bound with withies

Sent: 3 May 2003

It's been interesting, these five years in the Midwest, giving me an angle to see things. Except for missing those of you I've been lucky to know, I won't be sad for a moment to go. Yet I know for a fact that you can never really leave.

Just after college, I moved from Washington, DC to an alternative community in Maine where we tried to free ourselves from the corporate controlled world, the media, the oil. One morning I sat on the steps of the geodesic dome I lived in, hand grinding my co-op coffee, thinking that since I was 8 hrs up the coast of Maine in one of the poorest counties in the nation, I was living  a real alternative—that I could be Thoreau, Franklin, Blake, and all my rabble-rousing heroes. There, out on the craggy rocks where the light first hits the USA, we were ex-teachers, ex-accountants, ex-grad students, and artists, people interested in developing and living with alternatives; people who saw the great waste generated by modern life as simply misplaced resources that needed to be recycled. We wrote Vista grants, redid the local library, taught in the schools, and the people who stayed on there winter after bitter winter really have made life better for everyone in that threadbare land.

Happily grinding away, I sat in the sunshine, yoga breathing pure nature, delighted that the black flies had gone for the year. And then I heard something... it came through the woods from beyond where you can see: the sound of a marching band playing Stars and Stripes Forever. I sat up, squinting. What could this be? I thought I was surrounded by wildlife, bears and endless trees. But it turned out that it was the local high school marching band gearing up for the 4th of July, just kids who watched network TV and wanted cars and McD's hamburgers and tapes of songs they heard on the radio: the old McLife. There was a bus that pulled up once a week at the one small diner at the crossroads they called town, and the destination on the flap above the driver's head said New York. Many of them would end up on it—and the ones who stayed behind sought to import as much of New York there as they could.

Slowly I learned that even in alt.communities there were people at the co-op who felt more equal than others, people who came from money (Connecticut, mind you) who thought they should work less than others because they were more used to leisure and therefore work was harder on them. People who hated churches yet looked down on those who didn't attend the weekly Sufi dancing... people who looked at you with disgust if you didn't roll your own tortillas.

One morning, I found myself sitting with the ladies of the women's group, all of us in long imported Indian dresses, scarves around our heads, and I watched them nurse their lovely babies. Each and every baby had an Indian print kerchief around its little head. Now I'm all for old Mr. Gandhi, but I doubt the people of India saw much return for the labor in our cotton dresses. Nor did I feel comfortable as one mother blushed, feeling failed, as she told us that her baby's earache wasn't responding to the herbal concoction that worked for everyone else. She knew she was doomed to fail, and had been so ever since having a c-section. I commiserated with her in silence. I, too, was feeling doomed and failed, without even a c-section—because I had morning sickness. What was wrong with me? Moreover—I was feeling guilty for smuggling an occasional coke in from the local bait store (it settled my stomach), for I knew I would be shunt if that even got out—just as sure as the Sunfall family had forever fallen from grace when they were seen in Bangor at the Dairy Queen.

Seems there's always someone around to call you a hypocrite. Rush didn't start that, much as he likes to think he did.

Slowly, and then more quickly, it dawned on me that you can't escape human nature. The Franklins and Thoreaus and Thomas Hardys and DHLawrences are always few and far between, and they have their bad days too. I realized that no matter where you live on earth—even off in the midst of sandstorms—that it's just a matter of time before there's a McDonald's down the road from you.

So what am I left with, idealism exhausted, aware of knowing nothing? Nothing grand. Just simple things: to try keep from becoming these machines we serve, to establish and maintain individuality while still contributing and belonging to the community. Hard one, that last, for me. I know nothing, but still I sense that where we've gone really, really wrong is in thinking we are masters of Nature rather than part of it... forgetting that symbiosis is, after all, the principle of what endures. All that theory simplified in a Beautiful Mind is much more a true and better model than the social Darwinism that has hung us over the last two centuries.

But whatever happens, we'll get over it. Because we aren't masters, and all the little tin gods who are now making such misery—all the blowhard liars of FOX news and hate radio—all the baseball caps in pick-up trucks and monster SUV's—they will all simply dry up and blow away like everything else. They can dismantle the Federal government, Constitution, Bill of Rights, write books, make wars and leftbehinder movies, project Jesus in the sky—but that's all it will be: their own projection.

We will all be replaced... and above all I thank the gods that children will rebel. Enough of them will always tend to sweep the hands off their shoulders, like those nursing babies with those Indian kerchiefs, and some will manage to do some good. I've tried to enable my own rabble rousers, and have been happy to mostly stand back and share their unfolding, giving them the mental, spiritual, and physical space to do that safely—to the best of my ability. But lastly, I am in accord with the below... and I leave it with you today with a great joy that all of you have lived in the world at this time. I salute the light in you and know it illuminates others in this darkness.

With heart, Deborah 

Jung wrote a letter on 9/14/1960, nine months before his death. There's little doubt he was speaking to us all.

Excerpt:

[...] my main tenet contains nothing more than: Follow that will and that way which experience confirms to be your own, i.e., the true expression of your individuality. [...] None believes in the blossoming and unfolding of the individual as the experimental, doubtful, and bewildering work of the living God, to whom we have to lend our eyes and ears and our discriminating mind, to which end they have been incubated upon for millions of years and brought to light since about 6,000 years ago, viz. at the moment when the historical continuity of consciousness became visible through the invention of script.

We are sorely in need of a Truth or a self-understanding similar to that of Ancient Egypt, which I have found still living with the Taos Pueblos. Their chief of ceremonies old Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake) said to me : 'We are the people who live on the roof of the world, we are the sons of the Sun, who is our father. We help him daily to rise and to cross the sky. We do not do this for ourselves, but for the Americas also. Therefore they should not interfere with our religion. But if they continue to do so (by missionaries) and hinder us, then they will see in ten years the sun will rise no more.' He correctly assumes that their day, their light, their consciousness and their meaning will die, when destroyed through the narrow-mindedness of American Rationalism, and the same will happen to the whole world, when subjected to such treatment. That is the reason I tried to find the best truth and the clearest light I could attain to, and since I have reached my highest point and can't transcend any more, I am guarding my light and my treasure, convinced that nobody would gain and I myself would be badly, even hopelessly injured, if I should lose it. It is the most precious not only to me, but above all to the darkness of the creator, who needs man to illuminate his creation. If God had foreseen his world, it would be a mere senseless machine and Man's existence a useless freak. My intellect can envisage the latter possibility, but the whole of my being says 'No' to it...

*****
***
*

 ~ on the inevitable end of Egyptian religion, Hermes Trismegistus to his disciple, Asclepius

But I remember that little girl, dressed in the trappings of a revolution that meant nothing at all to her, no more than a Barbie T-shirt. That was when I understood the sinister power of manipulation in this throwaway world, where the market just absorbs, refits, and makes meaningless symbols by using them to sell something else.

Jung wrote of Freud, and to a great extent it's applicable to the present:

2 June 2004

Joscelyn Godwin in Harmonies of Heaven and Earth writes:

The Song of the Angels is their Gnosis; or, to put it another way, what they know cannot be spoken, only sung.

This tradition has been continued by two myth-makers of our own time. In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, the first chapter is entitle 'The Music of the Ainur', and it describes how 'Eru, the One, who is called Iluvatar' declared a mighty theme to the Ainur ('the Holy Ones. that were the offspring of his thought'). Iluvatar said:

[Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music. And since I have kindled you with the Flame Imperishable, ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme, each with his own thoughts and devices, if he will. But I will sit and hearken, and be glad that through you great beauty has been awakened into song.

Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and orgam, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.]

I love Philo's (Philo of Alexandria 20 BCE-50 CE) dance as he processes the special nature of the "poetry":

God is an author in whose work you will find no myth or fiction, but truth's inexorable rules all observed as though graven on stone. You will find no metres and rhythms and tuneful verses charming the ear with their music, but nature's own consummate works, which possess a harmony all their own. And even as the mind with its ear turned to God's poems, rejoices, so the word in harmony with the meanings of thought and in a way approaching it, is necessarily glad. [...]

The Creator says that He knows that the uttered word, being brother to the mind can speak, for He has made it like an instrument of sound to be an articulate utterance of our whole complex being. This Logos, both for me and for you and for all men, sounds and speaks and announces our thoughts, and, more than this, goes out to meet that which reason has thought.

The music analog. What they know cannot be spoken, only sung.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. ~Lewis Thomas

"Never speak it," the old magicians cautioned. The Word was ineffable, paradoxical, impossible to be grasped in pure conscious thought.

The concept of logos in Heraclitus, Philo, the Platonic, as well as the broad personification of such concepts reflected in daimon, genius, eidolon... all relate to an awareness of the origin of consciousness (and, ultimately, the differentiation and relationship between ego and Self). The early Greeks who prized oral tradition were followed by those who were long suspicious of written things, who felt it was the direct connection to the gods speaking through us that was important. Like Beauty, the concern was to mainline the Forms: a direct experience of the Forms (or Logos as Philo, a mystical Greek Jew, defines it), as opposed to the written word which could never be better than twice removed.

It's as if they were too aware that the conscious mind we define ourselves by had not long been broken off from the unconscious, an awareness of consciousness so new and so threatening--exciting, I suppose--that it inspired myths of eating at the tree of knowledge, woman and her snake... (sadly, the misogyny floating around at least since Homer).

Consciousness moved individuals to "think from their own center" as opposed to the reflex of tribal dogma. But to deny the shadow sublimated within its workings, to hamstring investigation of it--to not allow mystery-- it's what Jung is writing about in The Spirit Mercurius (CW 13). He cautions:

[It seems to me that Augustine apprehended a great truth, namely that every spiritual truth gradually turns into something material, becoming no more than a tool in the hand of man. In consequence man can hardly avoid seeing himself as a knower, yes, even as a creator, with boundless possibilities at his command. The alchemist was basically this sort of person, but much less so than modern man. An alchemist could still pray: "Purge the horrible darknesses of our mind," but modern man is already so darkened that nothing beyond the light his own intellect illuminates his world. "Occasus Christi, passio Christi." That surely is why such strange things are happening to our much lauded civilization, more like a Gotterddmmerung than any normal twilight.

Mercurius, that two-faced god, comes as the lumen naturae, the Servator and Salvator, only to those whose reason strives to­wards the highest light ever received by man, and who do not trust exclusively to the cognitio vespertina. For those who are unmindful of this light, the lumen naturae turns into a perilous ignis fatnus, and the psychopomp into a diabolical seducer. Lucifer, who could have brought light, becomes the father of lies whose voice in our time, supported by press and radio, revels in orgies of propaganda and leads untold millions to ruin.]

This last bit we see today in the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Rapture and Millennialism, a cult's unwavering conviction that only they know "the natural order", which is to say, their definition of their God's mind, the Word as only they, the saved, can hear it.

The Greeks had plenty to say about those who thought themselves god's equals, able to speak music. So would Philo.

Piaget described the process of consciousness evolving out of unconsciousness in the individual. In the same way, levels of consciousness evolve in humans, both self-awareness and awareness of the process itself. Like any evolution, the process can go either way--thus the scary collectives Jung and Bruno address.

I caught a snip of movie from just after the WW2, a melodrama in which a boy supposedly watched films of the Nazi Holocaust. The voice over told him that Hitler was opposed to Christianity, that he planned to wipe it out. It also said that 'perhaps' the greatest harm was done to the Jewish people. Perhaps! But the truth was that there were good people of Christian faith who stood against Hitler. Most did not. Hitler was himself an Millennialist, as are so many Fundamentalists today. One only has to look at Tom Delay or John Ashcroft or Ted Olson to see the hand of the dead on the shoulder of the living, making choices to that inner voice of the Divine they identify with -- when they're not calling it the devil.

They also seek to rewrite History, which has always been written by the victor and in no way can truly reflects its time.

Take Philo. He was spared by Constantine's PR man Eusebius because he had some utility in forming the Church Canon. Where are the sources for that tradition he extrapolates? Gone. Yet too developed to have been only his ... and even yet it goes on, sublimated into the Kabbalah and magick.

Jung didn't view the unconscious as a cesspool needing to be purged, pulled up in buckets and dragged to destruction, but as the dark living ground of all creativity. Individuation is about centering, working at a stillpoint in accord with an  ineffable nature, "an instrument of sound to be an articulate utterance of our *whole complex being*." Thus, Rationality alone, pure Thinking fx, becomes a blinding light, a sneer too ready--just as pure intuition degrades easily to superstition.

For all our conscious pure intellectual light, we don't begin to know much about time or space or matter or where they begin or end. http://www.biophysica.com/quantum.htm In science, we build the model, not the thing. In revealed religion, we project ourselves as Deity.

We get down and wallow in the mud we came out of (mud made of stars); we dance, we are irrational. We are body, and our thoughts are more than body. We can map out chemicals and genes, we follow neurotransmitters and the formation of memories. We can give pills to wipe memory out of the conscious mind, and we understand that each time we draw a memory up, we also rewrite it. But there is no chemistry that accounts for the sudden understanding of a concept. There are no chemical, electrical changes in the ah-HA, the momentary leap of the heart.

Symbiosis, balance, accord: we're dying for it. Humility seems our best partner. "Sit up mud." Our nature is to live within the Music's Mystery.

Summa felicitas,
Deborah
 

What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means, if anything, precisely that function which links us back to eternal myth? ~CGJUNG

The greatest successes in evolution, the mutants who have, so to speak, made it, have done so by fitting in with, and sustaining the rest of life.
~Lewis Thomas

a treasure from my oldest daughter, mother's day

Today I was walking in the Christ Church gardens and was stopped by an elderly woman sitting on a bench before a huge expanse of green meadow, full of thrushing long grass and honey-colored bulls... She asked me where I was from. She said that she could tell I was an American from the way I carried myself as I walked. Her name is Zoe Petersen. She sits before the swaying grass from dawn to late afternoon, writing poems about the simplicity of accepting nature. I sat on a damp bench with her for an hour, reading the poems she says she intuitively felt she must write. She never studied poetry, she said. She grew up in Switzerland and has been in Oxford for the past thirty years.

She draws individual blades of grass in the meadow, listening to their collective thrush. I told her of how ill modern philosophy makes me at Oxford. She agreed that most people don't see themselves reflected in nature.

****MOM I don't feel inspired at all here and I just feel trite and stupid!!!!*****

I cried as I read about the skeleton woman, sitting in the Trinity lab this morning. It reminds me of the Estes' depiction of the woman whose father allowed her hands to be cut off by the devil. I have founded a goddess cult here with my Oxford friends. There is this tremendous need amongst young adults to give voice to experiential pain and the treatment of those introspective and female. My young friends here have such a desire to use words to allude to spirit and love and synthesis with the energy surrounding them. They so adore the words goddess and divine and ecstatic. They are just aching to be part of a mystery cult. And I think we've created one. These friends have been the skeleton woman-both in a general sense and as individuals. They are aching to connect in terms of shared pain.

Yesterday I walked up to them and said that we should change the meaning of the word companion to 'those who break chocolate together'. *I don't know where this is god-damned going Mom!* There is an incredible interest in the Sophia cult amongst young people. It has originated in a third-wave feminism and popular female music artists sharing their pain on a mass-scale. These mass-culture developments provided an education, a starting-point for liberation from mass values that they never were exposed to growing up. My friends here don't have mothers who tell them that 'Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth.' They have mothers that tell them: 'You shouldn't wear your glasses, you need to look more fun.'

If I shared the essence of my mother's confidence in nature with these gorgeous little friends, I consider my life given tremendous value. My mother handed me back my hands every time she told me she couldn't understand why someone was cruel to me, every time she told me that I was magnificent because I was me. She was the one to tell me that I was beautiful in every way.

What use are any of us to each other if we can not delight in our collective and individual beauty? There are young people that want the Sophia cult, there are young people-lots of them-who have never been told they were beautiful in every way. There are so many facing a laughing devil, crying on bloody stumps of arms. Thank you for your most gorgeously integrative work. Baudelaire once wrote that good poetry has a power of sorcery and your poem conjured up a spirit of agony and beauty. Thank you for that gorgeous experience of life force.

yours,

e 

(I have all her letters from this time. They should be a book. This is the child who looked out a window one night when she wasn't even 5 and told me 'there are stars in the sky so far away that you can only see them in your mind.')

from deb

Greeks