just joined tumblr and googlewave and could not be more fucking confused. #crankypants

It is midnight in the parable; it is also midnight in our world, and the darkness is so deep that we can hardly see which way to turn. – MLKing Jr, A Knock at Midnight.

“Life is very precious, even right now.”— Werner Schroeter

The universal human tendency, he (Chogyam Trungpa) shows, is to see spirituality as a process of self-improvement - the impulse to develop and refine the ego when the ego is, by nature, essentially empty. “The problem is that ego can convert anything to it’s own use”, he said, “even spirituality.”

First line of “the leopard”: Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Not the First line of “the leopard”: Noli me tangere.

Introduction: The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.

I thought I was going to die in the winter of that year. For weeks I experienced terrible fevers. There was the physical strain of fighting off sleep or trying to function as I guess what anybody is really—a little dopey, well-meaning, confused, a very good-looking girl or boy aware of that or not, annoying and delighting friends and lovers, infinitely accepting until we’re not, greeting everyone as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening in the depth of our souls; here we all were at the very end after thousands of years of masks being human and ridiculous and graceful and increasingly and desperately unconscious and stupid amidst a waking and fractured dislocation that we hoped had nothing to do with us.Waking every day into crippling anxiety, we refused to believe, exhausted and swinging between glory and deepest dread; it was all the same: we refused the signs.

The visions were lucid and capable of knocking me the fuck out for weeks, horrified and lonely and sorry for myself that I wasn’t getting it, or immediately comprehending and incapable of moving on a dire, frightening message that was very clear and coming through; I did not know what to do with the waking visions or how they all added up, and I was frightened. I have always had visions, it’s not something awesome or particularly mentionable, except these were different: they weren’t coming from me. Ragged, frustrated, finished, suffering and enraged; the earth was rising up and coming apart, and she was shaking off the virus that afflicted her: us.

The logic of the destruction was right in front of me, it made a horrific, inexorable kind of sense and it’s not dream logic and that was what made me want to die right there and then just out of total fear; what’s the fastest supposed way out of facing your deepest nightmare. You are not wanted? You are the problem, my friend. You created this. These were not visions as I knew them and experienced all my life; sustaining and somehow blessedly other, but experienced and unavoidable in real-time, murderous reality; inhuman. They were increasingly disastrous geo-political scenarios we read in the newspapers or skimmed over on the internet and sighed heavily and flipped out about, all worked up at the disgusting, irrelevant yahoos who chucked their beer cans out into the ocean somewhere, elsewhere, up the coast and now it was floating by us on our little raft on Fire Island, maybe the starfish came out a little earlier than usual and died just as suddenly. Maybe the sandpipers didn’t show up one year. It would be all interconnected with global warming with water being central which would cascade into some other not currently thought about crisis, for example. If there is dramatic water shortage or excessive, whatever catastrophic disruption, then there would also be a dramatic disruption to ecosystems. And people would be forced to deal with, say, animals in a way they hadn’t previously.

The day I got my head out of my ass and realized this I made a weird frantic call to a friend pretty much just relieved that I wasn’t falling apart like I thought I was. The medication is out of my system, I said. She and I just ended up talking about this scenario. She was saying that weekend she had told her Environmental Protection Agency team members sitting with her in the van on the way to an off site about not being able to run on trails in southern California because the mountain lions are attacking people. Shortage of water, lack of food, she said. They adapt and come down to find food and water where the people are, that was the year the animals started showing up in Battery Park and along Riverside Park. That is not a power or fucking totem animal you just ran into mr crystal vision, that is an actual bear or wolf and you will be mauled and eaten. They are not fucking around. I’m sure someone could have made it all nice and poetic. I don’t know.

Also, the last time I had got personally involved with Imparting A Message Of Dire Importance I’d made a total ass out of myself. My grandmother had called in the middle of the night, concerned, after consulting Gordon Scallion’s EarthChanges™ web site, and instructed me to warn my little brother that there would be a tsunami hitting Los Angeles in the next few days coming from I think Hawaii, which had had a two week run of gorgeous weather if I had bothered to look it up. I didn’t stop to think why Grandma didn’t make the call herself, since she had his number, and marched right into a divine messenger complex or whatever and happily intoned into the phone that he should get the fuck out of dodge toot suite.

On October 15, 2011 the water summits failed to address the Arctic Ocean ice sheet and the fresh water supply to the world from its root regulator. You cannot separate water from the environment anymore than you can separate the blood from the human body. The friendly smiling ministers failed to understand, or perhaps failed to tell us, that the water wars have already started and ended in the southwest, they had been going on in Gaza for decades. Or put more simply and honestly, we didn’t care. Just look at Africa or Asia and see the map lines now. There is no aboriginal lands left in the United States, they are dry, dead and gone. And we are dying. Better yet just go there, back into the black void of the states, and have water summits where there is no clean water to drink, no rain, no communities, no people, no life. Gone. Then you and they might understand the reality of the situation. There is no word for relocation in the Navajo language. To be relocated is to disappear and never to be seen again. (Pauline Whitesinger)

AT 608 PM CDT…NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE METEOROLOGISTS DETECTED A LINE OF SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING GOLF BALL SIZE HAIL…AND DESTRUCTIVE WINDS IN EXCESS OF 80 MPH. THESE STORMS WERE LOCATED ALONG A LINE EXTENDING FROM 5 MILES EAST OF OSHKOSH CO TO 4 MILES SOUTH OF NORTH PLATTE TO 21 MILES SOUTHWEST OF DEUEL…AND MOVING EAST AT 45 MPH. TORNADO COULD ACCOMPANY STORMS ALONG RESIDUAL SURFACE BOUNDARIES. EXTREMELY THREATENING CLOUD TO GROUND LIGHTNING STRIKE RECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS… MOVE TO AN INTERIOR BATHROOM…CLOSET…OR HALLWAY ON THE LOWEST FLOOR OF YOUR BUILDING. COVER YOURSELF WITH BLANKETS…PILLOWS…OR A MATTRESS FOR PROTECTION. A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 1000 PM CDT

“A samå, the spiritual oratorio, is held in the memory of the one who, himself, had said: The king of pure thought Dancing, has gone To the other country. The country of the Light.” (p 57 rumi and Sufism)

Rumi had said: “if you are seeking. Seek us with joy for we live in the realm of joy.” (p 57 rumi and Sufism)

Rumi had said: “If you are searching, search with joy, for We inhabit the kingdom of joy.” (pg 33 Rumi and Sufism)

The Cosmic journey of the soul is, in fact, a spiritual itinerary, like Dante’s periplus through the different worlds… It is in the given realm of the soul that we find the heavens which Govern the skies of the world.

“What does the heart that is intoxicated with the Beloved know about the road, the day’s journey or the distance, short or long? Long and short are attributes of the body, the mental journey is of another kind. You have traveled from the seed to reason; it was not by making steps or by going from stage to stage or by going from one place or another. The mental journey is not affected by Time or Space, it is from our minds that our bodies have learned to travel” (p87 rumi and Sufism)

The soul is royal. The water wars have started. Water refugees are all over the world and it is not a simple historically or biologically accurate human migration pattern, there is no containment except in refugee camps, border towns, quarantined, avoidable only if you have the insurance and the money for government or local police protection. It is not even seasonal or regulated and safety zones are contracting while sanctioned pogroms are allowed. Droughts have intensified.

“We think we can apply justice to it,” she says, “but institutions are the dirtiest places. I try to create resistance, to come back to innocence and transparency.”

There’s a World Tree growing in New Mexico. Really. Its roots would have to be through Tibet. I pulled my head out of the Deli’s beer case and looked hard at her. She pointed at the newspaper front page blaring some mess about crystalline tree branches as big as one of the new buildings built and abandoned down by the Hudson River piers near 14th street. Baby, listen. I don’t know it looks amazing though. She whistles softly, someone is really convinced that this is a whole new species of what? Oak? I bet it’s petrified wood.

That’s very much less exciting then a World Tree. What about the unicorns ha ha ha. There’s petrified wood up in Inwood Park. And I go back to sorting out which beer we want just then. Ooh that’s totally cute! There’s a beer called “Crop Circle”.

There was a crossover comic series I used to be crazy about. It was the X-Men and New Teen Titans. The Palisades over in New Jersey across the river look like a certain vista in that comic. It was an enormous, generous panel, a spread over two pages which at the time represented out of the box design and depicted these enormous cliffs at the Edge of the Known Universe and beyond that was labeled (by me, right now) God Knows What.

The Villain was an amoral Galactic entity named Darkseid. The evil space tyrant Darkseid is continuing his efforts to break through the Source Wall so that the power of The Source can give him dominion. Thinking that the energy associated with the Phoenix Force can help him penetrate the mysteries of the Source, Darkseid sets in motion a plan to recreate the Dark Phoenix and the cliffs or “the source wall” had the space and volume; the enormity of Pink Floyd’s The Wall before it came down. Have you ever seen that concert? The pink pig blimp floating outside the Ministry of Art in Children of Men was a direct nod to the production and artistic direction of that concert. The Source Wall is that colossal.

I think the artist was Walt Simonson who also did Elric of Melnibone oh I loved him and he was my favorite comic artist except for the New Mutants, a series with an oddly dark tone, which was heightened with the arrival of artist Bill Sienkiewicz. In addition to very serious depictions of teenage angst and growing pains, it had themes of mysticism and psychic boundaries. He drew a spirit bear that still scares the crap out of me. It was called the “Demon Bear Saga” and I can picture that Ur-Bear right now coming out of everyone’s deepest cultural and emotional nightmares. Sienkiewicz painted the Classics Illustrated adaptation of the novel Moby-Dick. Of course he did.

Anyways, it’s about 3:30 am on a Monday and we are strolling downtown along the river on a transitional night between seasons and maybe The Demon Bear and Source Wall are out there now for real. I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, and dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now? I really got into it and at that age I was incredibly careless about shit but this I really loved and paid attention to: what was created by two universes of super-personalities and mutant powers and familial super-issues and all of it colliding and hybridizing, each team had a mad specific dynamic and it became like seeing the Magic Flute which actually makes no sense normatively or otherwise and is enchanting and really great with the Temple of the Sun versus the Queen of the Night representing a dangerous form of obscurantism and she is stealthily out of her mind batshit singing “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” (“The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart”), which reaches a high F6 (see Scientific pitch notation), rare in opera.

At the low end, the part of Sarastro includes a conspicuous F in a few locations. And everybody of course falls in love with the prince. Libretto Scene 9: An open country! Scene 8: The pyramids! How can you not love this? It is all the Enlightenment all the time! Sarastro, echoed by his fellow priests, then sings a prayer to the gods Isis and Osiris, asking them to protect Tamino and Pamina and to take them into their heavenly dwelling place should they meet death in the course of their trials. O Isis und Osiris. Whee. Or listening to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk for the first time while driving down Route 1 to Big Sur or even just to Santa Cruz by way of Pacifica. They know what is going on. Somewhere someone is playing Fleetwood Mac’s entire glorious album, Tusk.

Where is that pay by the hour hotel The Liberty Inn I thought it was somewhere around here? There was an art show there once like the gramercy hotel art fair, but I just wanted to fuck you in every falling down room. The windows were open and the air off the Hudson was coastal. A reputedly priceless Goya etching from the Disasters of War series was stolen last month from a gallery in the Colombian capital Bogotá. Visiting the exhibition in the Andean city days after the theft, I found a photocopy in place of Goya’s Sad Premonitions, with an optimistic caption: “Space reserved for the return of the work.”