Silent Light & the Foo

I hold the belief that we ourselves manifest the world from time to time. This belief shares kinship with the "be careful what you wish for" adage... but is not quite as straightforward as drawing a direct line from an internal desire to it's object counterpart in the real world. It suggests instead that... at least on our most brave and reckless days.... we fling the contents of our skulls and hearts into the world and the "universe" (whatever that means) collects that conscious intensity and mirrors it back to us via material representation. Or, maybe a better/simpler explanation, is that when you have, for example, William T. Vollmann on the brain you seem to find reference to William T. Vollmann everywhere you go.

Vollmann does play a role in this story as a topic of a first question asked "after all this time". Although, I wouldn't say he overtly represents the central confluence of coincidence and creative sensitivity that rippled 'round the magnetic Cap Hill corners and haunts last night. Last night... and maybe all month, to be honest... those places - and people - that ever pull you back (& you can't help but project wilfull intention here) to reveal new layers of personal oblivion were engaging in full on tug-o-war. And... instead of bracing against it... maintaining the equilibrium... pressing on into my self-contained (yet altogether entropic) future... I - for once - forgave myself my failures and self-conscious uncertainty & stopped momentarily to listen to the universal chouchoutement from a voice that has been savoured in the past both in hearing from and never hearing from again.

I turned up at Silent Light in part from this article . I think the refined melancholy of Mudede's voice that both elevated the freedom and reckless abandon of unabashed selfish generative energy and then destroyed it with the swift flick of time's inevitable whipcrack was the energy that set everything in motion. It was after this I also saw a vague and beautiful review of the film he had written. Later in the day, after yet another voice affirmed the existance of the film, I took it upon myself to find out why it had surfaced so forcefully. I walked through the rain for a long way before hopping a bus, finally, to make it to the film on time. Silent Light is slow and silky and lingers/dwells/wallows in an intensely beautiful tangle of emotions that have been wrapping around and strangling my own throat from time to time of late. So... that was big manifestation #1.

Running into the Fjahma in his black hood and that rich dark sensitivity to all that vulnerable human luminescence as I walked away from that film - THAT film- however, was completely arresting. And, it infused a nuance first suggested by the Mudede article, to the 2 hour emotional meditation to which I had just been made privy. I selfishly begged stories off the storyteller well into the night trying to infer from his offerings how those two emotional threads might be fused together.

At the end of it all, I found myself suddenly with a long run/walk home, having missed the last bus on my particular route. A cold dark self-contained entropic migration... but one accompanied by the strange sense that "peace" may in fact be the strongest force binding all the misunderstandings and hurt and passions and loves that dance about time together. For, in the end, all there is left to do is put one step in front of the other... and breathe.

Timbrophily Exhileration

YEEHAW! WOOP! WOOP! I crowed out loud while standing in line at the US Post Office yesterday morning. I could not help myself. My beloved Melibe leonina is now a star on the Kelp Forest Commemorative Stamps. How cool is that?

Human Jörmungandr

I am sure it began as a meditation on the symbolic marks people place on their bodies - like the loving ambigram that will forever reflect and balance the names of mon frere and I on both the material dna & named heritage symbol of our father... or the Dark Crystal symbol of the universe that enshrowds the womb of an adored girl I used to know.

As I wondered about the meaning behind certain self-selected marks of personal identity... I starting looking up symbols... signs... visual cues... illustrations to perpetuate and feed the random stream of consciousness on which I happened to be floating.

I have a small scupture of an Atlasisyphus that was made for me years and years ago now that today crumbles under its planet burden into the dirt of a potted plant. Maybe that's what got me started-- at least in part--on symbols of earthly burden. Symbols of the foundation of the world. Symbols about the precarious stability of our spinning biosphere.

Somehow, however, I found myself drifting off into the direction of cyclical infinity; Alchemical self-reflexivity and eternal return; the Ouroboros circle snakedragon consuming itself, tail in mouth; serpent nursemaid of self-knowledge and the end of human time.

And via this strange tangent two things happened at once... I met the Nordic version of the World Serpent... and I found this gorgeous image from the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires taken by Robert Wright.

In Norse tradition the gods Thor & Jörmungandr (world serpent) will destroy each other during the end time known as Ragnarök. Jörmungandr is a seagod - one grown so large that he could wrap his body around the entire world . Thor rules the sky. Ragnarök tradition says that the sky lord will slay the serpent and then, after walking only a handful of feet, fall dead from the serpent's poison.

Combining the two (tale & image)... I find myself crafting an evolution for my poor Atlasisyphus & his burden. I wrap humanity-grown-too-large around the world and gift the poor beast with the prophesied poisoning of the sky... the rising of the seas... & the twilight of the gods.

Hmmm... I don't know how giddy a symbol that might be to place upon a life. It's implied longevity does seems more suitable to the realm of the sepulchre. However, tail in cheek, I'm sure the world in all its cyclical infinity & splendor will still be here when the Gumby bending around the nature of our burdens cease.

I Heart J.B.S. Haldane

There are some people you wish you could have met. There are some people who you love across time... for their stories... for their words... for their shear audacity... for the life that still flares and flickers brightly across the universe despite the dark impenetrable truth of their proven mortality. I discovered one such character last night while reading an anthology of stories compiled by Jacques-Yves Cousteau & James Dugan. The story was a nonfictional account of how one man's "job during the war [WWII] was to tackle the physiological dangers to which divers and men trying to escape from submarines were exposed". The autobiographical author was JBS Haldane.

To begin with... if you have never thought much about how dive pressure tables were developed... all I can say is that you should! It is an wild story... full of Nitrogen Narcosis induced near-death inanity & even some full-blown bends driven demise. Mr & Mrs (#1) JBS Haldane were among the primary guinea pigs who willingly self-pressurized themselves over and over again in the Siebe Gorman's Chamber No. 3 in an effort to discover the true resiliency and limitations of mankind when living a "Life Under Pressure"(title of the article reproduced in the anthology).

But... as if this epic contribution to the winning of WWII wasn't enough... the rest of Haldane's life compounds my admiration. Richard Milner descibes the man as "one of the great rascals of science—independent, nasty, brilliant, funny and totally one of a kind". His interests and actions ranged all over the map. He was one of the best geneticists of his time. He inspired literary escapades of men like Aldous Huxley & (nemesis) C.S. Lewis. He served as a spy for Russia in part due to a passionate political dogmatism and belief in dialectical materialism . He wrote and wrote and wrote in an effort to popularize science.

He was simply: Ruthless. Fearless. Passionate. Brilliant.

Wish I could have been him for a day.