Connecting to the soul energy in my handful of dust.
Burial of the Dead
T.S. Eliot
“There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock.)
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (9)”
“Fearing the shadow that strides behind us before the noon of life is as natural as fearing the shadow rising to meet us in the evening.
What is different in the fear that Eliot is describing is the pervading sense of loss in so many people in our twentieth-century wasteland- loss so deep that the vital spark goes out, leaving a hollow shell. Patriarchy is crumbling.
The values that were taken for granted for centuries are being questioned as we watch our raped planet wither under the pressure of acid rain, toxic waste, overpopulation.
We can choose to tyrannize our inner victims and deny our fear, as millions of addicts are doing, or we can try to connect to the soul energy in our handful of dust.
Oppressed peoples around the globe are hearing their inner victims and fighting for their freedom in whatever way they can.”
Pg. 121 Lover can you Spare a Dime? The Ravaged Bridegroom, Masculinity in Women. Marion Woodman
#marionwoodman
I like to find fabrics with lovely colors and designs. I place them around my home. Sometimes the cats sleep on the material of red or golden.
Sometimes I hang the fabric material on my windows, as this textured sunflower pattern, to see the numinous wonder of light and shadow patterns playing on the opposite side of the wall.
His beauty was notable even in a province where the lack of it is more exceptional in a young man. It was the sort of beauty that is celebrated by the heroic male sculptures in the fountains of Rome. Two things disguised it a little, the dreadful poverty of his clothes and his stealth of manner. The only decent garment he wore was a black overcoat which was too small for his body. Its collar exposed a triangle of bare ivory flesh; no evidence of a shirt. The trouser-cuffs were coming to pieces. Naked feet showed through enormous gaps in his shoe leather. He seemed to want to escape the attention which his beauty invited, for whenever he caught a glance he turned aside from it. He kept his head lowered and his body hunched slightly forward. And yet he had an air of alertness. The tension of his figure suggested that he was continually upon the verge of raising his voice or an arm in some kind of urgent call or salutation.
~Williams, Tennessee. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (New Directions Bibelot) (Kindle Locations 22-24). New Directions. Kindle Edition.
Rendering of Flowers, lemon and Turkish Tea Pot… to be water colored soon by Hudley
Tennessee Williams wrote only two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950, adapted into a film in 1961, and again in 2003) and Moise and the World of Reason (1975) I have watched the 1961 film several times. Haunted by the film as many are, I had to read the novel to answer some questions that I have. So, the above quote is so beautifully tragic that I am taken to my youth and my world now as a senior citizen. Yet, the description above reminds me of the many young beauty punks I knew in my youthful years. I think, or should I say know… describes what I feel and saw back then. So perfect…. A door to a writer an education by him… what joy I feel. The right time and place to understand where I can alchemise his magic… a balancing of love and disdain I am sure.
“For life moves out of a red flare of dreams Into a common light of common hours, Until old age brings the red flare again.”
~ The Land Of Heart’s Desire, William Butler Yeats
Retrospective action is part of a process which helps us find solutions to human problems. So much is going on in the world and in my personal world. Where does one seek or find balance? Meditation maybe? Exercising and eating properly, that might be part of the answer. There is more to hypertension than the human body. It seems a common reality in these dark political times shared by many!
While putting together some positive moves towards balance, I came upon a few old friends. One is a meditation site called freeMedation and an old poem by William Blake entitled Jerusalem. Yes, going back to healthy practices and inspired ideals.
Shocked by the inclusion of this particular rendition of Blake’s poem on this site, it is still very endearing to me. It is a poem set in a place and time that one can transcend using retrospective meditation.
The poem speaks to us. For is not Jerusalem the palace [place] of our heart’s desire?
Below is an image, a facsimile, from my Blake collection. It has vast symbolic layers.
“When the morning Stars sang together. & all the Sons of God shouted for joy”
Side stepping biblical perspective, this image holds reference to three important elements: The stars known as the Pleiades, humanity, and the cosmos. Our foresight needs to put roots into the ground as a solid anchor. This need is achieved by reaching with retrospective action. Thus, bringing together the past, present and future. A balance for our crazy times.
The image shows me understanding revealed in meditation. Therefore, I love Blake’s work.
While sitting in my computer room I heard a lady screaming. In a fire windy weaving voice yelling,
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!!”
The car raced by my home. Oldest son heard it too. It was not directed at us, but we did catch it in passing.
Last night while watching reruns of Ancient Aliens I came upon one old image I’ve studied and another that I did not know about. The flower of Life and Leonardo da Vinci’s long-lost portrait of Christ ‘Salvator Mundi’
The flower of Life means many things but the one meaning I love best is that it represents the universe.
The Christ portrait is fascinating. I am amazed by a sphere he is holding. An interfaith symbol that other religious masters hold as well.
Two mystical round bubbles or circles of insight came together in my mind. Because Leonardo da Vinci shows the Flower of Life in his works, I found this an interesting point of reflection and study.
So, I did my own improvisation and put the flower of Life in the bubble sphere. It was fun to do.
I hope the lady who was screaming will have a better day then she seemed to be having.
Flower of Life Symbol
Salvator Mundi is a painting that depicts Christ blessing the viewer with his right hand raised while holding an orb in his left. The Latin title translates to “Saviour of the World”. The painting is attributed to the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci and is dated to around 1499–1510.
Leonardo da Vinci’s long lost portrait of Christ ‘Salvator Mundi’
The paintings below by Albrecht Durer can assist us to understand the esoteric importance of the planet Saturn. Saturn’s influence on us. “They all incorporate the symbols of Saturn to communicate a basic teaching.” I invite you to dwell upon these images and pine the importance of inward growth especially those who ponder in the world of melancholia.
“Melancholia” by Albrecht Durer
“Melancholy fury” stimulated the three highest human faculties : intellect, reasoning, and imagination” His observation was that a higher consciousness emerges from darkness.”
[Cornelius Agrippa of Nesheim 1509, from De Occulta Philosophia]
“St. Jerome” by Albrecht Durer
“The old man has transformed his gloomy cell into an earthy paradise with LIGHT streaming through the windows… his writings emphasize industry and resolve rather than despondency.”
“The Knight, Death and the Devil” by Albrecht Durer
“The knight riding on with a sense of purpose…”
Quotes taken from The Saturn Pluto Phenomenon by Joy Michand & Karen Hilverson Pages 3 and four.
Winged centaur, Etruscan black figure amphora, attributed to the Micali painter
You’ll have to get out of these little boxes, you know, physics on my left and psychology on my right, you can’t do that, you cannot do that in dealing with UFOs. What I’m saying is you cannot do that anymore in dealing with astrophysics. The problem that scientists have today is that time and space, the way we were thinking about them, don’t make sense when you begin to deal with particle entanglement and with entanglement of larger physical things. So we’re going to get to the same place eventually.
Dr. Jacques Vallée
Page 88 The SacriDcal Murder Carl Jung “Red Book” – Carl Gustav Jung / The Red Book
“But the way is my own self, my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wanted to be ever-present. But I’m ashamed of my God. I don’t want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous.” Jung 78/98
I have not done this for a while. To randomly pick a book and open the page and read a paragraph. It is a type of trance effort. Some of the worst and best loved characters that I have read or studied live in a kind of trance world. A place of myth, magic and raised consciousness. William Blake, Carl Jung, and the pitiful creature known as Adolf Hitler. I am studying Hitler’s biography now. I was amazed how his and their lives moved in the same worlds.
The place of science, math and technology works in our modern age. The world of Blake, Jung and Hitler are different. One cannot superimpose our current world upon theirs. Which leads me to the randomly picked book and paragraph today.
Blake is a marvelous visionary and artist. He inspires humanity to think and brings beauty in reach of our grasp. Jung heals humanity with his depth psychology.
Hitler inverts compassion and goodness. He shows us what the worst part of human nature is.
They all use their unique wills to inspire or destroy.
Blake and Jung show us that humanity is a wondrous reality. They have dived into their unconscious and show us luminous stars and a good conscience.
We find our history and our future with inspired foresight; what it is to do good for humanity. Blake keeps the best and the worst at bay while focusing his will to ascend to transcendence.
Hitler did this too. To understand him, his world, one becomes aware of a trance of darkness; he is a mythologist of national German superhuman qualities…of what it is to be demonically insane! He is without a touch of the human soul or spirit! No sparks make him human. Hitler is the trance of a monster! How can anyone in their right mind address such a hideous freak as him with a salute?
William Blake ~ Europe, A Prophecy 8
“It is one of the wonders of human existence that a person can live a long and happy life without once becoming aware of the reality of consciousness and its ability to transcend the immediate physical level. At the instant of death, will time suspend its rule long enough for such people to realize what they missed?”
~ Pg. 153 Jacques Vallee, Confrontations; A scientist’s Search for Alien Contact.
I love Vallee. He is the scientist that places himself in the world of myth, magic and raised consciousness! He does not ignore art or music either. He rings the heart of a compassion that wants to know. He transcends a nationalist myth blending with Blake’s “universal humanity,” or Jung’s “collective unconscious.”
“In his late works, he embodied these and other ills in the nightmare ridden figure of the cosmic giant Albion, or universal humanity, who has fallen into deadly sleep of mundane existence. In humanity’s coma, the divine is a remote and forbidding sky-god: nature a sterile heap of atoms, lovers and family members, enemies; and one’s own innermost being, an unrecognized alien.”
~Blake’s Poetry & Designs ` A Norton Critical Edition.
“…unless human beings could live at peace with one another.”
“In Goethe’s world conception, which is of a magical nature, both man’s spiritual and physical existence is related to the whole Universe of Stars, Sun and Planets. Just as man is not limited to his physical body, which Goethe conceived as the garment of both soul and spirit, the stars are not considered as simply meaningless massed formed in a three-dimensional space time continuum. Rather, Goethe regarded the heavenly orbs as the outer physical expression of Spiritual Beings, higher nonhuman Intelligences, which radiate spiritual and qualitative forces with their operative orbits.”
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
~Pg. 162-3 The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft
I am whispering in case the heavens are listening. This month the moon, sun, and planets are making a big deal about their place in the heavens, again.
I get it. It is a lovely galactic symphony. So, come the trials. Some are big and some very subtle and diabolically a pain in the ass. I try to keep sensible and logical, which I learned from my oldest son. It is hard to sometimes be logical and I turn to my passions.
So, the books start to come. I show a little interest in something from my past and the books will come. Not my doing it is my darn husband.
He has a statistical and chess mind. He thinks that by getting me these books that interest me, he can buy more chess books. So be it. I guess those rosy stories have been whispering in my ear as of late. As I said, it is that time of the year when chaos can be a good thing but unfortunately now it is discerningly a depraved time in our history.
Yet, from the cracks in the universe we find unique gifts like pearls. I shall go with the flow now engaging my moral courage for years to come.
“And while holding the talisman of power in his hands he told his Aides that mankind was standing on the brink of the most evil epoch in the entire history of the Planet. His young subordinates did not know about the Atom Bomb which was a most closely guarded a secret at this time.
They asked themselves what could be more evil than the Concentration Camps of Adolf Hitler’s defeated regime, and they wondered if their General had finally gone off his head. General Patton lift the bunker beneath Nuremberg Fortress in a somber mood.
Doom was written across the future of humanity unless human beings could live at peace with one another, and Patton could see in all clarity the danger of the new confrontation between America and Russia…Soldiers from the Third Division were standing guard outside the massive steel doors of the bunker in the Oberen Schmied Gasse when American aircraft unleashed the first atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic age had begun.”
Pg. 350 The Spear of Destiny by Threvor Ravenscroft
A gift to my mother. Now after her death I take it back and place on a wall in my home.
Over thirty years ago Finding a red rose stained glass five petals.
At a common thrift store then, upon my wall after, a gift to mother upon her wall.
Now upon my wall, again a symbol now I know it means good magic supporting me all along…
“Midsummer night upon the sword, Knights and squires are standing guard, In the grove knightly dance they tread With torches and garlands of roses red”
~ Johannes Steenstrup, CHR The Medieval Popular Ballad, 1968
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) Conductor 71, professor Snape in Harry Potter 7, and President Obama recently came together for me via a tear. A film, a book and a real life happening. It could be life imitating art or art imitating life. All three made an impression of me within the last couple months.
It was a tear in a film that was captured by a character from a woman in love. He put the tear on his rose and inspired a lawyer in heaven to win a case for a man in love.
It was in a book where a dying man gave a tear to someone to show his love for another. To save and share a memory.
It was a real life tear that the President shed today, a tear for lost children due to a terrible act of violence.
All three came together for me today. It is a synchronicity experience in a symbolic tear and a real tear that to me represents a subjective feeling part of my human soul and conscience.
To cry for love, grief, joy or saddens inspired by the art of a writer or real life person is a worthy experience. I was touched by a film, book and the act of a real person and I feel that for me it is wonderful that I can have art imitate life, or life imitate art in my own inward experience.
In one of my first college English classes I was taught that the objective and the subjective can cross over as in a metaphor yet more often as a simile.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate”
Sonnet 18 Shakespeare
It may be existential and philosophical to be inspired by a book or a film, and real life tear expressed freely and sincerely shared with the world.
Why a tear comes to mean something to me is amazing. Why it clicked together in my mind and caught the attention of my heart who can say. Yet I know poets and writers ponder on many things… and I am sure I am not the first to wonder about a tear romantically, lovingly, or sadly. Be it form a book, a film or real life experience.
“1940 is the year when we approach the meridian of the first star in Aquarius. It is the premonitory earthquake of the New Age.” We see how Jung considered earthly occurrences in a cosmic context, with an eye toward the approach of the Age of Aquarius, which was supposed to come after the Age of Pisces in the global calendar.
This fact, differently interpreted by the various esoteric groups, was frequently connected with an “age of enlightenment” and great steps forward in spiritual progress.
But it is not seldom forgotten that spiritual maturity carries the price of great suffering and severe trials. As Jung was certainly clearly aware of this aspect…” Pg. 333-334, The Second World War,
– Jung: A biography.
New Age, Age of Aquarius and “age of enlightenment” always put a little fear in me. At this time of the year the dead whisper their stories through dreams, books and biographies.
This Sunday I pulled my random book. I started reading randomly. The above quote from Carl Jung’s biography pulled at me. Directly pulling at reflections and meditations of the day.
After an early meditation outside near the bomb shelter; small rough golden and dark green leaves falling from the Cyprus tree onto my head, then down to my lap.
Looking up I saw a small song bird right above me on a branch chirping and giving itself a cleaning. I was focused on it. The coolness in the air calmed me as I looked up away further to see another bird flying. A white bird; a seagull or maybe an owl. It was flying South West.
A large bright bird highlighted by the rising sun. In my wonder I then looked down to see that the little song bird had left a white bird poop on my lap.
“Nasty little bird…I think I get the hint!!”
I got up and walked towards the house. Both female cats disturbed by my movement, as they had found a temporary warm home near my legs and feet.
On this Super Full Moon in Pisces where my emotions take over every little hair on my body. I think the long hand of mantis is pulling randomly. A green-golden flash pulls forth a book dusty on the shelve. Portraits and Observations The Essays of Truman Capote. The book is opened to A Voice from a Cloud. I usually only read the first paragraph but so satisfied , my eyes wander with my desire to read two.
“…mysterious, deep, very clear creek…wade and swim in the pure water…”
“One frosty December afternoon I was far from home, walking in a forest along the bank of a mysterious, deep, very clear creek, a route that led eventually to a place called Hatter’s Mill. The mill, which straddles the creek, had been abandoned long ago; it was a place where farmers had brought their corn to be ground into cornmeal. As a child, I’d often gone there with cousins to fish and swim; it was while exploring under the mill that I’d been bitten in the knee by a by a cottonmouth moccasin-precisely as happens to Joel Knox. And now as I came upon the forlorn mill with its sagging silver-gray timbers, the remembered shock of the snakebite returned; and other memories too-of Idabel, or rather the girl who was the counterpart of Idabel, and how we used to wade and swim in the pure waters, where fat speckled fish lolled in sunlit pools; Idabel was always trying to reach out and grab one.” Pg. 283 Par. 2.
” Excitement-a variety of creative coma-overcame me. Walking home, I lost my way and moved in circles round the woods, for my mind was reeling with the whole book. Usually when a story comes to me, it arrives, or seems to, in toto: a long sustained streak of lighting that darkens the tangible, so-called real world, and leaves illuminated only this suddenly seen pseudo-imaginary landscape, a terrain alive with fingers, voices, rooms, atmospheres, weather. And all of it, at birth, is like an angry, wrathful tiger cub; one must sooth and tame it. Which, of course, is an artist’s principal task: to tame and shape the raw creative vision.” Page 283, Par 3.
“Believe it or not, authenticity wins out over popularity in the end.” ~ Unknown
From A collection of symbols found when nature and man-made things merge. Hudley Flipside
“At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.” Pg. 165 Par. 2
~ The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, H.P. Lovecraft
I never imagined bringing H.P. Lovecraft and Elvis Costello together. Maybe it is because they both represent something lost in my life, such as the wild nature of randomness or the trek it took to find something new. Ones creative spark of unknown possibilities ? It was like galloping the hills of unknown mountains, or driving to new clubs to find ground breaking music. Only needing a loose possibility of familiar faces.
Here at the office of The Seminary Of Praying Mantis are many many books. Mantis does more than, with silence and insightful grace, sit on a flower or leaf. Often Mantis is found engaged in a book. As this is a seminary of sorts, and today is under the wonderful magic of a waxing gibbous moon; this day comes forth the ritual of random pick from a book day. Ordained by mantis and so forth etc… with a front leg, that is sharp with spines, grasps open a book… randomly of course !
