two fish

 
 
depression
may be defined as
an experience of ‘loss of significance’
that there is no there there
- rather different than
     say
meaninglessness

in that meaninglessness impends with significance
depression seems a difficult state or zone precisely for
its psychological sense (or landscape)
of no landscape.
there is no there there means
there is nothing to work with - the psyche
works with and through images - not necessarily
visual, but made of substances
here there are none.

                   

a word for depression might be anomie
taking a process approach
in looking at depression -
as depression is
at times extreme suffering,
most extreme pain -
it’s worth working towards an answer - from within
the landscape of depression (a non-landscape)

    – even in a black hole, there remains
the imprint of the falling, and it’s this falling
that may have set the gravity well
in motion

                   

following this logic, one of the psychological
approaches to depression works with the question
of triggers. To try to think or find the beginning of the feeling
of being depressed, and look to what was happening
or happened just around the time before that
– it may have
been incidental thoughts, may have been
a day of suck-off work a day
of freedom

the important thing is not to judge but just
to jot – so, a diary or journal is useful,
because it’s not nearly so useful to interpret later
(a slippery business) as to look back and see
the thing happening in writing,
and to write the transits out.
In the above,
what may or may not be found
is that there are
absolutely real and important concerns
that are triggers;
if these are known precisely these can be addressed.
these concerns do not cause depression, but, as mentioned
are triggers – this is one notion.

                   

if the cause of depression
remains mysterious, still one can usually find
triggers, if observing carefully, in a workable manner
without aggression.

Another mode of psychological thought concerning depression
is related to emotional process
there is an aspect of frustration and anger which is healthy
in that, separated from blame, anger for instance is often
     smart –
the sense of knowing in your bones that something
(situation or theme) is wrong , that
     you won’t put up with it,
     whatever that may be –

                   

not ascribing blame means, psychologically, it’s not
that it is wrong, so much as
staying with the self which feels

     – however, say, politically speaking,
     the thing may be wrong.
– But often we can’t change the thing,
reasonably or quickly,
looking at how to work with anger is important here.

the point is that anger (even frustration alone) left to brew
and stew, may turn later
to resignation.
one cannot
get out of the situation
change
the thing
or
change oneself
in relation to it
and so
there is defeat

                   

this sense of defeat i’m talking about happens beneath the awake mind
even beneath the subliminal
it is unstoppable
it may happen in both extremely minor, or major ways;
- working in this mode: to consciously
recall and list truthfully those things
that are really pissing you off
this would not be any ‘approved’ list of
what should rightly be pissing you off,
but an idiosyncratic list.

      it may be
Egg McMuffins and the size of one’s living room
     the color of a carpet:
the list must be honest, or it’s a useless exercise
in other words, depression must be taken seriously
as all really true and complete things are
which is a way of ‘attending upon . . .’

                   

     (all psychological means have to do with
proper attendance, to attend upon psyche,
a key to the nature of how healing happens)

   a ‘not’ or a ‘non’ -
beyond the issue of friend or enemy;
i mean, one can rail against depression
or try and befriend it, but neither works.
actually, coping doesn’t work well either

one issue about depression,
a mild or minor episode of depression may seem manageable
but this is a false impression of depression, based on
a seeming transience or brevity, a
‘lighter’ level of psychological suffering.
     When depression becomes chronic (incl. episodically chronic)
when this cosmos of depression becomes
   a powerful sense, a real element of life
it cannot be ‘managed;’ some seek
amelioration via drugs or vacations or changes of
scene – at times to a certain effect,
though these treatments
often prove to be disturbingly temporary – and as such
may be interpreted as failures, thus reinforcing the depression,
because one of the truisms of depression, as every depressed person
absolutely realizes, is that
nothing works

                   

another mode of working with depression is cognitive
     – based on an RET approach (rational-emotive therapy)
represented in the book, “Feeling Good,” by Burns. it
is a skillful approach, presenting an
‘applied contemplative-philosophical lens’ to daily life,
     and
deals with what we are saying to ourselves, moment-to-moment -
As we honestly look at these moments:
     i was surprised
very
     surprised
–
in this way of working,
by teasing out momentary
thought,
we may find
depression is
a cascade effect, with
beginnings
that don’t feel
at all like
depression
–
it’s not
so much
about anger or frustration
as seemingly ‘rational’
messages
to ourselves,
which might include
a thought
somewhere
already down
the cascade
like:

‘I can’t do anything.’ or
‘I’m a failure.’
This is the sort of
globalized,
black-and-white thinking
that marks depression.

                   

the point isn’t to change that thinking – which doesn’t work –
so much as to track it: back, on the one hand, and, to redirect, on the
other. for instance, when a thought occurs like, “I can’t do anything,”
you think of something you can do – cook an omelet perhaps.
and it helps to actually cook one.
so
then,
maybe
you
can’t
do
anything,
but
you
can
cook
an
omelet,
and
you’ve
proved
it
– this may seem
a bit innane, but it’s not,
it’s
quite serious

                   

RET or cognitive psychology (done right)
is quite effective in that it’s a
powerfully direct awareness practice.
the point is that depression is
a cascade-effect of certain kinds of thoughts, and each minutae of
thought

triggers an emotion, and that emotion encourages a further thought(s)
which triggers a further emotional environment(s), and so it goes
through the cascade – until the landscape is more solid
than a planet.
Burns’ book articulates depression
diagnostically, presents a means to self-examine, and outlines
a series of processes by which a person can basically work with
and often cure their depression. a self-help book in the
real sense.

there is another aspect to depression, which is archetypal,
something that western psychology and certainly medicine
do not touch on or really agree with. This involves the necessity
of depression.

In other words, depression may not be at all
like a bad cold you get rid of or wait to get out of.
When the universe pulls apart falls apart,
when you have no energy, when all of life is drained
from life. When even despair is an energy which seems
impossibly lively

                   

we can ask, but cannot know, wish to leave but be completely
stuck, or sunk in a quicksand, a morass. Something is
binding us, and we cannot rise, we cannot return to
easy ideals, cannot move on, go to the next step,
    so
we lose all that is cavalier. In the pain of no significance.
this itself, unbearable, is a destroyer of everything that is
cheap and american, so to say, every bullshit romantic
movie, every cheery, false newscaster on TV; every smile
hurts as does every grief

depression also eliminates death-metal gothic-fantasy overlays -
this is because depression cannot be willfully sublimated
into images and story – if it can, it’s not really depression but
something else.

So, galling limitation, as the I Ching says. such galling limitation
may be complex, composed of outer, inner and relational
(inter- and intra-psychic) realities;

the point is,
we can always work with
our mind
with depression –

                   

     an aggressive attitude doesn’t seem to work:
the ‘let’s get rid of this’ attitude – the fighting against, the
battle to ‘remove’ depression.
actually, depression is unworkable
this is why it’s called depression, what the word means
and not something else,
so we don’t work on depression per se,
but on how we think or feel, and what’s happening in our life
situation – depression feels totally solid, but the moment, like
the conscious mind, persona, isn’t at all solid, there’s space;

     the situational factor is likewise important
as are the social-cultural factors
and we can track, and in gathering certain valuable nuggets of
thought, information, process, a certain psychological horizon
may appear (no guarantees, but generally speaking)
often, related to depression is a deep and profound despair, grief,
pain. These we can know. find and know and attend.
But depression itself cannot really be found and known in the
same way.

It may turn out that real changes are necessary
but these needs may be quite small, nearly infinitesimal
it may be that a subtle pattern of thought can be reframed

                   

                   or

                   /

                   and
other changes may be necessary
– something inimical to
depression –
a plan – a later stage of work
may be formed and implemented
over months or even years of time.
Sometimes
the honest formulation
of a reasonable plan
is an antidote
(though usually not the antidote, alone)

The I Ching says,
“Galling Limitation should not be persevered in.”

                   

Emory College hosted a debate on war, between James Hillman and Deepak Chopra. Here are a few summations, reported online:

Psychologist James Hillman based many of his arguments on the theory of basic personality types proposed by psychologist Carl Jung, whom Hillman studied with in the 1950s.

Hillman said people in general, and Americans in particular, lack imagination, which causes conflicts to lead to violence. He said more creative solutions to conflicts can be found, [and that] part of the blame falls on lack of education. “If we don’t imagine, we get Iraq, we get New Orleans, we get criminal irresponsibility,” Hillman said. “Where does imagination go to school in the U.S.?”

A sold-out crowd of about 1,200 people, mostly local residents not affiliated with Emory, packed the pews of Glenn Memorial. Jean Houston, a researcher in human development from New York, moderated. According to both speakers, aggression is so ingrained in human nature that war might be inevitable.

Chopra said the “fight or flight” response originates in the limbic system, the same part of the brain responsible for instinctive behaviors such as eating or the urge to procreate.

Hillman mentioned that the prevelance of wars outnumber years in recorded history.

Chopra said peace might be more likely to occur if nurturing female archetypes replaced the violent male archetypes now dominant in much of human popular culture and mythology. But Hillman saw no such reason for hope. “Why are we talking about evolution, about the future?” he said. “We don’t know what the hell’s coming. It’s pretty bloody serious, what’s here. It does no good to be hopeful.” He added that humanity must be mindful of the struggle it faces in attaining peace to make peace possible.

Chopra and Hillman also disagreed in their definitions of peace. When Chopra identified the passive resistance of figures such as Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi as peace, Hillman said such actions constituted strength, not peace. “That’s a Judeo-Christian interpretation,” Chopra said. “Peace in the East is a transcendence of opposing energies that allows one to dwell in a state of pure consciousness.”

Both participants and the moderator offered numerous criticisms of President Bush and his administration’s foreign policy, and Hillman called for “doves” in the audience to take over the business of war. “You must turn to war and give it deep thought,” he said. “Otherwise, it will be left to the hawks, to Kristol and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.”

Tuesday’s event was organized by the Mythic Imagination Institute, which seeks to foster understanding and respect through stories and archetypes, as well as the Alliance for a New Humanity — a forum co-founded by Chopra — and the Emory Public Issues Forum.

   N’Kisi

“Fascinating story about Alex, but there is another grey parrot even more amazing than Alex, called N’Kisi. Why is Alex now a star and N’Kisi still obscure after years of amazing scientific results? Simply because the scientist who studies N’Kisi happens to be named Rupert Sheldrake, and the scientific establishment has quietly agreed to ostracize and marginalize Sheldrake as much as possible. N’Kisi is not only the most highly accomplished animal speaker known today — of any animal species — he is also very gifted telepathically — at least with his owner, a woman with whom he has a unique bond. Check out this link: sheldrake.org/nkisi” – JR

Hear N’Kisi Speak!          Interview, and more about Sheldrake
  

Interspecies Telepathy Experiments
N’kisi would often describe what Aimee was thinking about, reading, or looking at in situations where there were no possible ordinary clues. When Aimee saw Rupert Sheldrake’s book Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home she contacted him, and they collaborated in designing an experiment to try to replicate and document this phenomenon under controlled conditions. . . .N’kisi has already shown aspects of intelligence that animals were thought to be incapable of, particularly a species that shares so little genetic similarity with humans. Globally, parrots are the most endangered of all birds, with the greatest number of species currently facing extinction due to poaching and habitat destruction. We hope our work will help people to realize the amazing abilities and awareness of these intelligent birds, and encourage greater care of these precious beings and the planetary environment we share.

The BBC reported on N’Kisi, Chatty Parrot Stuns Scientists ( 26 January 2004).

Interview, and more about Sheldrake

Rupert Sheldrake is best known for his controversial theory of “formative causation ” which implies a non-mechanistic universe, governed by laws which themselves are subject to change. Born in Newark-on-Trent, England, Rupert studied natural sciences at Cambridge and philosophy at Harvard, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow. He took a Ph.D in biochemistry at Cambridge in 1967, and in the same year became a Fellow of Glare College, Cambridge. He was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology there until 1973. He was a Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society and at Cambridge he studied the development of plants and the aging of cells. From 1974 to 1978, he was Principal Plant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, and he continued to work there as a Consultant Physiologist until 1985. Rupert is the author of A New Science of Life and The Presence of the Past, in which he presents his theory for explaining the mysterious process of morphogenesis. In 1981 the British science magazine, Nature described A New Science of Life as “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years, ” while the New Scientist called it “an important scientific inquiry into the nature of biological and physical reality. “

Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness
($10 new, under $5 used)
by Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, Jean Houston
(2001).
  
  

ONE VERSION OF INFINITY

You run so fast, round and round and round, that finally the fastest way to
run is to stay still. You run so fast that you begin to see your own back,
and you begin to become still. At that point, the whole thing begins to
become infinite. When you hold still, you supercede any kind of speed at
all. You become the ultimate and utmost winner of that particular race.
From that point of view, being back to square one is one version
of infinity….In this case, back to square one is the infiniteness of
immense immeasurable space and expansion that you experience. Therefore, it
is absolutely absurd to try to search further – and the only way not to
search further is to be, to stay, to stand or sit still.

From “Cosmic Disaster,” in GLIMPSES OF REALIZATION: THE THREE BODIES OF
ENLIGHTENMENT page 14. Edited by Judith Lief. Published by Vajradhatu
Publications.

Afraid I’m more of the “seraching further” type (d monk)

           Moog Modular

Thank you Robert Moog!

Moog died today, age 71. In rememberance, the beginning of a piece on Moog (rhymes with ‘vogue’) published April, 2000 in salon.com.

Robert Moog
His invention had an extraordinary impact on how musicians create, and radically changed the way music is made.

By Frank Houston

In the 1920s a Russian inventor named Leon Theremin unveiled the first purely electronic instrument. You played the theremin by waving your hands in the vicinity of two metal rods, controlling pitch and volume, that were attached to a nondescript wooden cabinet. Between the strange arm motions and the instrument’s invisible machinations, the theremin’s overall effect in performance was theatrical and mysterious.

But like the 200-ton telharmonium, the world’s first mechanical music synthesizer (invented by Thaddeus Cahill around 1900), the theremin was difficult to play. In 1955, four years after the theremin’s eerily weepy sound was employed in “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” RCA introduced the first modern synthesizer. The machine made sounds by manipulating electrical waves to denote timbre, pitch and volume. Like early computers, it filled a room and was tended by men in lab coats.

Moog Sonic 6

A few years later Robert Moog, a graduate student in physics at Cornell University, published a magazine article explaining how to build a theremin, offering do-it-yourself kits for $49.95. Orders poured in, and Moog sold 1,000 that year. “We had $13,000 in the bank,” he recalled recently, “a humongous cache of wealth for a graduate student back then!” The windfall enabled a career that helped bring electronic music out of the realm of novelty acts and university labs. A decade after the first RCA machine, Moog introduced the first widely adopted electronic instrument – the synthesizer that bears his name.

When Moog (rhymes with “vogue") unveiled the Moog music synthesizer in 1965, his engineering skills combined with a bit of business luck to radically change the way music was made. Synthesizers went from being computers to instruments that could be found in any music store. The flowering of rock music may have come via Leo Fender, Les Paul and the Gibson Guitar Co., but the innovative music of the early 21st century owes far more to Moog and his imitators and successors.

Mini Moog

After getting some exposure to the liberal arts at Columbia University’s Engineering School, Moog began graduate education in the engineering physics department of Cornell University. He took eight years to get his Ph.D., largely because of his part-time hobby: building theremins and other electronic instruments. The degree came in 1965, a year after Moog launched his synthesizer business. Moog built his synthesizer in 1964 after a composer told him about the need for user-friendly electronic instruments utilizing new solid-state technology. The Moog was modular: You used patch cords to select your waveform (the sound’s timbre) and frequency (pitch), and plugged in the interface – a keyboard, instead of the binary code on paper that had defined the first RCAs. Moog’s engineering wizardry did the rest.

Significantly, Moog’s was the first synthesizer to use attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different knobs, which control the qualities of a sound’s onset, intensity and fade. Like many of his designs, Moog’s envelope generators became a basic component of later synthesizers. . . RCA synthesizers, intended for an elite market of labs financed by universities and record companies, had cost $100,000 and up. In 1967 the new Moog sold for $11,000. It wasn’t the only synthesizer around; many experts also commend Donald Buchla’s modular synthesizer, built around the same time. But the Moog became prized for its utility and elegance, making Moog the name that brought synthesized music to the masses.

The Moog’s biggest break came in 1969, when musician Walter (now Wendy) Carlos had a huge, Grammy-winning hit with “Switched-on Bach,” . . . The Beatles introduced a new Moog in the majestic “Because,” on “Abbey Road,” . . . In 1971, Carlos brought the Moog to cinema, scoring Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” with electronic Beethoven [she also scored The Shining, and played Moog synths for TRON] . . .

The synthesizer also boasted the voltage-controlled lowpass filter that came to be known as the Moog filter, capable of making a variety of full horn, string and vocal timbres. The filter was patented in 1968, much to the envy of the competition, who “ate their hearts out,” Moog says. They “all came up with voltage-controlled lowpass filters, but most of them sounded like shit, if I do say so myself.” . . .

         
Wendy Carlos & her circa 1971 Moog studio



Robert Moog
 
 

Zero is an abstract notion
that humans don’t typically understand
until ages 3 or 4.

Parrotic Zero

Alex, a 28-year-old African grey parrot, lives in the lab run by comparative psychologist and cognitive scientist Dr. Irene Pepperberg. The parrot spontaneously and correctly used the label “none” during a testing session of his counting skills to describe an absence of a numerical quantity on a tray.

The discovery prompted a series of trials in which Alex consistently demonstrated the ability to identify zero quantity by saying the label “none.”

The findings, published in the current issue of The Journal of Comparative Psychology, add to a growing body of scientific evidence that the avian brain, though physically and organizationally different from the mammalian cortex, is capable of higher cognitive processing than previously thought.

Girls with Guns in Cinema

Joseph Rowe writes
In all the excellent material that has been published and broadcast (notably by Bill Moyers) about stories and myths of the hero figure in Campbell, there seems to be little awareness of the fact that the hero archetype is really one pole of a dialectic, one which I also overlooked in my previous post. It cannot be complete without its Other, the Hero’s complement (and in a sense, his opposite) which I shall call the Sage, though there are other possible ways of describing it.

Campbell himself is keenly aware of this dialectic. He continually discusses and alludes to it in many ways in his writings. He associates the strong emphasis on Hero archetypes mostly with Western traditions, and with the masculine pole; and strong emphasis on the Sage archetype with the Eastern traditions, and the feminine pole. Of course this is a generality, with commonsense caveats against reductionism – after all, these poles exist within each of us, psychically. But the historical and cultural manifestations are fascinating, and can perhaps be helpful for dealing with them in our own lives.

In a nutshell, the Hero says : “I will.” The Sage says “I am.”

Action vs. Being.

There is an ineluctable tension, and sometimes even a conflict between these two. This tension will always return sooner or later, no matter how many times we think we’ve “solved” it with truisms such as “true action is non-action.” We can verify this in our own lives. Of course the two poles of the dialectic can (and must) be reconciled. Figures like Jesus and the Buddha are great inspirations. But it’s not as easy as we think! And it’s a process, not a static formula or solution.

It reminds me of something Ram Dass once said (quoting approximately):

“Our human predicament seems to be that we must live with two truths simultaneously: that all Being is One, absolutely and mind-bogglingly perfect, just as it is; and also that there is an experience of suffering, and of wrongness, and that compassion compels us to do something about it, to try to make things better.”

The poles of Hero and Sage have always existed, of course, but different cultures and different epochs of human evolution have placed very different emphases on one or the other. Historically, heroism comes into its fullest expression, according to Campbell, with the advent of warlike, patriarchal cultures, who give priority to masculine, sky-gods. These religions replaced the older Bronze-age, goddess-oriented religions, and their emphasis on wisdom, acceptance of impermanence, and the cyclic, cosmic order of time. Campbell is worth quoting at length here, from the chapter called “The Serpent’s Bride” in Occidental Mythology:

“For its is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth, but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother myths and rites the lighter and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature-powers the character mostly of darkness — to which, also, a negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic order of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, as the order of Mother Right. And opposed to such, without quarter, is the order of the Patriarchy, with a ardor of righteous eloquence and a fury of fire and sword.”

He then goes on to discuss the figure of the Serpent, which was associated universally and intimately with the goddess, and which also represented, in its coiling movement, and its shedding of skin, the ever-destroying, ever-renewing, cyclic nature of Time. It is very significant that a number of patriarchal god-heroes — the three best-known are Yahweh, Zeus, and Indra — do battle very early in their careers with a cosmic Serpent, vanquishing that figure (seen as a monster), and thereby instituting a new, heroic order of things. Not the least of this new order of things is a new concept of time. When Yahweh whipped old Leviathan’s ass, Zeus did likewise with Typhon, and Indra with Vritra, they were not just getting rid of monsters associated with the old Mother Right religious order, they were vanquishing, according to Campbell,

“daemons that formerly had symbolized the force of the cosmic order itself, the dark mystery of time, which licks up hero deeds like dust: the force of the never-dying serpent, sloughing lives like skins, which, pressing on, ever turning in its circle of eternal return, is to continue in this manner forever, as it has already cycled from all eternity, getting absolutely nowhere.”

To me, this brings us close to the heart of the tension between the Hero and the Sage, as well as the related tensions between West and East, and between the Masculine and the Feminine. For the Sage, time is characterized by eternal cosmic cycles and the implacable Law of Impermanence. For the Hero, on the contrary, time is actually GOING SOMEWHERE … there is a purpose, a goal, a meaning in its story, its evolution, and its outcome. It seems to be more linear than cyclical — it may contain cycles, but they are subservient to its over-arching, linear story.

How can these be reconciled? Apparently we are faced with a paradox which cannot be solved intellectually, for this dual aspect is inherent in the very nature of the way we think about time. Campbell’s great virtue is that (like Ram Dass, in his comment about our “predicament") he never really takes sides, though he is fearless in pointing out deluded cultural and religious exaggerations on either side (which has led to a number of misconceptions and fatuous charges against him by some critics). And for anyone who is tempted to take sides, and find easy solutions, he offers copious material for deeper reflection, bringing us always back to the paradox.

I am tempted to leave things here, because this paradox is something that each of us must work out in our own lives. But I can’t resist closing with another short quote (with a delicious allusion to Wm. Blake), one which sympathizes with the Sage and the goddess-oriented aspect. This may seem like taking sides — but after all, we live in an age of unprecedented planetary crisis, when the hyper-masculinization of culture, politics, and economics is so imbalanced in its worship of competition, elevating the market to the status of divinity, and those whom it favors to the status of heroes, that it has become pathological, threatening all life on Earth. In speaking of the exquisitely beautiful figures of Cretan and Mycenaen goddess-figures consorting with serpents in a Garden of Paradise, a Garden which appears in many Bronze-age cultures, and which is much older than the Garden of Genesis which was derived from it, he says:

“… [these figures still] stand as a shrine to this goddess of the early Garden of Innocence, before Nobodaddy made her serpent lover crawl, and locked the Tree of Life away for all time.”

I believe philosophy

is only

as liberating

as is its ability to free

our imaginations.

Watching The Source, there’s a moment when Norman Mailer appears (in 1990s present), offers a short poem to Allen Ginsberg, and says

He may be the bravest man in America.

Jay Stevens

The hipster, Mailer wrote, was the man who understood the central role Death had come to play within life—in the Fifties death was personified by the concentration camp (cultural death) and the H‑Bomb (species death)—and as a result had decided “to divorce” himself from society, “to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.” But for Mailer these rebellious imperatives did not include looking into the face of God, which was the whole point as far as Ginsberg and Kerouac were concerned.

In Storming Heaven, Stevens continues
It was ironic, but … at the height of their fame the Beats already were mutating toward what a later generation would call hippies. But a few heard a peculiar siren song amid all the bad poetry and smelly feet. Writing in Playboy, Herb Gold, who was considered an expert on the Beats largely because he lived in San Francisco, was reminded of some lines that William Yeats (another nineteenth‑century man who had thought Homo sapiens was in the process of climbing the evolutionary ladder) had written:

What rough beast, ifs hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

Could the beatniks, Gold wondered, be Yeats’s proto‑gods? Naw. “When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible savior, an evolution up from animality into something strange and wonderful—he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim, the tunneling hipster’s avoidance of feeling can lead to a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a ground hog might someday learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one strange bird.”

Precisely the point Yeats was making.

In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s second Beat novel, there is a moment when the Gary Snyder character experiences a vision of the future comparable to Yeats’s. What he sees is “a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh … wild gangs of pure holymen getting together to drink and talk and pray.”

That was the Beat fantasy, and it was one that Allen Ginsberg was using all of his market research skills to bring about. Ginsberg became the public relations director of the Beat movement, which irritated some of the more self‑reliant poets. He badgered the intellectual journals, particularly hostile ones like Partisan Review and Hudson Review, to publish the work of his friends; he contacted agents and editors and was rarely without a selection of manuscripts that he was trying to place. If the Beat movement was a modestly glowing goal, he was going to do everything within his power to make sure it burst into flame. Years later Ginsberg described the potential of this moment this way:

We’d already had, by ‘48, some sort of alteration of our own private consciousness; by ‘55 we made some kind of articulation of it; by ‘58 it had spread sufficiently so that the mass media were coming around for information, and by that time I realized that if our private fancies, our private poetries, were so serious that they absorbed the attention of the big, serious military generals who wrote for Time magazine, there must be something strange going on.”

What was happening, Ginsberg thought, was an alteration of consciousness that was filtering up through the young into all levels of society. It was as though the country was just catching up to where the New Visionaries had been back in 1944. “That year on the literary scene in New York it was all in fashion to go crazy,” remembers Barbara Probst Solomon. “It was the fashion to push things to their ultimate extreme—all kinds of sexual and drug experimentation. Once, at a party, someone put LSD in my drink, and I went home and woke up seeing things. I thought I was going crazy until someone phoned later in the afternoon and asked how I liked my acid trip …. It was the beginning of the Sixties, really, and I used to say to Larry Roose, a Freudian friend of mine, that it was all very violent, that I didn’t like being part of it.”

America, thought Ginsberg, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Yesterday I received an eloquent and fullsome reply to the post Hero As Myth: The Freedom To Live, from Joseph Rowe, whose recent artistic activities over are worth taking the time to view, read, and listen to. Visit the website Natural Chant and Rhythm, and have a listen to some of the CD tracks here; Natural Chant and Rhythm is led by

Catherine Braslavsky
 
 
and

Joseph Rowe

Joseph Rowe
Thanks for posting William Indick’s very useful resume and structural analysis of Campbell’s archetypal heroic voyage.

Also, thanks, Richard, for a superb reborn blog, so full of rich images and interesting themes!
For me, Joseph Campbell himself is a hero — and more importantly, a great spiritual, psychological, and literary teacher. I would even go so far as to say that for world culture in general, as well as American culture in particular, he has functioned as a kind of trans-cultural healer, helping (often in an indirect, unacknowledged way) to reconnect alienated, modern (postmodern, paramodern, whatever) humanity with our ancient, universal psychic and mythic roots … and leaves! Ever since George Lucas brought Campbell’s mythic insight to Hollywood with the first episode of Star Wars, cinematic art has perceptibly changed (notwithstanding the usual wasteland of mediocrity and routine mass entertainment, of course) — since that pivotal event of the 1970’s, movies have begun more and more often to dare to attempt the great themes of mythic, archetypal imagination, something which (with some exceptions, of course) was done before only in the most routine, predictable, stereotyped ways.

Strangely, Campbell’s writings are neglected, and mostly out of print here in France, where I’ve lived and worked for over 15 years — yet his indirect, invisible influence is still there, mostly through some of the best films and books of American culture (yes, there ARE a few good American influences in Europe, though I grant you, many more bad ones). But it never ceases to amaze me that only university scholars seem to have read or even heard of Campbell in this extremely literate country. I am certain this doesn’t reflect any lack of potential interest — still less intelligence, or imagination — among general readers in France. (Everyone seems to have read or at least heard of Mircea Eliade, for example.) Rather, it reflects the typical lack of imagination and intelligence of big publishers, which we see more and more of now, on both sides of the Atlantic…

However, what I really want to write about here in relation to real-life heroes is something very often overlooked: the question of the value of hero stories and myths for ordinary people. I perceive a serious and widespread confusion here, and it centers around the issue of amplification. Virtually all lives of heroes we hear about are amplified in some way. They exist on a larger scale than that of ordinary lives — maybe only a little larger, maybe vastly larger, as in myth, but almost always larger. This amplification is necessary for many reasons, but it must not be confused with the essential message. The problem is that many people — perhaps most — mistake this amplification aspect as having something to do with the real value, message, or teaching of the heroic story. This is a serious mistake, as bad as that of a would-be musician who yearns to have the same megawatt equipment as a famous rock group, so as to become a better musician. It also often leads to arrogance, inflation, and megalomania — or their shadow-opposites, lack of self-esteem, self-aggression, shame, nihilism, etc…

Modernist literary fashion sensed something of this, and created the anti-hero, with all the ironic and tragicomic aspects. But this threw out the baby with the bathwater.

What these heroic stories are always whispering to us, and the main reason they move us so deeply, is because they remind us that even the most ordinary and humble human life is inherently heroic — if only because we human beings are the only animal on this planet who are called to live in the conscious knowledge and certainty of our (and our loved ones’) inevitable death and pain. Unfortunately, instead of embracing and living up to this noble birthright (which is ours, whether we like it or not), most of us seem to want to flee it like the plague, and distract ourselves at any cost.

I can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that there are many real-life heroes whose scale of action is not at all amplified like that of the ones we hear of, and is often deceptively humble. Yet their “ordinary” heroism may be just as authentic and grand as that of a Neo, a Frodo, a Luke Skywalker, or even a Christ or a Buddha. I’m reminded of Henry Miller’s claim (I’ve never tracked down his source for this) that there is a Buddhist tradition which says that the greatest Buddhas have come in the form of countless human beings through the ages, who work quietly and in anonymity, so that their names never appear in the annals of the Sages, yet their influence is actually greater than all the famous Saviors put together, and that humanity would long ago have perished if not for their actions … I’m also reminded, somehow, of Wordsworth’s little jewel of a poem, “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways.” Strictly speaking, the latter is not about heroism, but it suggests something I’m trying to get at…. that the people who truly get the message of the hero stories, and incarnate that message, are not the kind of people you are likely to hear about in “lives of the rich and famous….”

I’m interested in perusing the meaning of heroes for individuals these days. A couple weeks ago I sent out an email asking for personal stories – if you have personal, intimate and honest reflections of who your heroes are, and reflections on why, please send them, if inspired.

The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again–if the powers have remained unfriendly to him–his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).
– from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces

The text below, which I hope to comment on in the future, is exerpted from:
Classical Heroes in Modern Movies: Mythological Patterns of the Superhero
(Journal of Media Psychology, Volume 9, No. 3, Fall, 2004)
By William Indick, Ph.D.
Dowling College

The hero is the integral archetype in the collective unconscious of American culture. He is at once a collective and personal encounter, as each individual in the audience identifies personally with the hero’s story, while the hero simultaneously embodies the collective hopes and ideals of the culture that creates him. It is this compound phenomenon – the personal identification with the collective hero – that makes the hero archetype so psychologically powerful. This compound identification with the hero fulfills what Carl Jung called the “transcendent function” of myth and dreams.

In Jungian psychology, myths are collective dreams, the communal expression of a culture’s goals, wishes, anxieties and fears. Dreams, on the other hand, are personal myths. They are the individual expression of personal unconscious issues, amplified into visions and projected onto a screen in the “theater of the mind,” in the form of a personalized movie. Experiencing a modern myth in the form of a film is, in a Jungian sense, a transcendent experience, because when we identify with the hero and vicariously experience his journey, we transcend our own private conscious existence and integrate a collective cultural archetype. Furthermore, as a function of the film-going experience, we transcend our own individual neuroses, allowing ourselves to commune with the rest of the audience through a shared understanding, integrating the collective encounter on a personal level.

Joseph Campbell: The Hero’s Journey

Campbell’s model of the mythological hero, from his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), is by far the most influential, especially in the field of screenwriting, for several reasons. First, Campbell himself delineated clear stages of the hero’s journey, providing a distinct structure for screenwriters to follow when devising their plots and character development. Secondly, Campbell’s model is the most eclectic of the major studies, integrating Freudian, Rankian, Jungian and Frazerian theory into a cohesive pattern of heroic elements. And finally, Campbell arranged his model in three broad units, (“the nuclear unit of the monomyth”), which corresponds quite nicely with the three-act structure that most screenplays follow.

Campbell’s term “monomyth” is a reference to a term originally created by James Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake (1939). It refers to the basic elements of myth, the archetypal qualities of all legends and heroes, that transcend individual cultures and specific periods of time. The monomyth is universal and timeless. Hence, the hero that Campbell explains is not one particular hero from one particular myth, but the universal qualities of all heroes from all myths… the “hero with a thousand faces.” The monomyth is universal and timeless because its basic form fulfills a psychological function for both the mythmakers and their audiences. Campbell explained it as follows:

“The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation – initiation – return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.”

The formula of the monomyth is then summarized as follows:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of the common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

And the specific actions within the three parts of the formula are explained as follows:

“The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle is lured… to the threshold of adventure… then the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of his mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), or his own divination (apotheosis)… The final work is that of the return… At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread… The boon he brings restores the world.”

Campbell went even further in his account, breaking this three-part, (or three-act), formula down into seventeen specific stages, each of which he explains in detail. The stages of the hero’s journey are as follows:

Act One: Departure

1. The Call to Adventure

2. Refusal of the Call

3. Supernatural Aid

4. The Crossing of the First Threshold

5. The Belly of the Whale

 

Act Two: Initiation

6. The Road of Trials

7. The Meeting with the Goddess

8. Woman as the Temptress

9. Atonement with the Father

10. Apotheosis

11. The Ultimate Boon

 

Act Three: Return

12. Refusal of the Return

13. The Magic Flight

14. Rescue from Without

15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold

16. Master of the Two Worlds

17. Freedom to Live

A tipping point, brought to my attention by my friend Jeff:

Val Valerian writes:

Earther vs. Earthling

If you live on Earth, you’re an Earther. Earthling is a derogatory term used by Dark aliens and accepted by fools as real. Think of duckling – a baby duck; hatchling – a helpless newborn from the egg. The origin is from the reptilians who look on Earthers as food/slaves/surrogates. The -ling addition says how they look on Earthers as under them, children to be ‘taken care of’ (that’s another topic). As long as you allow that term by using it or not correcting others who do use it, the vibration of the term will continue. There have been some efforts made to change that. In the Babylon 5 series, for example, people were always Earthers. For some reason, in Star Trek, Earthers are never called such, but rather humans, making it sound like ‘all humans’ live on Earth!

In order to uncover the true history of human endevor, the relatively overlooked topic of duck psychology must be studied:

Probably the most balanced Ducks are those who belong to the Loyal Nests. They have no illusions of a great history and do not try to be what they are not. They simply live their lives and try to be as happy as they can. It is only when Ducks mingle with outsiders that their natural inferiority complex comes into play and they try to escape through swagger, bluster or cunning and deceit.

     

It’s a bit tragic that, if glimmers become dreams and dreams become social realities, if the realities are consuming enough, the manifestation appears as organic, simply part of the existing landscape, thus relatively unnoticed. The glimmer of a dream - instantly being able to freely access those most-condensed fonts of human wisdom: books, works of intense labors, devotion – just beyond reach. No more! A panoply of sacred texts translated, straight no chaser.

Just now the golden-sandled dawn has called.

(Sappho, Fragment 18)

Sacred Texts Online

Sacred Texts: Timeline

World Mysteries dot com

Bibliography of Sacreds Texts - with online links

Comparative Religion dot com

Some 2000 free eBooks - relating to Asian cultures and and cultural studies generally

here at the U Virginia eText Center

Beyond Reading: Papyrology Links

Sappho and

Other Women’s Voices: Translations of Writings Before 1700

What greater good can be done for the future without learning, growing into knowledge. Even without a friend, impoverished, with only food, an Internet Cafe and a few bucks – open your mind.

A napkin dripping.

(Sappho, Fragment 110)

M. Scott Peck writes:

I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or anoth­er’s spiritual growth . . . . Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.

I have heard that Peck has helped many; a good friend has applied Peck’s dicta with success in her work. This rant is less about Peck then a general observation about definitions of things larger than we are.

Perhaps the first question about love to contemplate is – might not any definition primarily reveal the reductive thinking of its author? Is the very idea of DEFINING love passé? Definitions turn metaphors, sensations, into literalisms, turn the intuitive and ‘irrational’ into rational logical proposals, things you look up. Definitions replace feeling with meaning; image with cause and principles.

When the day comes that we can adequately accept a definition of love there will be no need for poetry, little need for metaphor. Knowing will be secure, that is, securely contained. It may be this is where society’s headed – I choose to resist this sort of existential center.

There may be some aspect of love represented in Peck’s definition, some small part. To me, it’s highly rejectable. I completely disagree with much of what he’s saying–or the way he’s saying it–his totalist certainty. Love is a highly charged word, but if you take a less charged word, like adoration, it’s pretty clear that you don’t choose to adore something. Adoration is an aesthetic reponse to being touched by the world, through the senses. Being touched (a very different perspective than “the will to” do ~); it isn’t something we choose, except in the sense of choosing to be or remain sensitive. To attend to the world (psychology [to find the the ‘logos’ of psyche] is defined, phenomenologically, as “an attending to, an attendance” by Hillman – i like that) as it lives (an animistic possibility); how much more so, for love. And what is love, without the presence of adoration (adoration in its deepest sense). Adoration isn’t a feeling, it’s dissimilar to, say, anger or happiness. It’s related with value . . .

Without a sense of adoration, is “caring” about the environment enough to “save” it? And, what are we trying to save – if not that which we adore? And, not adoring, is rational logic alone enough to find us truly caring, with power and intent and sticktuitiveness? That is, to value not from the head merely, nor merely from the heart (that’s right), but from our guts as well? It’s an ecocritical question; so far, social results suggest “No.” The idea of love, its extension, feeling, sense, is as much about a leaf as the cosmos as another human being or bug or rock or tree – as Heidegger said, the revealing of existence in its essential being through “projecting into nothing.” If we don’t have a love of that, what’s the point, really?

It is only through “projecting into nothing” that our Dasein [an attunement with Being, but as being-in-the-world] relates to what-is, in other words, has any existence . . .

(Heidegger, Essence & Being, Regnery Press, 1967, pp. 336-340; Wallace Stevens & the Seasons, Lensing, U, Louisiana Press, 2001, p. 140).

The first principle of psychological method holds that any phenomenon to be understood must be sympathetically imagined. No syndrome can be truly dislodged from its cursed condition unless we first move imagination into its heart (James Hillman, A Terrible Love Of War . Penguin, 2004, p. 2).

Hello readers. Creating this blog has been a worthwhile endevor for me. I’d like to continue with it, but wonder what readers like, don’t like, and would like to see more of – please leave feedback or any sort of comment in the next two weeks, by clicking on the comment link just below this post. I’m requesting you take a moment.

twofish heads to Western Canada for two weeks,
the next post should appear September 4.
- - - - -

Yesterday I wrote a rant to a good friend, I’ll post part of it here. The background to the rant has to do with a book. Occasionally a book comes along that affirms ideas and values you didn’t know needed affirming, and the information acts like a chariot enabling further confidence and strength to explore new territory. The slim volume, Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique, by James Hillman, is such a book. The versus in the title codifies a key consideration. Systems, particularly systems that organize persons into “types” (Jungian typology, the Eenneagram, astrological typing, the Buddha familes in Vajrayana Buddhism, the manual of mental disorders, etc.) while useful, worthwhile and therapeutically valuable, also by consequence minimize or ontologically devalue the perception of the unique. There is a polarity betweeen typologic systemization – and the perception of the unique.

The perception of the unique typically becomes subordinated to critical analytical systems of all sorts (categorizations are a means of typing), in order to extract meaning and data from the unique.

T,

if you were to read my haiku writings (i’m not recommending this, as they are focused on a research specialty), you’d find that my strongest “message” is AGAINST REDUCTION. I am interested in approaches which do not reduce the complexity and unknowingness of real experience, but rest in embodiments, flow with it.

Civilization is systems. Language is a system of signs (symbolic representations). So, systems define what we think of as human consciousness. It’s not a matter of getting rid of them, and it’s an impossible task in any case. But we need to have awareness of how exactly, precisely, systemic thinking and perspectives shrink/contain reality. From a Freudian perspective, you could say, we need to investigate how systems are used to defend against the overwhelming unknowingness we swim in.

The most difficult sort of awareness for a fish, is I think, the awareness of water. Water is an unconscious element for a fish, but arguably the most important element or the most primary element. If you were a fish, and you were begining to become aware of water, how would that awareness arise, how would the hints of water enter your senses? I’ll speculate (anthropomorphically): For a fish, water can never be perceived directly, it’s too close to fishness, to what root-fishness is. Hints of water come as unique, idiosyncratically arising psychic landscapes, as dreams, mystical visions, inspirations – in other words, fishness and waterness are “other” to each other – clearly separate, yet paradoxically, one does not exist without the other. You can’t have fishness without water, and you can’t have waterness without fish (because waterNESS, the NESSNESS of water is something only a fish can sense, in its fishlike way).

In a similar sense, as Jung thought, human consciousness is human because uniquely, humans have the capacity to reflection upon perception (some other animals have also a limited capacity in this regard). But the reflector itself, the existential (or ontological) reality of what reflects is hidden, is outside of perception; it’s not in time/space (as reflection occurs in any combination of prior to, during, following perception, is unconscious or an absence). Reflectivity is the water consciousness swims in.

So, notions of reflectivity arise as quasi-forms, perceptions, feelings, straynesses, meanderings, imaginations. That we reflect, that we swim in reflection (and by reflection I don’t mean thinking about life per se, but rather that we know for instance abstractions like “apple” or “time") brings up a useful point about wildness and reality:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. ‘Wild’ as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read ‘language’) a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? (Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, 1995, pp. 163-172).

Ecology and wildness and “the grain of things” and complexity and “information” and “the imposition of order on chaotic nature:” these are the active elements of my current aspiration, seeking. I think what we lack in our culture is a healthy relationship with wildness, a valued means for evolving a sense of “the grain of things” (which involves both an art and craft of life). We need to let wildness in, respect this mind, without containing it. Finding the wild always humbles one.

Controlling and containing the life of wildness (i.e. egalitarian typologies, systems), can help with sorting out incomprehensible situations, confusions, reducing suffering, and can also provide tools for knowledge – science, technology, psychology. Certain “new” psycho-spiritual systems (like Ken Wilber’s integral theory of consciousness) use systems thinking and reality modeling extensively. But increasingly, I see the dangers. First and foremost is arrogance. Second is the separation and minimization of the energy and power of the wild and wildness and a lessening of respect for the universe at every level, by consequence.

So, I’m interested particularly in poetic in systems that deconstruct themselves, and that are paradoxical (like haiku, the work of Ammons, Stevens, etc). I think probably Zen philosophy comes closest, in terms of an experiential philosophy (though not institutionalized Zen Buddhism); Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Plotinus, even Plato use paradox and deconstructive techniques: meanings posed are self-erased, potentially leading one back experientially, kinesthetically, to the perception of the unique – I think this is crucially important to incorporate at every level of analysis in the art and science of systems which attempt to describe the psyche of individuals and/or society.

How’s that for a rant?

I’ve got this and another Metamorphoses post yet. There’s something seductive about the Golding translation, I’m posting the first 20 lines of the Epistle. They just don’t sign books like they used to:

The. xv. Bookes
of P. Ovidus Naso, entytuled
Metamorphosis, translated oute of
Latin into Englysh meeter, by Ar-
thur Golding Gentleman,
A worke very pleasaunt
and delectable.

With skill, heede, and judgement, this worke must be read,
For else to the Reader it standes in small stead.

from THE EPISTLE

At length my chariot wheele about the mark hath found the way,
And at their weery races end, my breathlesse horses stay.
The woork is brought to end by which the author did account
(And rightly) with externall fame above the starres to mount.
For whatsoever hath bene writ of auncient tyme in greeke
By sundry men dispersedly, and in the latin eeke,
Of this same dark Philosophie of turned shapes, the same
Hath Ovid into one whole masse in this booke brought in frame.
Fowre kynd of things in this his worke the Poet dooth conteyne.
That nothing under heaven dooth ay in stedfast state remayne. …
And next that nothing perisheth: but that eche substance takes
Another shape than that it had. Of theis twoo points he makes
The proof by shewing through his woorke the wonderfull exchaunge
Of Goddes, men, beasts, and elements, to sundry shapes right straunge,
Beginning with creation of the world, and man of slyme,
And so proceeding with the turnes that happened till his tyme.
Then sheweth he the soule of man from dying to be free,
By samples of the noblemen, who for their vertues bee
Accounted and canonized for Goddes by heathen men,
And by the peynes of Lymbo lake, and blysfull state agen…

 

Lately I’ve been reading versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is a book which Ezra Pound described as “the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare’s).” He was referring to the Golding translation, 1567, the first in English; Shakespeare’s Ovid. Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC-17 AD; bio, and links here) wrote Metamorphoses in exile, at the age of 52. Of the many translations available, the poet Ted Hughes, (whose free-verse translation, which won the 1997 Whitbread Award for a book of poetry), mentions: “However impossible these intensities might seem to be on one level, on another, apparently more significant level Ovid renders them with psychological truth and force. In his earlier books, preoccupied with erotic love, he had been a sophisticated entertainer. Perhaps here too in the Metamorphoses he set out simply to entertain. But something else joined in, something emerging from the very nature of his materials yet belonging to the unique moment in history – the moment of the birth of Christ within the Roman Empire” (TedHughes in The New York Review of Books, July 17, 1997).

It should be possible to gather quite a large number of translations for comparison. Below are six diverse versions of the Invocation, which appears at the beginning of The Metamorphoses:

MY SOUL WOULD SING of metamorphoses.
But since, o gods, you were the source of these
bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
your breath into my book of changes: may the
song I sing be seamless as its way
weaves from the world’s beginning to our day.
(Allen Mandelbaum, Trans. 1995)

Now I shall tell of things that change, new being
Out of old: since you, O Gods, created
Mutable arts and gifts, give me the voice
To tell the shifting story of the world
From its beginning to the present hour.
(Horace Gregory, trans., 1958)

OF bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
‘Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc’d from Nature’s birth, to Caesar’s times.
(translated into English verse under the direction of Sir Samuel Garth by John Dryden, Alexander Pope, etc., 1717)

I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.
(A. S. Kline, trans. 2000)

Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne.
(Arthur Golding, trans. 1567. Invocation here)

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed
to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods
inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves
and all things you have changed! Oh lead my song
in smooth and measured strains, from olden days
when earth began to this completed time!
(based on Brookes Moore, 1922)

Here are a few more links. Quotes from Ovid’s works, primary sources: ancient texts, Illustrating Ovid (links to rare historical illustrations), additional art influenced by, U. Vermont Ovid Project, voluminous links.

Sometimes, certain questions have to be asked, if only to ask if they have been asked. Google searches some 6-billion-pages these days, the search string “fish on other planets” seemed worth a try. Rewarded by a hit from an AI forum, “language, mind and consciousness,” which in large part quotes Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Philosophy of Physical Science (1967, p.16; first-publication 1939).

A mention about the AI forum foundation statement:

The manipulation of natural human language by a computer, a major research track inside artificial intelligence, at first seemed like a highly tractable problem, but slowly revealed itself to be prohibitively difficult. The research of language acquisition is today central to the science of AI. How do people acquire language? And how could computers? Is there such a thing as a “universal grammar ? And why is it that machines just don’t understand? The science and philosophy of language are the heart of AI.

Sounds promising, and especially as regards the possibility of extraterrestrial fish ("Few listen when Hoagland talks about the face on Mars. But fish on Europa? That’s a creditable, if fanciful, possibility"). The thread “but is it science” was started by the post below:

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the ususal manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations:

[1] No sea-creature is less than two inches long.

[2] All sea-creatures have gills.

These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it.

In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science.

An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. ‘There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them.’ The ichthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. ‘Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of ichthyological knowledge, and is not part of the kingdom of fishes which has been defined as the theme of ichthyological knowledge. In short, ‘what my net can’t catch isn’t fish.’ Or – to translate the analogy – ‘If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science. You are a Metaphysician. Bah.!

Arthur Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science.

“What my net can’t catch isn’t fish.” Rob Hoogers, who wrote the post, adds, “Still a very good parable, even after all these years.” He adds:

But is fishing with dynamite or ultrasound fishing? Does hanging nets above sea-level have any chance of catching those elusive ‘flying fish’, and if so, are these fish in the accepted sense? Do fish object to us fishing them? Do fish bred in captivity have the same animal rights as free fish? Would there be fish on other planets?

These questions must be asked. The questions have been asked. Questions like, what kind of net, what kind of fish, what kind of science? evolve naturally from contemplatiing fish on other planets. As can be seen, the conundrum of fish on other planets, the nature of scientific investigation and the primary nature of artificial intelligence are closely linked.

It isn’t easy, these days, to find a deep psychological extrapolation of current events. William Van Dusen Wishard, author of Between Two Ages: The 21st Century and the Crisis of Meaning, and head of WorldTrends Research, a Washington-based consultancy specializing in the analysis and synthesizing of global trends, begins his thought-provoking 9/11 commemoration speech to the C.G. Jung Institute of New York, Sleepwalking Through the Apocalypse, with this perspective:

“In 1957 Peter Drucker wrote, ‘No one born after the turn of the 20th century has ever known anything but a world uprooting its foundations, overturning its values and toppling its idols.’ If Drucker’s right, and I personally think he is, despite all the political, social and technical advances of the past century, the underlying story of the 20th century was about a world where the historic social arrangements, spiritual underpinnings and psychological moorings that had anchored nations for centuries, have been in a transition of epochal proportions. The tectonic plates of life as we’ve known it are shifting.”

This lecture presents six major points of global shift, and discusses humanity’s future. It’s well worth reading in its complete form here; the excerpts below represent a jumping-off point rather than conclusion. Here are the six major thematic shifts Wishard presents:

First, science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as nature, human, and life. Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology. The faster computers go, the faster our whole tempo of life goes just to keep up. In essence, we may be abdicating our own psychological center of being and handing it over to the computer. Within the next three decades we’ll have reached the point where the question will be, “What are humans for in a world of completely independent, self-replicating technological capability?”

Second, for the first time in history, the Caucasian race is no longer reproducing itself. No European country is reproducing its population; nor are Caucasians in North America reproducing themselves. The implications of this are so far-reaching that it’s difficult even to speculate what they might be.

Third, future ages may view man’s seeing the Earth from the Moon as the defining event of all subsequent history. Joseph Campbell clearly considered it the most significant psychological event of the past several thousand years. Seeing Earth from the Moon vastly accelerated the collapse of all the boundaries that provide identity — boundaries of nation, race, religion, class and gender. Thus everyone, to some degree or other, faces a crisis of identity. This also profoundly affects the underpinnings of all religions, as every religion includes some cosmological concept of how the universe was first created. But space exploration has given us new and different information and perspective.

Fourth, for the first time in history, what constitutes a family is being redefined. This has acute implications for government, education, social cohesion and what we broadly term “civil society".

Fifth, the ability to create change, as well as the attitude that change is desirable, is now a global possession. Throughout history, in all civilizations, continuity rather than abrupt change has been the normal state of affairs. No society on the planet knows how to live with constant, radical change. Thus for the first time in history, every nation is, concurrently with all other nations, in a state of profound crisis as we try to adjust to an ever-accelerating pace of change. Thus there is no global center of stability and order such as Britain provided in the nineteenth century, and America supplied the second half of the twentieth century.

Sixth, our whole symbolic language has been devalued. For example, “Heaven” used to carry a sacred meaning. It was the dwelling place of the gods; a place people hoped to go when they died, our link with eternity. Now we speak simply of “space,” an endless void. Similarly, we used to speak of “Mother Earth,” which gives the earth a creative, nurturing implication. Now we speak only of “matter,” an abstract, lifeless substance. In this way, our symbolic language has been diminished. The function of symbolic language is to infuse into our conscious life some of the transcendent meaning that emanates from the unconscious realm, from the depths of our inner being. That connection has been weakened, so there’s far less transcendent vitality brought into our conscious life.

Returning to the light topic of relationships between the Earth, poetry, psyche, and death (see this post) the following paragraphs are excerpted from the British critic Sir Frank Kermode, whose essay Dwelling Poetically in Connecticut appearing in the book Pieces of My Mind (pp. 153-57), is a gem. For the sake of space, you’ll have to put up with something of a jump start:

‘Poetically man dwells upon this earth’, said Holderlin. In the poverty of the Time Between, one establishes this dwelling by finding the poetry of the commonplace, in the joy of Danes in Denmark, the cackle of toucans in the place of toucans, in Elizabeth’s Park and Ryan’s Lunch. Stevens did it over and over again, observing the greater brilliancies of earth from his own doorstep. He dwelt in Connecticut as Santayana dwelt in the head of the world, as if it were origin as well as threshold. He wanted to establish Hőlderlin’s proposition, and every reader of Stevens will think of many more instances of his desire to do so. . . . The foyer, the dwelling place, might be Hartford or New Haven, Farmington or Haddam. The Captain and Bawda ‘married well because the marriage-place / Was what they loved. It was neither heaven nor hell’ (Collected Poems, p.401). It was earth, and the poetry of the earth was what Holderlin sought and Heidegger demanded. Stevens was always writing it and naming the spot to which it adhered. This is what poets are for in a time of need. They provide a cure of that ground; they give it health by disclosing it, in its true poverty, in the nothing that is. The hero of this world, redeemer of being, namer of the holy, is the poet. Stevens has many modest images of him, yet he is the centre. In that same central place Heidegger sets Hőlderlin and adorns him with words that have special senses: truth, angel, care, dwell.

Heidegger gave the word dwell a special charge of meaning. Drawing on an old sense of the German word, he can say that ‘Mortals dwell in that they can save the earth’, that is, ‘set it free in its own presencing’, free, as Stevens would say, of its man-locked set. There is much more to dwelling, but I will mention only that to dwell is to initiate one’s own nature, one’s being capable of death as death, ‘into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death’. Furthermore, ‘as soon as man gives thought to his dwelling it is a misery no longer’; so out of its insecurity and poverty (‘man dwells in huts and wraps himself in the bashful garment,’ says Hőlderlin; ‘a single shawl / Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor. . .’, says Stevens [CP, p. 524]) he can build, can make poetry. For Heidegger is here meditating on Hőlderlin’s enigma, that we dwell poetically on this earth, even in a time of destitution, and that our doing so is somehow gratuitous, independent of our merits, a kind of grace.

But perhaps, after all, Stevens did know something about Being and Time. Perhaps it was knowing about it that sent him looking, in his seventies, for news of what that Swiss philosopher might have to say about his supreme poet. Heidegger wrestled with ideas we all wrestle with: the potentiality of no more being able to be there, he remarks, is the inmost, one might say the own-most, potentiality. We have many ways of estranging death; for example, we say, ‘Everybody dies’, or ‘one dies’. So we conceal our own ‘being-toward-death’; yet death is the ‘end’ of Being, of Dasein – and the means by which it becomes a whole. To estrange it, to make it a mere fact of experience, is to make it inauthentic. Being understands its own death authentically not by avoiding that dread out of which courage must come but by accepting it as essential to Being’s everydayness, which otherwise conceals the fact that the end is imminent at every moment. There must be a ‘running forward in thought’ to the potentiality of death.

Only where there is language is there world, says Heidegger; and only where there is language is there this running in thought, this authentication of death. It is the homecoming that calls for the great elegy; it is ‘learning at home to become at home’, as Heidegger says of the Hőlderlin elegy. ‘All full poets are poets of homecoming,’ he [Heidegger] says. And he insists that Hőlderlin’s elegy is not about homecoming; it is homecoming. Stevens knew this, whether he learned it from Heidegger or not. He knew the truth of many of Heidegger’s assertions, for example, about the nature of change in art. ‘The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves, to be sure, that we encounter . . . but they themselves are gone by.’ The work of art ‘opens up a world and at the same time sets his world back again on earth’. The perpetuation of such truth is the task of an impossible philosopher’s man or hero. Stevens’ poet works in the fading light; the ‘he’ of the late poems has to make his homecoming, has to depend on his interpreters to make it for themselves and understand that it is impermanent. The advent of the Supreme Poet, who would stop all this, is like the return of the god.

It should be added that the ‘he’, the poet, of some of the last [Stevens] poems, can be a ‘spirit without a foyer’ and search among the fortuities he perceives for ‘that serene he had always been approaching /As toward an absolute foyer . . .’ (Opus Posthumous, p.112). It is a different version of the running-toward-death, and Heidegger would have approved of that ’serene’, for Hőlderlin used the word and his glossator turned it over many times in his mind. Is this ordered serenity too easy? When we climb a mountain ‘Vermont throws itself together’ (OP, p. 115); Vermont does the work, provided, of course, that we climb the mountain. It is not quite easy, but it is of the essence that it is also not quite difficult. The greatest image of the being at the threshold of death is, I suppose, ‘Of Mere Being’, a poem that is also, one may be sure, very late. It contains a foreign song and a foreign bird. There is dread in it. Heidegger, I dare say, would have admired it . . .

Fractal.org is pretty comprehensive. Wikipedia (where the above public-domain image is located) has a good basic overview of what fractals are, with links. “A fractal is a mathematical object that is self-similar and chaotic. Fractals are infinitely complex: the closer you look the more detail you see. Most fractals are generated by a relatively simple equation where the results are fed back into the equation until it grows larger than a certain boundary. Fractal mathematics, thinking and vision have been taken up in various fields. There are a few webrings: UltraFractal webring, the Fractal Artist’s ring, and the Infinite Fractal Loop.
A few online essays:

The Fractal Revolution by Peter Bearse.
Human life is inherently chaotic. People have felt it to be so since the beginning of recorded time. They have sometimes sensed, but mostly prayed, that the chaos may have an underlying structure. Only recently, however, has this hope been expressed in scientific/mathematical terms, as the tracings of an underlying reality rather than merely the subject of deep human yearning. Until the French Revolution, the structure of human existence was an article of transcendental faith rather than human knowledge. The basic “structure” was millennial – the apocryphal City of God, reified by vain men in the form of monuments and causes. The discovery that the “geometry of nature” is fractal has radical implications for human beings’ understanding of their society and of their role in things social and political.

A Man Who Would Shake Up Science by Edward Rothstein.
Mr. Wolfram is finally publishing his work, and his claims surpass the most extravagant speculation. He has, he argues, discovered underlying principles that affect the development of everything from the human brain to the workings of the universe, requiring a revolutionary rethinking of physics, mathematics, biology and other sciences. He believes he has shown how the most complex processes in nature can arise out of elemental rules, how a wealth of diverse phenomena — the infinite variety of snowflakes and the patterns on sea shells — are generated from seemingly trivial origins.