20230131

Back to the Garden: This Two Shelled Path




 







A garden of forking paths provided me with the opportunity to receive an apocalypse from a safe distance.  Having experienced gnostic entanglement in the past, I know it scratches an awful bloody truth. Therefore, I do not boast of innocence.  I reflect on past guilt, and how innocence and guilt occupy identical centers of pain.  It is only the perspective of time and the dimensions of space that divorces their brotherhood.  This two shelled path, it bores us to joys.

20230128

Back to the Garden: Look In The Barrel






Here comes a catholic 

Can you see anything offensive in that?


“This’ll be the end of Aaron’s…”


“C.K. kept talking about morality and punishment throughout the set, but never connected the dots to his own behavior. He belittled the idea that parents should teach their kids the difference between right and wrong. He tells his kids there are no bad words, you just have to think hard about who you’re saying them to. He talked about convicted murderers and how admission of guilt plays into sentencing. He observed how everyone in hell is equally miserable, and Hitler shares real estate with people who committed minor sins. He doesn’t believe in God (according to “Sincerely”), but mentioned his Catholic upbringing and ended the set by literally reading from a Bible. The obscure verse was about Jesus making a fig tree wither and die out of spite because it wouldn’t bear fruit.  

“You want fruit out of season? Go to Whole Foods, you f—king J-w,” he said.  


If you’re like me, that line probably made you laugh, but it didn’t make you smile.”


Dan Gentile




20230127

1/23/23: Long Live The Wizard


by Mark LeClair


Mirror Ball


And Time with us was always popular When did we not prefer some going round To going straight to where we are?

- from Our Bias, by W. H. Auden


Where are we?

Many moons ago, in an eldritch age of high weirdness called "The 1980's", I found myself attending a semester of summer school--for personal reasons.  

My high school days were over--deader than disco.  I had dropped out in the 11th grade--an act of mere formality, because in those days, music was all that mattered to me.  It was a fool's errand to try and marshal my attention elsewhere, even under the threat of forced attrition.  Listening to music, lying around day dreaming, listening to music, reading about music, trying with limited success to play music, to create new music, listening to music.  It was all I cared about and made no bones about it.  I just plain didn't give a fuck about my so-called education, or the society that education was designed to help me to live within.  Musical education, too, was too strict for me, because it carried with it the dreaded necessity of a business transaction, and the discipline of practice.  

Back then, for one brief and shining moment, I was a legend of self-destructive renown, regarded by my fellow students and teachers alike with legitimate awe, but not merely because of my glaring and preternatural hatred of social commerce.  After all, there were plenty of kids on that bag, and there always will be, I guess.  In my youth it was the Head-bangers; the pop-set, in Camaros and Speedwagons, stereos blaring Journey and Heart; Punkers; the emerging Goths.  Kids raging against the machine love their music.

What made me peculiar was the music I liked: strictly Classical; and the attitude I copped: intellectual, questioning and fiercely serious.  No drugs, no booze, no action (well, not much action).  No fun at all--just business.  Not a snob though, not by a long shot, but serious and droll and self-isolated.  A rumpled copy of Will Durant in my jacket pocket, Shostakovich bleating on my bulky protean Walkman.  Dressed for school in a suit and tie every day of the week, and well before the preppy revolution, mind you.  A deadly sarcastic teenage contrarian--ready to fight on each and every teaching point--a jarring set of characteristics just too much for my peers, my parents (a small town accountant and his beleaguered farm-girl wife), and way, way too much for the administrators of my youth.  At one point, I was institutionalized against my will for behavioral reprogramming.  It didn't take.

Music wasn't exactly all that mattered to me, there was just one other thing, namely, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I was dragged by some friends, quite unawares, to a midnight showing on my 15th birthday.  Ironically, my friends, two sci-fi buffs who had to really muscle me into seeing the film, came away bored and annoyed.  I was changed for life.  It is reasonable to say that since that February midnight, more than 30 years ago, the enormity of my existence has been wrapped entire in the pursuit of Kubrick's enigma, even when I wasn't aware of it at the time.  

The yolk was on me of course, and it didn't take too long to figure it out, either.  Only a few days after seeing the film, I had become exhausted by my research.  Endless interpretations, cobbled from a heaping pile of library books and periodicals, and none of them remotely satisfying.  I soldiered on because I had to.  That infernal movie was more than just a monkey on my back, it was the mother of all monkeys--in the parlance of our times, it owned me.  Over the next couple of years, I would read up on as much of the available interpretation as I could manage, and a variety of ancillary studies became necessary.  A certain book of physical proofs was a stumbling block.  I didn't understand it, so I went "back to school", to scan a course in 12th grade physics.    

One day after class, I listened in as a stoner student tried to impress the teacher with a notion that would stick in my noggin but good.  I had no idea the dude was offering up the solution to Kubrick's 2001, much less a complete revelation of reality--I thought simply that he had an interesting idea.  Looking back, the clues were everywhere, and profound.  

The lecture that day had been on the subject of a phenomenon called thin film interference, which describes how the shimmering rainbow visible on the edge of a soap bubble forms a repeating cycle of rainbows, each group of seven thinner, narrower than the last, smaller and smaller rainbows, forever and ever, to the point of invisibility.  Xeno's Paradox, a fable which illustrates a similar principle, that the space between two points on a line can be divided into progressively smaller sections, was also used as a talking point, and it was explained that thin film interference was helpful in the production of high grade camera lenses, to reduce glare, sharpen focus, and clarify color contrast.  This last point, about the lenses, barely registered at the time.  Delving into the mystery of Kubrick, and into the mystery of life at large, it didn't occur to me that optics may play an important role.  

After the class, this stoner kid, and I know he was a stoner because he had tried to sell me hash, this stoner kid shambles up to the teacher to propose an idea inspired by the lesson.  He sketches a sphere made of glass.  One could see into the interior of the sphere as one might see into a bubble, but, the kid goes on, the inner surface would be a mirror, like that found in an interrogation room at the cop-shop.  A one-way mirror.  The kid then wonders that if a bright enough light was shone into the sphere, that light would be visible from outside the sphere, while the light inside would be trapped by the mirror, and bounce around inside, creating a kind of perpetual lightbulb.

The teacher scoffed politely and said that it would never work.  He explained something vague about how the light would "decay".  The teach was right on the second point, and wrong on the first, although, to be fair, the kid's idea for an eternal lightbulb was just a little off the mark.  A lightbulb does not describe the mechanism as deeply as it can be described, but just what that kid was onto, that glimmering inside-out Mirror Ball--well, it is real.  A real object--an object we all know.  

It is The Moon, and the secret of its power is at the center of reality.

The study of synchronicity is highly seductive. It is a house with many rooms, many places to dwell.  It intimates what appears to be a practically limitless variety of elements to be compared, arranged or explored to the heart's content.  However, there is another principle of synchronous phenomena, implicit in the very term synchronicity, which suggests something fundamental: a happening together. Things in synch happen together.  

Self evident?  Yes, especially in the narrative and linear sense of synchronicity.  But what about the location of this happening together?  Things happen together, but where?  

Christian philosopher and fantasy novelist C. S. Lewis quips, "The reason we can not find the center is that it is all center".  This idea is nebulous and romantic, and inclines a sentiment well suited to the new-age good-vibes going around, and to the magickal fantasies of Lewis's Narina, or Tolkein's Middle Earth, or Hogwarts, as they are beheld in their present real-world fascination, as a kind of a fashion statement.  A statement quite comfortable to many of the best minds in the study of synchronicity. 

For me, the real brilliance of synchronous phenomena is typified by a single and  unifying principle--one idea, one image, and finally, one place.  That place is The Moon, and it is fixed, motionless at the center of the cosmos.  It is a sort of a lightbulb, although the term projector is a bit more apt.  It is also an eye that sees, an eye that blinks, and a mind that dreams.  It is, as the conspiro-nauts think, hollow.  Hollow, but not empty.  

Inside is everything.

Claire de Lune, indeed!


Gravity's Rainbow


Talking to myself and feeling old Sometimes I'd like to quit     Nothing ever seems to fit...       Rainy days and Mondays          Always get me down.

- from Rainy Days and Mondays, by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols


Rainbows tend to happen on rainy days.  As we are told, a thunder storm opened over Golgotha and poured rain upon the scene of the Crucifixion of Christ, until a shaft of light pierced the clouds--and thus it is accomplished.  Nowadays, it is always raining somewhere.

To begin our story, The Moon is identified as a revelation of the Gnostic Christ, The Man in the Moon, who is crucified not as an act of attrition by the Pharisees (the official story), but by His own design, for the express purpose of holding the cosmos together in a single piece.  As the lyrics of Rainy Days and Mondays lament, He is alone and feeling old, wants to quit, but can not.  It may be pertinent that this song, made famous by The Carpenters, provides a nice pairing to the lyrics of Bowie's A Space Oddity.  "...here am I, sitting in my tin can, far above the world.  Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do".  The image of the dilemma of Christ is the same proffered by Nikos Kazantzakis in The Last Temptation of the Christ--Christ must choose His role, and all of the suffering that comes with it, willingly and with complete foreknowledge.  

Loathe as it may be, it is an important job--being the center of the universe.  If, that is, we accept that something is better than nothing or at least that something is more likely than nothing.  And here too is an added dimension to the proverbial nothing is impossible.  It seems, thanks to the persistence of memory, that nothing truly is impossible.  

The mature apprehension of the cosmos, the woefully enlightened mind, knows that whatever is happening, however mundane, it is completely impossible but ever so real.  It can not be happening, and yet it is.  Not a paradox, because although it can not be happening, it must be happening, it is happening.  This sort of clarity is inaccessible to the socialized mind, the mis-named rational or scientific mind, because it is not contained by empiricism, however great the data, but revealed only through the application of metaphor.  The knowledge that reality is not possible and yet somehow necessary is near the summit of true rationale, and it is coldly logical.

Thus, we apprehend that reality must have a center, and how that center must be permanently secure.  The accepted scientific models of the universe simply do not measure up.  They do not explain the cohesion of reality--how it all stays together.   The even fleeting perception of time, the fact that we do not immediately spin off into nothingness, is solid proof that this center is achieved, and furthermore that each of us, within that center, is immortal.  As stated by Krishna in the Gita, "All that lives, lives forever".  Krishna is a model, one of many, of the Cosmic Christ, who guarantees immortal life, whether you like it or not.  The seemingly tragic problem, that these so-called spiritual allegories are not recognized as the properly scientific, exacting models of the cosmos that they indeed are, is a programmed function our reality, not an error of bland misinterpretation. A certain level of bold, informed ignorance is critical to the stability of the system.  

The Moon is our proposed center, and we begin with a operation to reveal that  center which derives from the image of the inside-out Mirror Ball, and the principle of The Rainbow as pure light in decay.  The seven day week is the main key, and must be adjusted to reflect the universal central station as The Moon.  

To be properly academic, the seven day week is not unique to history.  Different periods of measurement have been used to count the days, but it is fair to say that all of these systems become instantly irrelevant from the precise time of Abraham, right up to the present day.  This influence, of Abraham and his seed, has dominated world socio-political and economic affairs, North to South and East to West, for 6000 years, although for a specified stretch, the depth of this pressure was to remain esoteric--sheltered from the hoi polloi, broken in to a multitude of nations, and kept alive only through the techniques of high Kaballah, the Magick of Enoch, Son of Cain.

For now, we correct the week from its long tenure in occult array, with Sunday as Day One and Wednesday at the center.  Our new week has Monday fixed at the middle, right where it has always been.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.  These are the days of the week in their proper order, and also reflect the seven colors of the Rainbow in their natural order of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. 


Lady's First  


In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

- Genesis, Verse One, by God (Holy Ghost-Writer not attributed)


Friday is Day One.

Here is a fun fact.  A massive proportion of the Kaballistic and Talmudic study of the Bible is concerned with the first verse of the Book of Genesis.  Massive proportion, impossibly out of whack in the normal sense of heuristic text analysis, all honing in like a laser on the quaint little tidbit of lore: "In the Beginning...".  This is a nice clue to the importance of thin film interference.

It is fairly well known to students of The Bible that right out of the gate more than one creation myth is presented.  More than one creation and more than One God too, to the perpetual vexation of the religiously dogmatic.  But when compared with the phenomenon of thin film interference and the occult obsession with the study of the first verse of Genesis, we make a startling discovery.  These different stories are not different at all--they are expanded versions of the original allegory, each wider than the last.  Perceived in reverse, from the widest of all imaginable expressions of nature back toward the most refined and narrow capsule, we can see that these allegorical models mimic perfectly the thin film, the progressively narrower slivers of rainbow color seen on the edge of a bubble, or on the internal curve of our inside-out Mirror Ball: The Moon.  In this way, these models serve as a perpetual boundary between the ineffable Pure White Light that emerges from The Moon and the rainbow colored pseudo-material world that is trapped inside The Moon--a boundary with seven repetitious veils.    

According to the Talmud, the first verse of Genesis carries within its Hebrew text the complete riddle of of the cosmos.  As the story continues, this riddle is telescoped into progressively baroque expressions of the same central principle, with each later and wider version appropriated by a another God, and then, when the Gods have run out, in versions under the manipulation of Human Beings.  Of course, these widening rainbows are not, at least in the prosaic sense, confined to the pages of The Book.  As the story is passed from God to God and then to human kind, it is inevitably passed down to you, dear reader, when you become the God of an infinity of sorts, and you cross into the abyss and right to its terrible bottom, riding your own private rainbow all the way down.  It is an inevitable process of consciousness, for what can be truly infinite to someone, even a God, except their own life?  And how can that life be anything but infinite?

In the Gnostic allegory, it is a Woman, not a Man, who engages in the act of primordial creation, although this Woman is not a woman in the material sense.  Her name is Sophia, which is the Greek word for wisdom.  For the purpose of primordial creation, She has two distinct aspects.  

First, as Elder Sophia, She is the Bride of the Cosmic Christ.  The Elder Sophia and Cosmic Christ are not manifest, they do not exist in any form, anywhere in the history of so-called material or conscious reality.  Instead, they are the intimately balanced and combined aspects of all positive and negative cosmic forces.  It is not until these forces separate and descend into the material realm that they become man and woman.  Before this event they are invisible.  The Elder Sophia and the Cosmic Christ are the True and Only One, you see, and that thing called One can not be seen, even by Itself.  

Unless it has a mirror.

The Young Sophia, as an act of will, tears Herself from the Cosmic Christ to plunge into the primordial and shapeless pool of Chaos.  The glittering play of these waters, the iridescent diamonds of Chaos rising and falling like bubbles in champagne, is too much for Her to resist, but Her rejection of the Perfect One is not the act defiance portrayed, say, in the traditionally accepted interpretation of the allegory of Eve and the Serpent, because the Perfect One must allow its own division.  It must allow its own division because it desires its own division.  When the Young Sophia separates from the Cosmic Christ, it is the first act in the construction of a Mirror of Ineffable Creation--the only act of love available to a supreme and undivided God.

With The Moon in the Middle, our first day is Friday: Lady's First.  Not the plural ladies first, but the contraction that produces The Lady is First.  Yeah, God is a chick.  Now you know which came first. 

Friday is the planet Venus from the Roman panolpy, and cultural alternatives to the seven day week, with their own peculiarities intact and from all the world-wide, reflect uniformly the quality of Friday as Venus.  In common to many images of The Birth of Venus, She emerges from the depths of an abyss.  This cypher of Venus is also a mirror image of the True Venus, The Young Sophia, who is not being born of the abyss but giving birth to the universe.  She rises not from the deep, but descends from the Heavens and plunges herself into Chaos--Chaos as symbolized by the Sea.  Her descent can not be captured by the naked eye, but is visible in its reverse--as Her mirror-self emerges from the profane waters of the material realm.

The glyph for the planetary Venus is a circle with a cross attached to its Southern pole.  In his graphic model of universe, Dante Alegheri draws the Crucifixion of Christ at Golgoltha attached to the bottom of the globe, at its Southmost pole, which produces a three dimensional drawing of the glyph of planetary Venus.  The Cross of Venus is The Crucified Christ as the wound of the separated Elder Sophia and Cosmic Christ.  It is the precise spot on the ethereal body where the Perfect One is torn asunder.  This explains the infamous overkill of cruelty illustrated in the murder of the Human Christ.  The act must produce plenty of blood and torment.  Enough to insure the vitality of the dark creation it wishes to nurture.  The Southern position of the Cross of Venus is The Wound of The Young Sophia, the human female sex organ, from the fallopian tubes to the vulva, and produces the tide of cosmic menstruation, upon which the whole of material history rides at lightspeed red-shift like a shell-shocked surfer of the apocalypse now.

This "surfer" is the esoteric source of the popular Silver Surfer of comic-book legend, who precedes in his travels the coming of a destroyer god--an apocalypse.  In Baum's The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wears silver slippers.  On the silver screen these slippers become ruby.  One in the same image, the first in a nitrate emulsion, the second developed into full color.

Red is First.  Lady's First.  Venus First.

Friday is Day One.  Thank God, It's Friday.  


Bad Religion


And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

- Genesis, Verse Two, by Santa Claus


Saturday is Day Two.

When the Young Sophia plunges into primordial chaos, the act conceives and gives birth at once to the arch-typical problem child.  He is a blind, ugly cannibal called Samael, or Ildaboath, or Saturn, or Cronos--the kid has a lot of nicknames, more than most of his fellow gods.  Furthermore, and quite unlike the other gods, whose images are purified with each new discovery of an aspect, these myriad nom's de plume of Samael are designed not to clarify his persona, but to front-off a deliberately dissimilar set of personal quirks and sartorial postures. The hateful; the beautiful; the cruel; the scandalous; the charming; the good; the demanding; the intolerable--the neverending masquerade, to vex, to rebuff inquiries into his identity.  This method, of shifting and modulating disguises, is typified in the high religious technique of cross-dressing, the mantle of gowns donned by the priestcraft of all religions, which mystify the identity by obscuring the gender-- a practice carried forward through history by a long line of Saturnine cults, social agencies, pop-up clubs and governments.  As the second principle, Samael imitates, apes his creative Mother.  So far, the technique has been fabulously successful.  It is correct to say that the advances of human science, art and social commerce, as the imitation of creation that they try so damned bull-dogged to be, are all traceable to the original Satanic act of self importance, when Samael declares himself the Lord of All Creation and becomes a compulsive liar to obscure that he is no such thing. 

Samael is a bastard to be sure, the rough, even shapeless origin of Bad Santa, who wants you to believe he is at the top (North), who promises to reward his devotees and punish his detractors.  He is Satan, the pure Satanic principle which is the essence of Ego.  Understood in just this way, as the principle of Ego, Sam isn't really so bad after all.  He is, in fact, a unavoidable side-effect of consciousness.  As evil as his ultimate image may be, and it is pretty nasty to be sure, Sam is, after all, just an individual.   Individuality is the back-bone of self-awareness, the pillar of personal consciousness.  Each of us, humans every one, regardless of the dignity of our separate choices, imitate Sam to a Mason's T every time we call attention to ourselves, to succeed, in a spasm of joy or pain, to create, yearning to be loved a little more, to be placed a little higher, to feel of value, to matter at all.

The color orange is associated with deceit and mistrust, pridefulness and passive assertiveness--a tiger, brimming with orange rage, striped and softly panting, glowering, lurking in the thickness of ferns, ready to pounce and consume the soul from the inside out.  The color of gold is also a function of orange, and not of yellow as is the common misconception.  Gold is the achievement of royalty and godhead through the act of alchemy, which is a process of Saturn.  Saturn, Father Time, who is Satan, who is Samael, begs the question on every body's mind.

Did you ever wonder why the smallest standard unit of the common measurement of Time is called a Second, and not a First?

"Give me Time", he cries in his wilderness of loneliness, "give me Time and I can do it right, I can be a proper God, and you will finally love me for what I am".  But Time is all he's got, and so far it ain't enough by a country mile.  Reality is ruminated. Chewed, regurgitated and chewed again.  Everything new is old again.  In the womb, when the spine first forms, it is the exact image of a wad of chewing gum, rolled about in the mouth and then bitten by one side of upper and lower teeth.  In the Book of Revelation, God says "I will love you if you are hot or cold, but if you are tepid, I will chew you up and spit you out".

Sophia doesn't swallow Her gum, and all of us are tepid to Her insensate tongue and teeth.  All of us with a back-bone, that is--all of us who insist, like Samael, Her first and most problem child, that we are real, that we somehow matter, that we are a special principle unto our unique selves.  Sophia will have none of it.  The Elder is a distant Mother, an Ice Queen, to whom her children are a disappointment--a necessary evil.  She loves only the Cosmic Christ, her Husband.  The Younger also loves only Christ, the Human Christ, Who follows Her out of paradise like an owl into the night, to be the nail that hangs Her Mirror Ball of Light.  Samael is the beast inside of this machine.  The throbbing gristle of the crucified body, eating itself up, ignominious, lost in a labyrinth of madness.  He is the unwanted, crippled babe of Jocasta, called Oedipus, who is left to die in the wilderness.  

Saturday is Day Two. Saturday, Cronos, the designer of Time, the Clockwork Orange.  Yesterdays dinner, a plate of leftovers.  Seconds.  But he is tough and resourceful, smart, too dangerous to dismiss as a mere force of blunt or banal evil.  Yes, he has tricks in his pocket, things up his sleeve, and he is fucking hungry all the time.

Feed him.  It's all right.  Give the Devil his due.  Milk and cookies on the counter should do the trick--maybe a splash of rum.  And whatever you do, be good, for goodness sake!


With A Cherry On Top


Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.

- Genesis, Verse Three, brought to you by Dairy Queen, home of the Dilly Bar


Sunday is Day Three.

In the lyrical pop-masterwork Manic Monday, by Rogers Nelson, just one of a raft of immortal Sunday themed pop-anthems, we have a fine example of Sunday as the standard of the freedom to Be Me.  "...wish it was Sunday, that's my fun day, my I don't have to run day...".  The Me in question is the infamous inner child that we are instructed dwells inside of each and every one of us, and is described repeatedly and reliably throughout the popular Sunday ouvre.  Sunday is the day of a special kind of peace.  Not the peace that comes after conflict, that fleshes itself out of the ambiguity of an agony or metamorphosis, but the peace that comes before, the peace of innocence, of a child who does not know pain or fear or want.  A Child who is loved by His Mother.

In the deepest possible interpretation of the Gnostic allegory, this Child, like His own Divine Mother, gives birth to Himself.  His Mothers Womb is but a passageway into the material realm, which is the stage of His self-appointed Destiny.  He is the Human Christ Child, for just as the Young Sophia creates Herself in the act of separation from the Perfect One, He creates Himself, to repair the damage She has done.  Damage He wanted Her to do.  Damage He helped Her to do.  The Damage of Desire.

From the moment of His birth, for a short season of bliss, He forgets he is Husband and dreams at His Mother's Breast.  This stitch of time is the life of the Human Christ, prior to the beginning of his ministry.  Thirty years of boundless contentment, to be exchanged for thirty pieces of silver, when the contract comes to its maturity.

The dignity of this repose is not limited to the male sex.  The catabolic period of human life is thirty years long.  For thirty years, every normally healthy human being suckles at the teat and doesn't pay a cent.  The mind and body grow only stronger for this period, finer and more balanced, wounds heal and quickly and slights are soon forgotten.  The source of this life-giving Sunday strength is symbolized by the astrological glyph for the Sun, which is a circle, with a dot, a point at its exact center. This glyph is usually associated with the image of the Sun itself, and its traditional fixation at the center of the Solar system,  but in fact exhibits not the code of the Sun, but the fixation of the Christ Child--His Mother's Breast.

The term of light, by way of the English homophone, describes not only a source of luminescence, but also the sensation of weightlessness, of freedom from the force of gravity, which is the grave, which is death.  The person of youth does not concern themselves with the problem of death, and so we see that this inner child, this catabolic child, is also a child of light.  The same inference can be gleaned from the triangle, which, when drawn automatically, freely, without thought, by the child inside, is always drawn pointing upwards.

Sunday is Day Three.  The Triangle.  The first non-linear shape of Gnosis.  Sunday is all yellow, the caution of a yielding mother and the jealousy of a child who clings to youth, the beautiful Apollo.  And it is the Breast of the Mother, a cool bowl of sweet clotted milk, with a maraschino for a crown.  An Ice Cream Sundae--hits the spot. 


Cast the First Stone


And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

- Genesis, Verse Three, by Tim Farquarhar, the guy who takes family portraits and prom photos at the J.C. Penny


Monday is Day Four, but for Tim it is Day after Day, every day is Monday.  He has had his last night off.

"It's a jorb nobuddy warnts--nobuddy appreeshinates what I do.  Delivering memories.  And for chump change already.  Gheesh!".  

It is Sunday night, but not really.  More like the tail end of a continuous blur of spirit, one long dark lost weekend, carried in from Friday night and the Friday night before it, and Tim Farquarhar is hammered but good.  Tim is always hammered, but he isn't an ordinary lush--he drinks to kill the pain, and it is a monstrous pain.  He is right after all, no one appreshinates his work.  The delicacy of his tender lighting and the mastery of his spatial tableau go altogether unnoticed by the unwashed hordes of drooling lumpen-proletariat he snaps day in and day out.

"Aww, I forgiff 'em, they know not what they do, man--they don't unnerstant phatawgriffy--bunch of fuckers".  Tim isn't a hateful man, in fact he is sentimental and brimming with empathy.  He is a people person against tremendous odds.  Given the strictures of his life as an lonely, invisible pariah, a childless bachelor, insolvent, without a hope of getting laid much less hooked and in love, supernaturally average, a cypher--it's a wonder he isn't a serial killer. 

And there are countless millions out there just like him.  Men and women, janitors and house-maids, soldier-boys and candy-stripers, garbage collectors and waitresses, bachelors, whores and old maids too--the Elephantine--who fall through the cracks of a golden world to the bottom of the Pillars of Atlas, to the Bottom of Sisyphus, whose simplest needs are ignored and whose disfigured and ugly lives pass by without a second look from the rest of us, not because of our indifference, but because they seem so ordinary.  Unseen on the face of life, their curse is hidden in the codes of history.  American literary icon Gore Vidal instructs, "It isn't enough for one to succeed, others must fail".  Moreso, it is not enough that one has joy, even fleeting joy, others must suffer in open anonymity, for that suffering is the inertia, the foundation of dreams, the foundation of hope, the bedrock of reality.  It is the brutality of this fact that is the inspiration for Buddhistic nihilism.  For the Buddha, enlightenment is the instant realization that all is suffering, and he teaches that the one possible freedom from suffering is the abandonment of Earthly hope.  Close but no cigar, Buddha.  We are still here, aren't we?  Trudging around perdition, broken, not a trace of nirvana.  We cling to hope, for now.

Tim Farquarhar is one of millions, yes, but it his skill as a photographer that is of special interest.  About his beloved craft Tim has a mantra: Good Light.  Separate the shadow and the light--for shape, for tension, for beauty even, but always, always good light.  When Tim sees the light, and knows that it is good, he clicks the shutter.

The big revelation of The Moon as a model of Christ Crucified, which is our main focus here on Monday, is found in the interior of the sphere, the inside-out Mirror Ball.  But to begin, we gaze first at its pearly outer curvature, which is the reflected image of the Young Sophia, Pure White Light as it descends from Perfection.  It is important to realize that this image is just that, an image--imaginary.  The severed Perfect One can not be rejoined, which is the compromise of the Sophia, fueled by Her desire to behold Her reflected glory, to see Herself in the Mirror.   

It isn't that She is vain.  As explained, the decision to undertake this separation, belongs as much to the Cosmic Christ as is does to Sophia.  He wants to see how beautiful She is, and for Her to see How beautiful She is--if She is indeed as beautiful as She feels to Him.  And She is beautiful, dancing just outside the Rainbow.  Anyone can see this beauty if they have a strong desire, the desire of truth, but just as for Our Lovers, that desire comes with a price.  And sometimes it is impossible not to see.  Sometimes, and without warning, the truth breaks free from its fetters of denial, because this great Act of Love, which hangs The Moon in the nocturne sky, is the basis for existence, the framework of the Matrix Generosa, and it crucifies every man and woman and child on a cross right next to His Cross, to share the suffering, the passion, the endless river, to be flung wherever the orbit of The Moon can reach, across the invisible waters of Chaos, for a good long time.

The Roman Catholic practice of transubstantiation is our first clue to the inside of the mystery, the inside of The Moon.  The wafer and wine served in place of The Body and the Blood of Christ is called a host.  Consumed in a single bite, it is green cheese, a chunk of compost from the exterior limit of the eternal Green Man.  The term of host is interpreted in two ways: first, as the source of sustenance for a parasite, and second in its more pleasant guise as the host of a party.  In its aspect as the sustenance of a parasite, the host is visible as the practice of agriculture, which is the driving motivation for the model of sociological suppression, of human trafficking, slavery, and voodoo economics, and has been just that since it was invented by Cain.  The harvest is the murder of The Green Man and the relentless flaying of the Christ on His Way of Sorrows, before the winter covers him in His Shroud of White.  The model seems a kinder, gentler compromise in its guise as the host of a party, but turns out to be very much the same indeed, if not worse, as it denies the slave an immediate tactile attachment to a real metaphor for his or her abysmal plight.  At a good party, the host can't have too much fun--there is a lot of work to do, and the quality of the affair is not judged from the perspective of those who must tend to its engine, but by those who are its honored guests.  This host, in the greater sense, is the described foundation of inertia at the Pillars of Atlas, and the basis for the unsung service of the post-modern Monday hero.  Someone must work while others play, while others dream and grow, love and live, and because of an unfortunate feature of The Matrix, some of these folks never get an even break--ever.  This character is nicely summed up by Neo, the tragic hero of The Matrix Trilogy, the odd man out, for whom his moment of transcendence is an instant act of sacrificial service with very little joy to wash it down, and in its feminine posture as distaff Pirate Jenny from The Three Penny Opera of Brecht, who complains of her users, "You gentlemen can say, "Hey gal, finish them floors! Get upstairs! What's wrong with you! Earn your keep here!".  Distilled to absolute purity, this pair are The Young Sophia and the grown-up Human Christ.

In the New Testament, the Young Sophia is personified as Mary Magdalene, and her story is the key to our mystery of the function of The Moon.  The words of Christ,, "Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone", which appear to save her from being stoned, and to provide the remedy that such a stoning must not take place, and that such a stoning is unjustified and cruel, are in fact a code that it is only the Christ Himself, he who is without blemish, that has the right to commit the act, to cast the first stone.  This stone is murderous and loving, and suicidal, because it is the Earthbound simulation of the separation of the Perfect One and the wounds that it produces.  From inside of His Blind Desire, the Cosmic Christ gazes at His Mother Bride, the Elder Sophia, in the quintessential reflection of Her own gaze at the alluring waters of Chaos, before She pulls away.  This Gaze of Love falls upon the first ever image of the exterior Moon, the reflected image of Sophia, as it falls away from Cosmic Christ.  Thus The Moon, by the acquiescence of His Desire, is cast away like a stone.  For the man of flesh, this gaze is reenacted at the point of orgasm and ejaculation, so often accompanied by the utterance, "Oh God!": a moment of peace, and the release of a pearly dew.  There is a funny and quite prurient example of this model in the old time song called Carolina in the Morning: "strolling with my girlie where the dew is pearly, early in the morning", and "where the morning glory's twine around the door".

The Gaze is also the gaze of the of a photographer as he takes a snap, and reveals that the Moon is the Lens of The Camera, which captures the reflected beauty of Sophia as She falls away forever.  The phases of The Moon, which can be perceived as the motion of a scythe as it threshes wheat, are also The Shutter, the mechanism which allows for the isolation of an otherwise ineffable and unbounded Perfect Light, so we can look at it now and then, although it is long gone away.

The inside of The Moon, then, is the very body of The Crucified Christ, the nail that hangs The Mirror.  In many Old English myths of Christ, he is hanged, not crucified.  Upon His Everlasting Cross, he pins reality together at its precise center.  We are told that this is an act of penance carried out on behalf of human kind, for our sin, and this is true, but it is not all.  By the mere shape of our existence, and the longing, gnawing demands of our flesh, the human being must imitate the First Great Sin, the division of the Perfect One, which turns out to be a Gaze of Super Cosmic Love.  When we look up at The Moon, we can see this fearsome love.  And when it goes black, the world trembles together in fear.

We cling to hope.  For Now.   

Monday is Day Four, inertia, the four-pointed tetrahedral stone, the tri-pod, the first possible manifestation of a three-dimensional object, the four corners of the floor, the bedrock of material reality.  Monday is The Camera at the focal point, and fills the records of our memories with ever wider layers of Kodachrome Nostalgia.  Monday is The Moon--the first and only Stone, the Gaze of Christ, and inside of The Stone all of us descend, with Him, to be baptized in the cool and tingling waters of Chaos, like a an Arrow and a Dove, locked forever in the Anguish of Desire. 

Thanks, Tim.


Home is the Hunter, Home from the Hill, and the Sailor Home from the Sea


And God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.  

- Genesis, Verse Five, brought to you by The US Marines: "Sempre Fi"


Tuesday is Day Five.

In his orchestral tone-poem called The Planets, British composer Gustav Holst gives many clues.  The section named for the planet Mars is in the arrhythmic signature of 5/4--five beats to each measure, instead of the normal two, three or four beats to a measure that are standard to almost all of the rest of Western Music, and also typified by the organization of accented patterns heard in World Music at large, and especially in dance music.  It is hard to dance to the 5/4 signature, which has a driving, almost machine-like quality when presented at any other than a slow tempo.  Tough guys don't dance.

The Latin Tuesday, is named for Mars (Fr: Mardi).  Mars is the arch-typical Fifth Body. These bodies are not represented here in the order of their appearance in creation, in the order of their peculiar origination, but as they are inevitably arranged upon the Cosmic Solar Platform by the consensus of the dreaming mind, its many voices inside The Moon. These and all other phenomena perceived as visible exterior are scattered across the mindscape, nebula and constellation, galaxy and wormhole, and in this sense they are imaginary.  The arch-typical bodies are The Sun, Mercury, Venus, The Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn--the Earth not represented because it is the illusory Matrix that dwells inside The Moon, inside the Chamber of the Camera, which both captures the image and projects the dream.  Mars, which is the emergence of the human body inside The Matrix, appears as Fifth Element, in spite of the influence of alternative arrangements.  Mars is the five-pointed star, the upstanding Vitruvian Man of Leonardo Da Vinci.  Two strong arms, two strong legs and headed for work.

On Monday, certain liberties are extended as a courtesy.  It is OK, maybe, to be a little late, a little hung-over, disheveled, too tired for work on Monday morning. But come Tuesday, when the cock crows, you had better be ready to rumble.  Grace is over.  The end of this Grace period is seen likewise in the descent from grace, the original sin, when Eve and Adam eat the Fruit of Knowledge, the five-pointed nest of Apple Seed at its core, and are poisoned, and know at last the death of the body.  The subtlety that this event is also the beginning of work can be found in the Latin travail, which is the source for the term work in the modern Latin languages.  It is also the source of the English verb to travel, which is the story of the expulsion from Eden and of the thirsty desert perambulations of the Tribes of Moses--to be lost, without a home, looking for a home, a place to rest in peace, looking for a birth right--it is the same as to be at work.

Mars is Ares, God of War.  Orson Welles as Citizen Kane, in a risky quotation direct from the audacious lips of robber baron and publisher William Randolph Hearst, declares "Give me the pictures and I'll give you the War".  This notion is explosive, because it not only implies the action of The Camera as it snaps, but also the motion picture image, when the man comes alive, awakens from his slumber of youth, the night of nascent dreams, captured in a Kodachrome reverie, playing with a beachball or something, innocent in the summer sun, and begins at day break to move, to rustle and stretch out sinew, to awaken from his ignorance--when the man begins to work.  The night is separated from the day.  

The expression of work as a form of war is equally profound.  In Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Sorcerer draws creation from the surfaces of mighty waters, as a symbol of the Perfect One, advertised in masculine disguise, drawing Creation from Primordial Chaos.  The Great Work.  When the child of flesh is born, and should he be of Angelic tongue (English--Anglish), his first enunciation of the articulated water will almost certainly be the phonetic wa-er.  War.  Later, when the master's mousy apprentice takes his shot at the Great Work, he is at once overwhelmed.  For this little mouse of a man, the man of flesh, 24 hours a day and seven days a week just isn't enough, could never be enough, a lifetime isn't enough, and in the fullness of time he is down-twisted, broken by the wheel of gravity.  The exhausted, short and violent life of the soldier at war and all of its bloody and nightmarish consequences, war which is the throbbing piston that drives the engine of Earthly work, driving its commerce and its kingdom across the pages of history and the face of the globe, to quell the land and build its kingdom to the sky, is yet another thin film, this time the compression of the work of one ordinary man, one man's working life, and the vain dreams of glory that inspire its motion.  The soldier and the worker share the same grave.

The astrological glyph of Mars is a circle, with an arrow attached at two o'clock.  Ascending from the top of an eyeline.  It is the eye of the man of flesh as he rises to his work, to his inexorable challenge against the forces of gravity, as he lifts his eye to his work or to the onslaught of his opponent, which is Death. The arrow and the motion it symbolizes are the soul as it departs the body to be received by Christ.  A secret teaching of Scientology is that Christ is Crucified at The Gates of Mars.

Blue, the dark blue of the rainbow, is the common color of masculinity, and the color of the dress uniform of a sailor, the uniform he wears in attendance of a burial at sea, and to his own burial at sea, when the sailor, the seaman, in full dress, is wrapped in a shroud of white and returned to the to the Bosom of Chaos, to be born again.  The dignity of those spermatozoa that do not find the egg is irrelevant because they are only essence and without a soul.  But the working man, even as he returns to the sea in his final body, as a sailor, as a fisherman, whose unseen work feeds the multitudes--his soul is attached for good, it is the weight, and he will fall, rise against the weight, and fall, and rise again and fall again, and he will run and play again in the haunted hallways of his childhood, and hear those lost and muffled echos, the cooing and complaining of his mother's love, for a season of bliss, a restful night under a shimmering Full Moon, for thirty days or so, for thirty winks, and then rise to his work, rise to the war, rise to the water, and return once more to to the sea.    

Tuesday is Day Five.  Blue Collar Blues and a Handful of Dust.  It is fifty stars on a field of blue--the American Dream, which is the dream of a Satanic success made humble in the skin of a man.  The work ethic that gives no reward except the coolness of the grave and the freedom of Spirit beyond The Gates of Mars, a mist in the shadow of Jupiter, the promise of a Second Sun in his own hands.

It remains a dream.  


Avast, Ye Mateys


Then God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."

- Genesis Verse Six, by the newly formed partnership of Goldman, Sachs, and Blackbeard  


Wednesday is Day Six.

The appearance of the expanse, of landfall, which divides the the waters into constituencies, into obstacles across the travel routes of the free waters, is the appearance on the stage of the first human Magician, the first human to manage a sufficiently impressive simulacrum of the original Act of Creation, which divides the Sophia from the Cosmic Christ, and thus another thin film, another copy of the Rainbow.  But there is a difference.  A big one.  The Original Division, of Sophia from Christ, is a mutual Act of Love.  The separation of the waters by an expanse of landfall is all business.

The Latin Wednesday is Mercury's Day (FR: Mercredi) and it is from his name that we derive the terms of mercantile and merchant.  Mercury, the Magician, is a used- car salesman of unseemly proportion.  He is selling the dream.  Selling the dream to you, to hedge his own obscene fortune, to build himself a temple, a castle in the clouds, to make himself a king.  The English Wednesday is the name of Wotan, Woden, the modern Odin of Norse legend.  Like Mercury, Wotan carries a Great Staff of Magick.  The Staff of Merlin.  Upon this staff, called The World Spear, is carved a runic magic spell.  The staff itself is fashioned from The World Tree, Ygdrassil, from a branch torn off of its side, which wounds the tree, eventually killing it.  The act also identifies Wotan and Mercury as Longinus, who, with a spear, mortally wounds the Crucified Christ as He languishes in His final Passion, refusing to die.  This murder, of a God by a mortal man, is the envy of Longinus, the little man against the principle of the sacred that he secretly despises, as the tiny Mercury, awash in golden warmth, envies The Sun, the source of his warmth.  This is also why the planetary body of Mercury does not rotate on an axis, to keep a second face forever in the shadows, a face that can not conceal its hatred of the Sun.

In our latter-days of pop-magickal infatuation, it is ignored, ignored with a vengeance, that the process of business and the process of magick are one the same tawdry millworks.  The runic spell carved into the World Spear is in fact a business contract, a contract made between Wotan and the Giants Fafner and Fasold, whom he hires to build Valhalla, his vainglorious palace of gods, the monument to his own genius, power and munificence.  And just like every trickster, like every wheeler-dealer, Wotan reneges on his end of the deal, and apocalyptic hilarity ensues, and the End of the World is suddenly Tomorrow.

Wotan, Woden, Wooden, is likewise the basis of the longstanding influence of human paternalism, the godly phallus, the maypole, adorned in fresh flowers.  Mercury is vain, a real Beau Brummel, and wears a boutonniere in his high lapel.  He is so fashion forward, in fact, that he is oft times framed as sexually ambiguous, an androgynous male, dressed to the nines.  Prince Rogers Nelson, the Artist formerly known as Prince, whose "symbol" is remarkably like that of the astrological glyph of Mercury, who loves to snuggle in his plush robes of soft purple, of indigo, is a fine example of this powerful sexual magick and its ravishing strides along the rainbow runway of desire.  

Mercury, his eurythmic pose, articulated gestures and swishing androgyny, is also pop-personified by Disney's Jack Sparrow, of The Pirates of the Caribbean series.  The pirate is a master seaman, a devil on the water, whose circumnavigations both open and then manage, with a cutlass and a whip and row of ready cannons, the trade routes of the seas, which are a necessary element in the building and maintenance of the global business network we know as Maritime Admiralty.   We do not kid ourselves when we discuss business.  It is piracy, all of it--the mad dash for Cutthroat Island, the top of the mercantile pyramid scheme.  Everybody wants the booty, only so much to go around, and its lonely at the top.  A desert island, it is.

Wednesday is Day Six.  A sharp dressed man in crushed purple velvet.  The con of the indigo child. A Magician. In its attitude as the phallic wooden Wotan, we call it Hump Day.  For the publishers of a newspaper, Wednesday is thick day, in which all the retail business ads to lure the weekend shopper are crammed into a phonebook of running black type and oily parchment. Wednesday is the quickness of pi, the pi-rate, racing in an endless and uncatchable string of numbers, stock updates on an old ticker-tape, filling space with foamy coils of quicksilver ribbon, waves as they crest and fall, compounding interest in a Swiss account, a swift corsair, seaworthy, trim, acquired from its previous owners at a bankruptcy auction, as it slips across the horizon and out of sight.

The bosen blinks and thar she blows no more.  Arrgh!


If This Van's A-Rockin'...


And God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.

- Genesis, Verse Seven, also known as Led Zep IV


Thursday is Day Seven.

The principle of Seven is the principle of Lightning, seen in the lightning shaped stroke of the Arabic number 7.  The Latin Thursday is named for Jupiter (Fr: Jeudi), the Greek Zeus, whose capital Z is the lighting bolt in his mighty hand.  He is also Thor, the Norse God of Thunder, sometimes called Donner.  In Das Rheingold, part one of Die Gotterdammerung, The Twilight of the Gods, Donner, to consecrate the completed Valhalla, swings his hammer and marshals the electric forces of the clouds into a great clap of Thunder and a crack of sudden, blinding Lightning.  The blow produces a massive storm, and as it passes, The Rainbow Bridge appears, and the family of lesser gods ride it to their new home on Misty Mountain Top.  In the alchemical and Kaballistic tradition, this is the function called As Above, So Below, which divides the Air above from the Earth below, and blesses the dusty golems of perdition with the burning kiss of Heaven, a stairway going up and down, Jacob's Ladder.  Wotan, Mr. Wednesday, the Great Magician, will climb and descend upon this stairway more than just a few times as he tries to remediate his contractual obligations.  

Richard Wagner, creator of The Ring Cycle, The Twilight of the Gods, is one of the most egregiously misinterpreted of dramatists--even the likes of Carl Jung became seduced and misguided by the romantic magic of the Gods at the beginning of their tale, the noble struggle to make a paradise of their own.  But Wagner had another idea.  The Hammer of Donner, yes.   But the Rainbow it reveals, according to Wagner, only looks like a stairway into paradise.  In this act of seeming completion, because of the compromises of its design, Wagner sees the end of everything, the end of the Gods and of the human civilization they have wrought--the human civilization Wagner himself happened to live in, just prior to Two Great World Wars.  To call him a visionary is an understatement.  Die Gotterdammerung ends in flames, with the death of love on an angry pyre, which spreads and consumes Valhalla at the fingers of Loge, the Fire God.  And it is the end, in a sense, but not quite how Wagner imagines it from his fin de siecle viewpoint, on the cusp of the 20th Century.  In fact, the final blow of Donner's sledge is the last strike of the awful nail of the Crucifixion, and it pins at last The Crucified Christ at the center of the interior Moon, the rainbow backside of Sophia's Mirror.  It is interesting to note that in Das Rheingold, it is hinted that Wotan commissions Valhalla not so much for his personal splendor, but as a token of love to his wife Fricka, whose name gives us the English Friday, who is Venus and in turn the Young Sophia.  To paraphrase Wotan's sentiment from the German libretto: "A man must travel, must work and build, be free.  I erect Valhalla to her luxury and comfort, to be her home".  Valhalla is Fricka's vanity.  Yet another thin film model of the Creation of Gnosis.

Love--who can explain it?

The final image of Seven is encoded in the Tarot trump The World, the last in the traditional tarot trump sequence.  It pictures Isis, who is the Sophia, as reflected by The Moon.  The term Seven yields the rebus S-EVE-N, in which the S and the N are serpents, flaccid phalluses, and EVE is in the middle, with one phallus in each hand.  In the Tarot World, in the grip of Young Sophia, these serpents are made stiff, are become electric rods, the twin poles of Jacob's Ladder, the desire of both the distant Cosmic Christ above, as he gazes at his Love in ardor, and the desire of the human male of perdition, perpetually horny, in the embrace of a long awaited carnal union.  

Thursday is Day Seven.  The deep purple of midnight blue divided from the Pure White Light of the Moon.  Thursday is Rock and Roll and when you get behind closed doors.  It is the hammer thrust, the man on top, and the strained visage of his lover as she gazes back from her below, the final act of sacred sexual magick, which overlaps the sexes, the sixes, and brings them to their peak near the limits of Seven.

Jeez--get a room already.


Me, My Name, I Call Myself


I've been alive forever, and I wrote the very first song.  I put the words and the melody together, I am music and I write the songs.

-  from I Write the Songs, by Bruce Johnston


A small concession for a small conceit.  It is not mere happenstance that I, your narrator, came to hear that summer school stoner kid sketch his model of the Gnostic Mirror Ball so long ago.  I am that kid.  It was I who accosted the teacher with that ever so clever idea--an idea I thought to be my own.  Truly, in those days of distant yore, I was as I have described myself, a milquetoast rebel: on the outside proper and self-contained, old in my daily ways, tea and toast, a volume of Dickens I would never finish, alone in my room with some Mozart on; and on the inside seething with anti-social animus.  It would be more than fifteen years before I cracked, took a toke, and got my head into some serious Floyd--and the walls came tumbling down.  Within one short month I was hooked for life, an over-night sensation in the Annals of Chronic, keeping pace with the most rasta of the rasta-man, from wake-and-bake to the cool pillow of bed-time stoned.  A win-win situation, as I enjoy a wasted and youth of one stripe and a wasted adulthood of some altogether different feathers.  I'm not proud of myself--it's just the way it is.

When I made that sketch of the Mirror Ball, I knew not what it meant, that it was the very pin-point to my burning philosophical quest for answers to the mystery of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which turns out, by way of some pretty vicious sleight-of-hand, to be about The Moon and little else, but also because of its intimate link to my real obsession: music, and to the seven-tone diatonic scale.

The chief tool of consciousness is vision, both inner and outer vision.  We use our vision to organize the vast realm of the cosmos in much the same way we set a dinner table, paint a picture, drive a car, make a blueprint, imagine an innovation, or dream an impossible dream.  In our story so far, we have cast our gaze only at the visible phenomena of creation, visible even when they appear only in the mind's eye, from inside the Mirror Ball, as principles we might see if everything were truly outside that Ball: Our Moon.  But in the formation of the complete Matrix sound is an equally important mechanism.  This matter, the importance of sound to the framework of reality, like the very shape of the sound that tickles our ears, is taken more on intuition, as it is believed by most that what is heard, a sound, can not be seen.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In the material world, our Matrix, everything that can be touched, smelled or tasted, much of which is also visible to the eye, is produced by the function of sound.  The structure of a material object, or of any stable material, a chemical element, a bookend and chair, a sandwich, a breath of fresh air, all of these are produced the by discreet frequency of molecular and atomic vibration.  A frequency, a vibration, always produces a sound, and so we see that what we tend to perceive as objects, geometric solids, liquids and gases, furniture and fine liquor, kitty cats, appear as a side-effect of the mechanism of sound.  This isn't a big secret.  In military and police technology we have the DEW, the directed energy weapon, which can, among other delights, create an impassible wall of sound, that can be felt, touched and even seen.  In terms of Creation it is a toy, a trinket, but the DEW, and other technological innovations like it, prove the connection between sound and the physiological sensation of feeling--and ultimately that sound is the quintessential physical, the concrete illusion of the material construct.

A single pulse of frequency does not produce a material essence, but instead an arch-typical essence, which is easier to assess as a unique visible phenomenon, such as a planet.  Within the Solar Matrix, which operates under the auspices of Sunday tech, the influence of astrological bodies are not felt in physiology, but intuited and seen, like the love of a mother is intuited by a child.  But the child can feel his mothers breast, which we have identified as the warmth of the Sun, which is felt on the skin of all the peoples of the Earth.  Apollo, who is the Sun God, is also the God of Music.  The use of sound which results in the visible manifestation of a solid, liquid or gaseous material essence, requires at least a harmony of tones, different tones played together.  A chord, played upon a lyre.  The complete study of the shapes produced by the frequency of different chords would be, beginning at the beginning, an unabridged chromatic catalog of all existing and all possible material essence.

On a smaller model, we compare the seven-tone diatonic scale to the diatonic mode called the lydian mode, another seven-tone scale, with the same notes as the diatonic scale, but in a different order.  As discussed, only the colors of the Rainbow as they appear in natural order reflect properly The Moon in the Middle.  We have readjusted the week.  We must likewise adjust the diatonic scale into the lydian scale, and then compare them side by side--for the final revelation of our Mirror Ball.    .

The diatonic scale is known to everyone, as the progression of Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do.  The lydian diatonic mode is the same scale, in the same circular order, chosen from the other modes to reflect the attitude of The Moon in the Middle and the new seven day week.  In lydian, it is Fa-So-La-Ti-Do-Re-Mi.  The juxtaposition of these two scales creates a harmony, an interval, which is a simple two-note chord, a chord which produces a feel-able sensation.  The intervals, the difference in the frequency of individual tones in the pairing, is critical.  The first and last three intervals are each a perfect fourth.  The central interval, the interval of the diatonic Fa and the lydian Ti, is an augmented fourth.  

Correctly aligned, the two scales look like this, the diatonic in the left column and the lydian in the right.

Do=Fa (a perfect fourth)

Re=So  (a perfect fourth)

Mi=La  (a perfect fourth)

Fa=Ti  (an augmented fourth)   

So=Do  (a perfect fourth)

La=Re  (a perfect fourth)

Ti=Mi  (a perfect fourth)

As stated, a group of notes in a cluster is called a chord.  Each single note on a scale has a compatible tonal chord of its own, called a major-triad.  The immediate and resplendent truth of this pairing of the diatonic and lydian modes is found when the intervals it produces are played as two-chord cadence, one chord followed by another, from lydian fourth position to diatonic first position.  

The perfect fourth, six out of seven of our interval pairs, when played in major triads as expressed, from lydian fourth to diatonic first--for example: the major triad of Fa followed by the the major triad of Do-- produces a plagal cadence, the same cadence of the ancient Gregorian intonation of Amen.  This cadence is nicknamed the Amen Cadence because countless composers of Western Classical Music, even to this day, use it all most exclusively to intone the the feeling of Amen.  A good example, familiar to many, is the closing cadence, passing beneath subtlety, of each verse of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.  Given the subject matter of Cohen's powerful and poetic story of the gaze of David upon Bathsheba, we can infer that it encodes the same Amen, the same "Oh God" of male sexual release, that celebrates the original Act of Creation, when the Cosmic Christ casts his better-half into the waters of Chaos like a smooth white stone. 

The single augmented fourth, found at the exact center of our paired scales, is the mysteries of mysteries.  In classical theory, the augmented fourth perfectly divides the octave into symmetrical halves.  This ethereal almost ghostly sounding interval is called The Devil's Interval, which turns out to be yet another trick of the Devil, Samael, who wishes to make himself like The Most High.  The augmented fourth does not fall as Samael falls, it lifts the perfect fourth by a semi-tone, where it sounds the strain of something reaching upwards, toward resolution, toward perfection.  The interval is also exactly one half of a four note cluster called a Dominant 7th, which by way of an inter-lingual pun, becomes The Lord of Seven.  In the Gnostic and even commonplace Christian mythos, seven is the number of spiritual perfection.  As one half of a Dominant 7th, the augmented fourth is the Crucified Christ, whose completed act is one-half of Creation, who strives upward toward the Heavens, like the arrow at The Gates of Mars.  The other half of the Dominant 7th forms an asymmetrical interval--a perfect fifth when ascending, and an inverted perfect fourth as it descends--the interval of the Sophia, in her dual aspect as Mother and Lover.  This interval is out front of 2001: A Space Odyssey, heard as the opening theme of Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, and called by Strauss The Nature Theme.  In the pure white Key of C, the two tones of the Dominant 7th assigned to the Sophia are G-D.  Really.  Like I said, G-d is a chick.

The completed revelation of the diatonic and lydian pairing is courtesy of lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, and his Do-Re-Mi from The Sound of Music.  We describe each of seven pairings, but first, here is the list of the individual tones, to Hammerstein's delight.

Do (Doe), a deer, a female deer.

Re (Ray), a drop of golden sun.

Mi (Me), my name, I call myself.

Fa (Far), a long, long way to run.

So (Sew), a needle pulling thread.

La (?), a note to follow So.

Ti (Tea), a drink with jam and bread.

Here are our pairings, articulated by the significance of the Amen Cadence.

Fa=Do.  Far and Doe.  The first principle--Friday.  The Doe is the Younger Sophia and Far She will run. All way to the bottom, sinking like a stone.

Re=So.  Ray and Sew.  The second principle--Saturday.  Ray, in this aspect is the false glory of Samael, who wishes he could shine like the Sun.  Sew is the function of power, of control, to Sew things up.  Sew is also a function of of the Thread of the Norns, and thus of Time, Samael's big creative idea.  The Norns pull, measure a length, and cut the thread of life, to put a number on the life of the human being, to mark their Time.

Mi=La.  Me and ?.  The third principle--Sunday.  Hammerstein avoids the La, gives it no description.  This is no mistake, because the subject of La, which is the sixth note of the diatonic scale, is x-rated, not appropriate for the sing-songs of pre-pubescent kids.  Six is Sex.  Leaving La blank, Hammerstein is making a very subtle, grown-up joke.  Mi, in this pairing, is the Sunday male child Me, who celebrates La as his first contact with the exterior woman of flesh-- with his mother's breast.  Me La!

Fa=Ti.  Far and Tea.  The fourth and central principle--Monday, The Moon in the Middle.  Here is the second of the two pairings with Fa, and don't you know it, it reflects the full measure of the first principle, the other Fa pairing of Fa=Do, the Young Sophia.  Fa=Ti is the the crucified Christ.  The Ti not only hinting at the Hebrew Tau, the letter equal to the English T, which is a Cross, but also the Greek Omega, which is Christ as He dies on the Cross, and inherits His augmentation, His resurrection.  Just as She must travel far (fa), He has a lot of work to do.  Work and travel--one and the same principle.  The lyrical jam and bread of Hammerstein's Ti infers the Roman Catholic host, and consumption of the Body and Blood of Christ.

So=Do.  Sew and Doe.  The fifth principle--Tuesday.  In its Amen Cadence, played in the order of Doe and Sew, we have the image of the Magdalene as she stitches the folded Shroud of Christ.  The shroud of a sailor to be buried at sea is the same white shroud, and it swaddles the broken body of the working Christ, a lone spermatozoa, returning to the womb of the sea, to rise again on the needle point of Mars.

La=Re.  Sex and Ray.  The sixth principle--Wednesday.  This principle is the essence of hyper-sexual magick, the favorite tool of Mercury, the androgynous Magician, Prince, who can carry a pretty good tune, but not the Music of the Spheres.  It illustrates the close connection of Mercury and the Sun, the Sun who is the naturally androgynous Apollo and God of Music, the child of light before his sexual maturity.  It is from the Sun that Mercury pirates his joie de vivre, his nearly everlasting elan, his quickness, and the source of his potent Sex-Magick, which drives the pornographic engine of human economy.

Mi=Ti.  Me and T.  The seventh principle--Thursday.  Me and T is the maturity of Sunday's child, the youthful, hopeful Me, the inner child of light, into the Accomplished Christ, who has been Crucified and resisted His Last Temptation--Me and T, is Me on the T, or Me on the Cross.  Donner, Thursday's man, hammers home the nail, bringing with it the lightning and thunder, the relentless winds, the driving black rain, pouring like vinegar from ominous clouds, bringing even the Rainbow that follows--but the pain and the completion belong to Christ--the Rainbow belongs to Him.  It is the never-ending, disappearing into the invisible, more and more ineffable thin film of undulating color that is the interior limit, the inner curvature of The Mirror Ball.  It is His Crown of Thorns, the Seven Stars upon His violet brow, and He has earned it.          


Crazy


And so, we've had another night of poetry and poses, but each man knows he'll be alone, when the sacred gin mill closes.

-  A couplet, by Jan Willem van de Wettering


Our fable draws its heaviest breath, the final page will turn at last.  No telling what tomorrow's gonna bring.  But my, wasn't it a marvelous tour, our Rainbow Ride, to be flung wherever the orbit of The Moon can reach--perhaps even a little farther--perhaps even much farther.  There are a few i's to dot and t's to cross, but what is a jot or a tittle to a little man like me, to little people like us--in the fields of human striving, perfection is a phantom not worth chasing.  To many these rememberings may be dangerous, or blasphemous, or downright evil.  To others they may seem just a bit off-kilter, the tin-hat set, annoying, harmless, maybe even meaningless.  What does it matter?  We are all of us bound to know someday--we will know, or blind ourselves and hope to forget.  It has all happened before.

Me, in my role here as The Revelator, coming off a mushroom trip like St. John of the Apocalypse stumbling starving out of a mossy Grecian grotto--I am certain beyond the shadow of doubt.  To the skin of my teeth.  The Moon is in the Middle.  And I have a fail safe just in case, a fall back, a nice soft bed and eiderdown to dream my dream in the face of the most pugnacious opposition, in the face of a real nightmare.  Because all of this is madness, you see.  The yearning, the suffering, the finest bliss and the roughest pain, Sufi twirling, dizzy, passing-out, waking up drunk, the slippery new born babe, the hand of my Grandfather, cold rice paper, the warm Sun, the burning Sun, the killing Sun, a highwayman, a green bottle of water, the desire, the desire, the desire.  All of it madness.  There can be no meaning to a life, no meaning at all.  Won't bother with the philosophy--there is no greater meaning, nor could there ever be.  But there is hope, the hope in every human heart, and shining in the eyes of the innocent that someday, somewhere, somehow... somehow.  It shouldn't happen, no reason, not one good reason, but it is happening.  It must happen.  And so it does.

"Yes, that's it then--crazy--all of us are crazy!".  Reginald, the dresser, has sneaked more of the master's brandy than is likely to go unnoticed.  "I'll add a little tea", says he, "just a drop.  He won't notice, the old ponce".  He is alone in the red-eye glare of make-up dust, by the glow of an old gaslight.  After the performance, everyone gone, tidying, cleaning and ironing the master's costumes, organizing the unopened letters of his admirers, drinking a little too much of his stash to go unnoticed. "I'll add some tea", says he, "just a drop".

Reginald has a private glory, his moment of unknown stardom, a tragi-comic monologue, for an unseen audience of none.  Each night, at the end of his work, he lights a spot upon the stage, and stands upon the empty stage in the pure white light.  He stands, looking up at The Moon, in front of the great murmur of echoes, the dark waters of Chaos, the long departed audience, wondering--is anyone there?  He delivers his lines, not in the moody tone of doom, the ponderous and chilling basso of his master, but in a quiet tenor, not too meek.  "Yes, that's it then--crazy, all of us are crazy--lunatics in love.  Strut and fret, fret and chafe--what's the uproar!  Silly people, ravishing strides, posing as people, pretending to be people, pretending to be real.  Impossible!"  And is he not correct--old Reg--are we not mad, all of us, like Eliot's mermaids, a pair of ragged claws, singing, each to each, in the darkling deep?  Isn't all of it mad, the lot, The Whole of Creation, the longing of love, the pity, the ennui. the downright mean, the road, the hard and ragged road, the gypsy carnival--and the music, oh, the music.  All for a song--my soul for a song.

But there is something else.  Because it is Beautiful.  Beautiful--in spite of the madness. And charging into the madness like a white owl on the wing.  Through the madness of the night, the madness of desire, straight into the womb of a lunatic of in love, straight into blackest kind of madness, perhaps even because of the madness, to where the wind pulls the water into frantic dance.  Because it is Beautiful.  She is Beautiful.  Up there in the night, with time enough for love, dancing over the rainbow, dancing outside the rainbow, a night bird singing and the wisdom of truth.  Beautiful, yes--and that is good enough.  Good enough for me.


Moon in the Middle                







20230115

To Empty Hell: Hod is Dead

 


“Like Ulysses, the ground zero here (FW) is the utterly mundane.  Middle class, tormented, Irish people embedded in the detritus of the 20th Century.  But there’s an effort here to never lose the cosmic perspective, to never lose the sense that we are not individuals lost in time, we are the front ends of gene streams that reach back to Africa.  That somehow we have all these ancestors and conflicts swarming and storming within us.


It’s a glorious, psychedelic, heartful, Irish view of what it means to be embedded in the mystery of existence.”


Terence McKenna, 1995


20230110

To Empty Hell: Debbie Does VALIS




“I have a secret conviction that Zebra is Christ, invisibly returned, and not what we've been told about him (her-Hagia Sophia). Aphrodite has returned, regaining her rightful power (of love) over the male war gods.  It is the "darling creature, the first created and most loved by God" of "Proverbs” 8 and “Wisdom of Solomon”.  Jesus was a disguise she took.  Now she is everywhere.  Being a projected hologram she can take any form she wishes.”


PKD,  April 1978