth" yesterday fascinated me with his breakdown of myth as linguistic themes that can be analyzed, much the way I performed something akin to Calvin Hall's statistical analysis on my own dream themes last year. It is interesting to note that dreams are perhaps more rooted in language, as their recall is often based on, is only based on, what one can actually say about the images, that which can be repeated later on waking. Any small detail of a particular dream is important to its significance, from shades of light to pronunciations of names, whereas myth, according to Levi-Strauus, is that which remains when it is taken out of the language, the themes which carry across regardless of the particular linguistic events (a function that he claims places myth at the opposite end of the spectrum from poetry, despite other mythologists' (like Campbell) assertions that myth and poetry are inextricably intertwined). In order to recall a dream for recording, I've found it best to lay in bed half-way between wake and sleep and review the visual images of the dream with specific phrases and descriptions that won't as quickly dissipate upon getting up and being confronted by the stronger images of the World. Another interesting point is his idea that myths linguistically express not only the past and present of a culture, but the continuation of the events into the future, not something quite so akin to prophecy but a subjunctive pattern recognition that also perhaps allows one to make inferences from dreams about projected or desired states of the psyche. How does a story (whether mythic or oneiric) suggest what one might need to do in life? This is perhaps Eliade's take on myth as a paradigm for cultural rituals and actions that reaffirm the cosmological abstractions of the narrative, as well as Jung's assertion that dreams serve the function of self-actualization.

I am now through most of my first week of school and I have to say how excited I am and thankful that I decided to apply to go this year, I think I would be going mad without it, having something else to push my brain and encourage me to grow beyond just my own day to day efforts. My schedule is only three days a week, and this feels almost like a vacation, having more free time to read and write, doing something more engaging than work. Of course I know that soon enough this will be filled with homework, but even that is still exciting and different. I had to write a one page paper last night for my critical reading class, and I spent most of yesterday afternoon working on it, perhaps going much deeper into a critical analysis of the reading than the teacher probably expects. I cant help it, I love to push my mind.

Some of the highlights so far: All my classes are in the Cathedral of Learning, a tower of gothic architecture that looms over the city and already featured as a significant landmark in my dreams. Wandering its halls and arched vestibules feels like I am in another century or country.

My history class, Magic Medicine and Science, does not appear to be as much geared towards looking at the medical arts, but at how these topics relate to the scientific revolution in the 17th century, but going as far back as the Greek philosophers through the Rennaisance alchemists. Mostly reading assignments, but we will have to write one paper, which the teacher said if we had our own ideas on... I already am thinking about the relation between alchemical and astrological world views, or between alchemy and the beginnings of psychology.

My intro to psychology class may be a large lecture in an icebox, but we are asked to participate in four hours of research studies, which should be highly fascinating and enlightening, and much further out of my everyday kinds of activities.

My critical reading class is in one of the Cathedral's nationality rooms, specifically, Yugolslavia, carved wooden walls and chandeliers. As opposed to the classic European literature most of the critical reading classes assign, our teacher is focusing on modern African American literature, which I admittedly know much less about. It will be curious to see how the class reacts to this, as they (and the teacher) are mostly white.

I have not yet had my last class, and the one I'm most curious about, Myth Symbol and Ritual, which looks at those themes in a modern context and is supposedly taught by a crazy alchemist professor. I am hoping to find someone intelligent and well read enough to perhaps become some sort of mentor, or at least a sounding board for some of my own ideas on the subject.

Perhaps my biggest hurdle so far is that I used the refund money from my loan to buy a new computer, one of the latest macbooks. I haven't had a reliable piece of hardware in years and I can't stop playing around with all its possibilities. Since I am a student, Apple has a deal where they also give you an ipod and a printer/scanner/copier for free. I am really glad to have this functional machine, but since its wi-fi capabilities are powerful enough to pick up an open network in my neighborhood I have to be really careful not to fall into my old habits of bumbling around the internet late into the night when I could otherwise be productive or asleep.

Either way it's all really exciting, and being back in school is already helping me to focus my mind better and start looking more closely at my future.

"Emergent narrative? Can there be such a thing as a narrative that emerges, by itself, from a seemingly random or chaotic structure or series of events? The way forms, fractal shapes and complex structures arise out of certain kinds of chaos. Are there “forms” — narrative cells I guess you could call them — that in sufficient quantity spontaneously give rise to what we call stories? If the existence of these things is possible then perhaps emotionally moving arcs, transformations and series of events could simply emerge by themselves given the right conditions — and could those conditions sometimes be man-made?"

from an article on interactive video games vs. narrative storytelling in David Byrne's blog (7.21.07)

My response is, of course, a resounding "Yes," having spent the last five years tracking out a narrative that has emerged from my own dreams. It is all in the power of the human mind to form connections.

I have been reading for a long time, pouring through stories at an unprecedented rate since I cold put sentences together, even being precocious enough to read the unabridged version of "Les Miserables" by 7th grade. But up till now, literature has always moved in one direction, from the front cover to the back, and I wrongfully assumed this was the only way to tell a story.

In the past several months I've discovered a near infinitude of story telling mechanisms, stumbling through several cases of what is called 'ergodic literature,' that is, texts that require a non-trivial effort to traverse the text, more than just the movement of eyes and pages from left to right, the reader performing the bare minimum necessary to interpret what they are reading. Several entries ago I mentioned Milorad Pavich's "Dictionary of the Khazars," a novel told through encyclopedia entries that one can read in any order, assembling the sense of a narrative for themselves. More recently I have fallen into what is perhaps the most important work of this type, Julio Cortazar's "Hopscotch," the story of several expatriate intellectuals living in Paris, debating semantics until several disturbing events drive them apart. Beyond a beautiful sense of language and rhythm, Cortazar sets up fifty-six main chapters, which can be interspersed with over a hundred more following various cues in the text, and drastically changing the meaning of the work on a second reading. "Hopscotch" has been hailed by some as the originator of hypertext fiction, though it was written in the late 60s, and requires that one actually has to search through the book for the next chapter. After this I picked up Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves," which while not quite as impressive literaturely as "Hopscotch" was endlessly more ergodically fascinating. The 'story' is really a critical text about a film called the Navidson Record, which may or may not exist, written and annotated by a blind man and found by a young punk who adds his own twisted footnotes and storylines to the already winding text. The core narrative itself is about a house that is larger on the inside than on the outside, passages leading to evolving corridors, stairwells, labyrinths, and the text itself reflects the characters movements across tunnels and abysses. I couldn't put the book down, felt myself almost being consumed by it as quickly as I was consuming it, and when I finally finished it I was struck by the realization that the way I approach literature will never be the same.

For years now, I have been trying to sort through my dreams in order to write a novel out of them, and continually come upon the problem of how to organize them, how to present material so that it maintains it essentially dream-like quality. But all of this stood within what I thought were the bounds of conventional literature. Now however it is like I stepped through a door into a terrifyingly large space, full of possibility of what it means to tell a story. It reminds me of being a child, and climbing up to the top of a lighthouse, the closed stairwell spiraling with the familiarity of the Everyday, but on reaching the top you are confronted with the sky, vast, inviting, a sense of space suddenly reoriented from safety to terror, clutching the railing at the edge of the known while still wanting, desperately, to learn how to fly. I think about my work now, already at such an early state, and am struck by the sheer possibility of where it could go, how it could be conceived. Not quite the writer's fear of the blank page, but a fear of what could be put on it. Mallarme, in his poem "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," itself a masterwork of non-linearality, with the words spilling in literal waves over the pages, describes this feeling of facing the page as being "cast into the constant neutrality of the abyss." Anything is possible, but then the pen falls and something happens, but between those two just what is open to anything, fluctuations of mood and light and desire.

Not that it is necessary to tell stories in such roundabout ways, narrative abounds with ways of breaking that sense of constant time and meaning; flashbacks, delay. Both Pavich and Danielewski's latest ergodic works recieved horrible reviews (but as they are about respectively the tarot and the history of revolution, both themes that intrigue me, I will probably read them anyway, at least to seee how not to tell this kind of story). But there is still sometyhing fascinating about having to flip through a text, back and forth as cues take you. It is much more like how the mind works, not in some linear train of thought, but full of connections, associations, symbols that relate to each other in countless different ways, always suggesting much more than just what is on the neurons around them. Dreams may appear to be narrative in scope, but this is only a 'secondary revision,' the collecting of the images themselves being the key to their understanding, always pointing to each other and to something deeper, hidden beneath the linearality of events. Awhile back I had a dream in which I was teaching a school of witches a game about how history is created. I placed a chair in the middle of the room, then arranged progressively wider arcs of chairs around this center. One person in the front tells a story about an object on the chair, which like an endless game of telephone gets passed back through larger groups of people, each time getting further and further removed from the 'truth' of the event, everyone of course having their own idea of what truth is, until their are countless stories surrounding any one object or event. Somehow, this seems more true to me than any one history ascribed by one person (usually the victors), as we all have our own perspectives and an ability to decide what that means to us. Of course, I may have read too many choose-your-own-adventure books when I was a child.

I spent most of last night getting into Thomas Pynchon's "Mason and Dixon," figuring if I wanted to enjoy a tome right now I'd pick one with less current cultural prickliness than the latest Harry Potter. Once again I found myself overwhelmed, unable to stop turning pages, cast into a full world in the same way as when reading Pynchon's latest, "Against the Day." What strikes me the most about his writing is that Pynchon is an intelligent man. He has done extraordinary amounts of research in regards to the subject matter he's presenting, and in regards to just about everything else, and he knows how to weave it all into a compelling story which doesn't read like someone's narrated science manuel. Furthermore he's also enough of a writer to not only understand his subjects, but to ignore all the truth of his knoweldge and make up his own sidereal histories to established persons and times, as if there were infinite number of histories, worlds to be historicized, waiting directly below this one, a Borgesian nest of worlds within worlds, each with its own sure dialects and idiosynchronicities, that can't quite be distinguished from but are certainly other than the world we live in. And there's a plot.

I had to put down Fernando Pessoa's "Book of Disquietude" because, despite how fascination his idea of assuming mulitple heteronyms to write under is, this is essentially a plotless notebook of moments of feeling rather glum and out of sorts with humanity, claiming to have fascinating dreams but not even telling us what they are, perhaps better titled a book of bemoaning. He is not even a Rilke with a prescience of vision and beauty beneath his Everyday which leaves one wondering just what the journalist really sees. Despite what I feel is a neccessity to divulge the depths of the human mind and experience, one wants to at least wonder if something will change, some slightest event actually happen to break the author from their ennui into a sense of real life. Sartre looked at a tree and felt a profound nausea in that he was one with it, a spiritual enough experience in what is presented as an otherwise humdrum life, and because of that decides to look up an ex-lover. Not a terribly profound plot, but moving, because at the very least it goes somewhere. Even Pilovic's recent "Dictionary of the Khazars," told in sprawling asymptotic encyclopedic entries that span space and time and religion and myth without ever quite being straightforward, has the ability to suggest that something happens to the characters, even if that happening is in the reader's own process of trying to assemble the disparate trains of thought. At least, entertaining, as it pushes the imagination, and the very act of reading.

Having felt creatively dry for days now, Pynchon's tome was like a refreshing drink, I was suddenly filled between his pages with ideas, scenes, a sense of something happening in the dark of my own internal narratives. He has created a world, which like all good worlds begs that it is quite possible to create others. The genius behind Tolkien's Middlearth is that it is self-contained, fleshed out, populated and mythologized to the utmost. Every line Tolkien wrote added to the fullness of his simulacraic reality, all the short stories and rejected fragments, so that we might have his grand trilogy, which is in itself not specifically a story but another chapter in the history of its world. The beauty, and curse, of dreams is that they are always set in their own realities, everyones' quite different, and more complicating it is a world with no set boundaries, that changes night by night so that a certain bridge you walked under five years ago no longer exists, and a strange tower now stands in its place which in itself never seems to quite stand still enough to tell how many floors it has, or who lives there, or if it is really there at all. Vague suggestions of denizens, deities, deep mythologies of the psyche, ever alluded to but never clearly explicated, forests and swamps and deserts that may indeed be nothing other than the dreamer's own body and somnolent processes.

Harry Potter may have his wizards' schools and loves and nemeses, but these elements can only belong, when all is written, to the world, to an externality of events driven more by economic fetishizing and the populaces that support it, than they can belong to himself. In the end Harry Potter's world can no longer sustain itself as a world, as it is not spun out of his own imagination with him as only a minor miracle worker in it, and he succumbs to the dustbins of all wornout marketing gimmicks. Arguably so does any element of history or the imagination, once the Author is done with them and moves on. Mason and Dixon, Bilbo Baggins, Bernando Soares, Harry Potter, the race of the Khazars, Borges himself, all these have passed on, returned to some post-formative, subterranean cavern underneath the ice shelves of cultural consciousness to be recycled back into the collective dreaming, to return next time with different faces, altered agendas, stripped of any original historicity and design, the only articulable world the one in which they somehow exist together, devoid of memories and the stories which birthed and bound them, lost names in the fabric of being nothing but someone else's character and never their own to invent, as we sometimes, barely, have the glimmering of possibility towards.

In response to the criticism of my last entry, it was not meant to be a well thought out essay as much as a rant or ramble just to get out some thoughts that had been building up in my head. With my eminent return to school in the fall I've found myself reading more and thinking more and needing to express my ideas, even if they are not yet coherent (certianly that last entry would not be a very good school paper!) nontheless, feedback of any sort is always welcome. I've found that I can best articulate myself by "thinking outloud" and having others say, no, that's not it at all.

That said, on the subject of how children play, Sophie and I have been talking a lot about this recently, recalling from our own childhoods how we would take whatever movies or games we were exposed to and recreate them in our own play, rewriting plots of "labyrinth" or "star wars" in order to place ourselves into the action, which listening to descriptions of modern kids playing World of Warcraft seems like is a continuing tradition. How many times have you read a book and said, I really wish I could have been there? Despite the content, or perceived lack of content, in modern play, what remains essentially the same is the use of cultural plotlines in order to offer a jumping off point for the imagination. Whether reading old mythology or playing video games referencing that old material, a child might imagine themselves in that world, in any world that is more interesting than the one they daily live in, and if this kind of play is carried out through their lives could foster a deeper internal reality later accessible for artistic excavation. Indeed that is what I've found to be the case for myself. I watched Star Wars close on a hundred times growing up, and even though the specifics of the
"arthurian space cowboy" aesthetic have lessened over the years, the deeper mythological themas have continued to hold importance in my psyche, even as a framing device for other stories. I imagine that Jung and Campbell were not trying to write out specific plot lines for others to follow exactly, but to find common themes that humanity has delt with in its attempts to create coherent narratives over the centuries, which is what made Star Wars so successful in the first place (as well as the lasting resonance of punch and judy, or tom and jerry, or whichever two antagonistic figures are swinging sticks at each other on tv these days). At heart what is present is a conflict between forces, ideas, family, the need to find a place in the Universe or a sense of meaning to one's actions. It's not so much that today's media spectacles are meaningless in a world where things were once meaningful before, but that there has never been any meaning outside of what we have given to our experiences. The fin de secle writers in France decried a similar lack of meaning at the turn of the last century, whch they addressed through various surreal, existential, or symbolic means, but each one an attempt to give personal meaning to modern life.

It is not surprising that superheroes and law-detectives have become the modern culture heroes, they are the figures that people can relate to, they are the legends that strive to rise above the Everyday and take real action in the world. Even if they don't exist, their possibility is enough for some even one kid in some small town to say, I could do that one day, I could do better than that. Or we see books coming out, on the other end of the spectrum from "the Da Vinci Code," where the heroes are intentionally irreal, mythical beings and monsters, who even more than the culture heroes address real human issues of the 21st century. Anne Carson's "Autobiography of Red" retells the myth of Herakles and Garyion, as if they were a homosexual couple going on vacation together, with all the monster's issues with being red, winged and unable to address the world except from behind the lens of a camera. Or Cary Doctorow's "Someone Comes to Town Someone Leaves Town" (which I heard about last night), whose main character is the son of a mountain and a washing machine and has a set of nesting dolls as brothers, and is trying to install free wireless in Toronto (Doctorow is a large proponent of Copy Left). Despite the element of the postmodern and absurd, such characters serve to focus the attention instead on a deeper psychology or perspective of what it is to feel different in an increasingly homogenized world. That in an increasingly wired existence where everyone has a voice, and every voice sounds about the same (like a large buzz from the vanishing bees), we are all still unique, and dealing with the same sense of existentiallity that earmarks such ancient mythic texts. Indeed, the classical gods ran around drunk and fucking each other more openly than the modern culture heroes do, and were worshipped for it.

Yesterday after packing the car to leave tomorrow i spent the afternoon reading Herbert Silberer's "Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts," which I picked up synchronistically at Caliban's the other day. Silberer was part of Freud and Jung's set in Vienna, and his work with alchemical symbolism predated and influenced Jung's own mounmental theories. The book is an intepretation of an old alchemical parable, called the Parabola, through Freudian dream interpretation and then integratively through alchemical and spiritual symbolism, showing how the analytical pshyco-sexual interpretations can not do justice to material that seeks at its heart to rise the spirit above the gross matter of the individual mind.

Perhaps more interesting than the material itself is the ease with which Silberer refers to a variety of world mythologies, and almost takes for granted that the readers (his intended audience being Freud's set), are already familiar with the process of deconstructing the texts of mythology and folk-lore as if they were the dreams of an individual, including referencing the quote that "dreams are private myths and myths collective dreams" to someone else other than Joseph Campbell and predating the esteemed mythologist! Despite the continuation of this process in Jung and Campbell's work, the idea of interpreting cultural texts as exemplery of the collective psyche seems to have fallen into disfavor (if it was ever in favor), and psychology chooses to focus more and more on the depths of the individual psyche, leaving cultural criticism to the literary critics. This work however points to an older use of this technique that predated psychoanalysis as the aim of the Vienna school, that collected stories, myths, folklore, whether by the Brother's Grimm or adventurous anthropologists, in order to deeper understand the human psyche on a whole. Indeed Freud could not have given such prominence to the Oedipal complex if he was only looking at one person's (or his own) psyche, and not the preponderence of such themes in world mythology surrounding the dismemberment of the parent/ god figures.

Perhaps the closest we come to such "collective psychology" today is found in movie or book reviews, and then only in mortification over the snarkiness and self-referentiallity of the post-modern paradigm (I was wholly disgusted by a recent review of Shrek the Third in the New york times, which could only comment on how the movie was a parable for the ongoing battle between Disney and Dreamworks). Even modern myth-makers like George Lucas, whose original Star Wars trilogy was an homage to his friendship with Joseph Campbell and based directly off Campbell's writing on the hero's journey, have fallen prey to cutesy characters and in-jokes designed solely to hook a young crowd that can not relate their experiences to a deeper mythological spectrum than pop-stars and punch-and-judy style pratfalls. Many of the children in Sophie's after-school program talked incessently of World of Warcraft, which though like Harry Potter and Narnia are fantastic in scope, and many older RPG video games like the Final Fantasy series referenced mythological names and themas, this kind of mythology is only a surface aesthetic, and further removes children from looking closer at the deeper themes and dramas of the original source material. Pretending you are a sword-swinging elf does not replicate the psychological depth implied by the heroic labours of Hercules (and not the Disney version) nor Theseus's struggle through the labyrinth, which are in themselves only metaphors for rising above the twisted and dangerous depths of the individual mind.

We got to Sophie's house in a choir of lightningbolts, always my favorite force of nature, and ran inside to find her back door wide open. Thankfully nothing was missing, nor strange lurkers about the house, and we sighed, thinking it could have only been one person, her naive but well-meaning housemate, Mr. Crowe. Shortly he came in, woozy from an acupuncture session, and with no clue about the back door, but carrying a painting he'd seen at the Shadow Lounge of a silhouette image over a starry sky of a figure jumping between the cars of a train. On being asked about it he said it reminded him of a dream he recently had of running along the top of a train to escape a werewolf, until dawn broke and the wolf reverted into a man he could tackle, while an old dorky boyscout chum who he hadn't thought about since his childhood looked on. Immediately I thought of the series of train dreams I had last summer, upon moving back to Bloomfield where the trains howl through the night, particularly the one, after watching Dead Man for the first time, in which my twin brother and I were riding on top of two parallel trains, like the sandworms in Dune, in the old red and green overalls of the Mario Brothers. We reached out our hands and gleefully pulled the trains in to each other, causing them to crash and fall into a wooded ravine, followed by a daring escape from the law in the coffin of my anima's dead grandfather. Mr. Crowe thought it interesting the whole death/ rebirth theme in my dream, which comes up quite often, and went on to explain how he can often tell how he's doing in his life by the appearance of dogs in his sleep, and how he reacts to them, as he had once been mauled by a canine when he was a child. In all my years studying dreams I hadn't heard this theory, of how one reacts to images of one's primal (primary) fear in dreams being a gauge of their power, but I certainly can see that in relation to my own dreaming. For all the years of watching the world end in endlessly horrible ways, I've reached a point where in the dreams I accept it, and upon waking reach quickly for my pen, excited for the new material that is infinitely more interesting than dreaming about work.

Bright morning light and birdsong between the distant pounding of construction on the bridge and the desire to stretch, a solitary noise back into the electronic wilderness. The epistemic body eclipsing the meat and dreams of this day to day life. Hello all who listen.

Sophie and I went to a Memorial day picnic yesterday, perhaps the first real time I've stepped out into public since New Years, all the punks and misfits sitting in the backyard eating pasta salads and vege dogs watching the kids run around and around swinging croquet mallets and laughing while remembering what it is to communicate. Sometimes I forget how easy it is to say hello. Cerina sat down, who had driven past the day before and waved, and asked what was going on in my life, since she rarely sees me anymore. No one does, and I could have answered to any present with the same exuberance.

Things are good, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ( I have been living in the secret parts of Fortune. )