Modern Mythology

Living in Stories - Planetshifter Interview

2010-09-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

Stories pass through our lives, tying us together with intimate bonds of shared understanding. A framework of words and ideas provides the impetus for our actions. In this lies one of the strongest calls to mythology. In myth the stories we live every day take on universal significance.

To change a culture one must change the cultural myths, and this must be done on an individual level. Multi-media artist, writer, and theorist James Curcio’s new anthology, Immanence of Myth, seeks to delve deeper into what myth is, how it remains relevant today and how we can live meaningfully through our understanding of it.

With Immanence of Myth, Curcio has collected the thoughts of contemporary artists, writers, theorists and creatives to address a more active understanding of the mythological process and to begin looking at how the process of active myth making can be a powerful tool for change.

Read Interview

Cannibals and Kings

2010-07-22T20:57:00.000-07:00

Cannibals and Kings provides a great deal of compelling anthropological thought; it focuses on a systemic view of the ebbs and flows of culture, and has been quite a mind-fuck for me, as I've been reading it in stops and starts alongside Manuel De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Harris' style is dry but concise, and considering that dryness it is surprising what a quick read this is proving to be. (1000 Years of Nonlinear History, on the other hand, may take me about 1000 years to finish.)

I won't reiterate the central thesis of the book, as it is easy to find on the net. I will say this: a central conceit of this book, and many other works of (theoretical) anthropology that I've encountered, is the premise that there is some intention lying behind the large-scale endeavors of man. Though many of the ebbs and flows discussed in this book-- as one method of production and consumption is outmoded by population increases and so on-- can be understood to operate almost like a thermostat, lying underneath his arguments is the idea that there is something intelligible, something orderly, something sensible in macro- scale human behavior. I'm not saying I agree with this premise, or disagree. I don't honestly see a way that we can know one way or the other. But it's the invisible hook you have to swallow to follow him where he wants to take us. (I was going to say "implicit hook" but I really don't know how a hook can be implicit.)

Purchase book.

For more reviews like this check out the Goodreads widget on the sidebar.

Murder The World

2010-09-04T16:17:00.001-07:00

egowhore-cover
Originally uploaded by agent139

A quick announcement for those that'd been following the production (and podcasts) tied to Murder The World:

We will be releasing that material as our second album, "Murder The World," as soon as it is ready. In the meantime, EgoWhore should be available through most major online retail services within the next month. I'll keep you posted.

Special G-Spot Interlude: MTW in the studio part 2

2010-08-13T17:48:00.000-07:00

Professional lunatic James Curcio takes over again for an episode and brings you back into the studio with MTW. This episode takes us even further out of the realm of good taste than the first, through a melange of tracks in progress, various prank phone calls, conversation outtakes, and flat out mind-fucks. Topics include independent music production techniques, catheters as tripping toys, amyl nitrate, psychological malaises of suburbia, voodoo, trickster Gods, and a lot more.

The tracks in this episode are taken from MTW’s upcoming release Nothing Is Sacred, and two tracks from Captain Zombie, another project being cultured in this dank basement. The outro track is provided by DJ Homicidal Rapist.

Check out the albums when they’re released if we don’t all OD on cough syrup and fermented yak semen, or invoke a wrathful demon that replaces all of our bodily fluids with nutella.

Defile Your Brainpan Here
Direct Download (mp3)

My Creative State of the Union

2010-08-28T15:35:00.000-07:00

For those interested, this is what I've been up to :

The Immanence of Myth proof copy has been taken off lulu. A handful of them went out to people, hopefully I'll get some feedback from you by the end of September, which is the deadline for this proofing run. I will then be working on integrating proofing input, doing another pass myself, and working on getting the formatting consistent so as to prepare it to shop to publishers. (Layout and final editorial will be, god willing, handled in-house by them.)
The Hoodooengine album EgoWhore is very close to complete: 7 of the 9 tracks are in the final mixing and early mastering phase, and the remaining 2 tracks are close behind. This project is somewhat in the vein of Chemlab, KMFDM, and Ministry, with a lot of drum and bass and even crunk influences finding their way in there. It is dancy, over-the-top and sci-fi. We hope to pick up a label and be able to do at least some short tour support for it in the coming year. Either way the album will be made available online, on iTunes, and on Amazon, as soon as that is possible. This album was produced and arranged by Marz233, I did assistant production and guitars, and Johan Ess is on vocals. (Plus some special guests here and there.)
I just completed a 2k word short story version of the first plot arc for the Nyssa comic script that I wrote last year. I've been having a hard time getting any sort of consistency out of the art development so I wanted to move ahead with a prose version. I'm contemplating putting together a pitch of the following plot arcs (which would constitute a novel) and shopping them to publishers as well. On the flip side, I am still interested in re-exploring a visual interpretation of the story with photographic source, possibly with Sean Jenx. One way or another one or all versions of this will be getting shopped around for print ASAP.
Murder The World is on hold until we find a vocalist for the project. For now we're going to focus on HoodooEngine. But you can enjoy our podcasts!
The Y script is being formatted for release with Weaponized as a hardcover book. It will likely include an introduction, I'm sure. We also intend to put together a free media offering to help bring the world of Y to you, which will include a debut of a couple of the HoodooEngine tracks. Release date TBA.

On that note, anyone want to help me plan, organize, and implement these submissions so I don't have to completely stop creative output for two months? Well if want hands on experience of this kind of thing and have time to spare, we could work something out. You must be dedicated to the task at hand, confident, and be able to think on your feet. Email me. If not, I'll put the kettles on the back burner and get out the spreadsheets myself.

No Write Way Redux (part 3 Drink To Success)

2010-08-22T13:35:00.001-07:00

(read part 1, part 2)

Maybe you've tried everything I've suggested so far, and you're disappointed to find that you're still not a great writer. Don't worry. Most of us aren't. But there are other tricks we can try.
There's a story that Hunter S. Thompson used to re-type the novels of the “greats” like Faulker, word-for-word, so he could hear the “music” behind the language. That sounds like some brilliant myth-making bullshit to me, but we'll go with it. Maybe we can find some common element behind the methods of now-famous authors. Model their methods, and you model their success.
If you take a hard look at the lives of Hemingway, Joyce, Poe, Hunter S. Thompson, Faulkner, Burroughs, Bukowski, and many other writers who have gained the mantle of post-mortem fame, we can see one commonality: they weren't teetotalers. That's a nice way of saying they were fucking drunks. (Many of them also had dead wives, but murder is right out.)
If nothing else has worked for you, you too should try drinking. I suggest a good single malt scotch. At least 15 years in the cask. Some writers prefer a finer scotch than that, but I think that your writing skills will improve regardless of the vintage. After all, Hunter wasn't so selective. He drank Wild Turkey like it was water, and he was a fcking genius.
You might still be staring at that blank screen with a feeling of horror. Spin the ice around in the glass. A firm, hefty glass. You want to feel the weight ofit in your hand. Stare through the ice to the source of your inner creativity as the ice slowly comes back to rest. For meThe sound of icee swirling brings on inspiration to unlock worls for your reader.
Dont take my word for itf you dont beleve me. By way of demonstgraintg to you the effectiveness of this technique I have been taking a slug myself with each couple sentences. It's like mehtod acting in motion. A smooth action motion like the bolt of a rifle or draught of godhood. Drink to success, not excess. Are you a genius yet? I am
If you still don't habve a grasp of your plot or characters, have another. Eventyally it'll work. Open up to the dfjf and moood enuff to wind the wyndlesssss. Tentacles. Plot twees.
Terrors of night awAIT--

No Write Way Redux (part 1)

2010-08-21T10:52:00.000-07:00

Working on a revamp of an old blog series I started back in 2007. Right now being guest blogged on Feckless Goblin's page:

There are many ways for a would-be author to get their work into the form of a physical book these days. We are going to cover those later, but it struck me that in most articles I’ve seen about self publishing, whether the final product is a physical book or a blog of some kind, the actual process of writing a novel is often overlooked.

The down-side of easier access to publication is a reduction of signal-to-noise. In other words, if everyone can publish a blog or a print-on-demand book, the chances of that book being unrefined or even worthless increases exponentially. It took me two novels to really catch my stride, in my estimation, so part of this has always been, and will remain a tautology: “how do you learn to write? Write!”

(Read full article.)

No Write Way Redux (part 2 Methodology)

2010-08-21T22:24:00.000-07:00

(read part 1)

   Once you’ve riffed for a while on your characters, it’s time to dig into the foundation of your story. Find a theme, and maybe ask yourself some questions. Why are you writing a story about these characters? What’s at the heart of the story?
   William Burroughs once said (in his Review of the Reviewers), that “all 'good' writing must get at the human condition, it must have something of 'high seriousness' to it.” It’s hard to say just how literally he intended for us to take the word “high.” All the same, this is a valid point. In theory, fulfilling this requirement should answer the question “why should this story be told in the first place?” Though at the end of the day that decision will likely remain in the hands of feckless thugs with Amazon Prime accounts.
   As I said in part 1, a story isn’t so much about what happened. No matter how bizarre your narrative style, there is still going to be a theme, which is rooted in your ultimate intention in writing the story in the first place. It is only in relation to this theme, and the underlying intent, that you can tell if you’re on or off the bar as you move into the process of actually writing your story, so hold onto it.
   Most intro to writing teachers will tell you at this point to look for the conflict, since that is generally the easiest way to put your characters into motion. “Happily ever after” is a myth that many people have bought for their own dreams, but we all know the story ends there. Regardless of what it says about us, we're bored to tears by a lack of ongoing conflict and resolution. However, these conflicts needn't occur in the outside world: group A and B are vying for the same territory, Man A elopes with Man B's wife (which also amounts to a territory dispute in most cultures), etc. There are plenty of modern novels where very little happens at all outside the minds of the characters. Take Joyce’s Ulysses for instance. This isn’t to say it isn’t rife with conflict, it just happens to be primarily psychological. If you want to talk brass-tacks, it’s about a boring day in Dublin. (On the other hand, not all of us can be James Joyce.)
   This “brass-tacks” approach misses the heart of a story with that kind of intention. Different intentions call for different methods.

   For example, with my first novel (Join My Cult!), I was writing about the plunge into the subconscious that can occur with some adolescents. The entire story, (if you want to call it a story), is centered around that painfully vital, melodramatic and sometimes even terrifying feeling of not belonging, of perceiving a world that no one but your closest friends seem to see. It’s about that, and not what happened at the beginning or end of the story. Those events are just like the glue holding together this odd collage of mental artifacts. If you are telling a story that focuses on the internal, rather than the external, then a clear sense of theme and character psychology becomes even more essential, because there’s nothing else there to move it forward. Most of the content amounts to the deranged ramblings of the characters themselves, whether it is posed in first or third person.
   With my second attempt, (Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning), you have many of the same characters rising out of that state and coming into their own and going out into the world, if in their own bizarre, rockstar-messiah kind of way.
   Even though many of the central characters are the same, these projects seem very different because they are being approached with different methodologies. Again, match methodology with the intention of the project. In a sense, each time you write a book, you have to re-learn how to write a book, if you don't want to write the same thing over and again.
   Every book you write should in this sense be your first. Each theme, each grouping of characters, each intention demands a completely different execution. Different characters demand a different use of the language, and a unique means of exploring the story. Consequently you have a different writing style that is going to arise in the process of bringing that to life. You have to re-discover and re-interpret your voice and your approach to writing, which is why it’s so damn hard to give a step by step process for how to write a novel.
   We may all fall back on conventions, turns of phrase or techniques that availed us in the past, but the more we can avoid that the better. It’s very much like the clichés that musicians resort to when improvising. Some writers will tell you to never resort to cliché. I disagree. However, cliché should only be utilized intentionally.
   A final note on the topic of your theme: if you find yourself purposelessly rehashing, leading with style instead of substance, then it’s time to zero back in on the vital kernel inside your story, and try to be true to that, or there’s really no sense in wasting your time. Or the time of your would-be readers. I know this flies in the face of the marketing sensibility that says that when you find your market, you should just keep shoveling the same shit. Not to come off like a sniveling artiste, but I'm talking about challenging yourself, and constantly endeavoring to be a writer. Not pandering to the desire of a market.
   Back to writing. Now that you have a sense of your characters, and probably a bunch of disconnected scene sketches that you wrote in the process of coming to know them, you can get to the actual story.
If your story does require a complicated plot, I suggest diagramming it out, scene by scene, chapter by chapter. When diagramming Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning, I got out a big ream of paper with a co-conspirator and created a plot arc for each character with a different colored crayon. At the points where events would make different characters paths cross, the lines would also cross. In these intersections, I had to think about what the different characters were bringing to that point in time – the ever repeated character motivation – and how this might catalyze them to work together, in opposition, or simply pass each other by entirely.
   One way or another, start playing around with your story visually on a time-line. I recently adapted Fallen Nation into screenplay format with a regular writing collaborator and good friend, Jason Stackhouse. This process, too, was different. We spent the first few all-night sessions drawing out plot arcs on his kitchen table with dry erase pen, and only when we were satisfied that it all made sense as a composition did we begin divvying up scenes and actually writing. In screenplay format, every beat and every page counts for time. There might be some argument to be made that if you want to write a tight novel, rather than a more meandering one (arguably like my first two, especially the first), then you should plot it out as if you're writing a screenplay. Every action and motivation plays counterpoint to something else.
   We decided on a three act arc, and broke each act into three piece, each of which had between three and five “action points,” most of which became individual scenes. Make flow-charts in Viseo if you feel the need. Your diagram will either come, or it won’t. Make a new method for each project if it suits you. Maybe you want to write a novel where key plot decisions are decided by throwing darts at a wall. More power to you.
If this diagram process is really holding you up, you're not necessarily sunk. You can probably move on to the next step, at least for a short while. Actually writing. You’ve spent quite some time – probably several months – preparing to write your novel. Now comes the part where you write it.
   During this phase, you need to turn off all the critical voices and random impulses in your head. “This is going to suck,” “I should just watch eel porn,” “Should I write it this way?” “I wonder what the etymology of the word bulwark is?” … Show the text to no one that will throw you off track. Share it only with confidants that you trust to not hate you after you've asked them to read three thousand and two versions of the same text. Just be as true to your characters and your theme as you can be, and write. (Remember: this is the fun part. So have fun now, because you may not during the editing phase, and if you're like me, you sure as hell won't during marketing.)
   There is too much to be said about the details of writing a book. For the most part you pick it up as you go along, and if all goes well, your voice will come out of that struggle. However, I want to point out the importance of dialogue. It may be naturalistic, it might be more poetic or formal depending entirely on the intention and tone of the piece as a whole. No one naturally talks like the character's Aaron Sorkin wrote for West Wing, but it's still mostly great dialogue because it matches the tone and intention of the show. My first novel might seem a horrible example of “natural dialogue,” mainly because the primary characters talk like 19th century Philosophers stuck in 18-year-old bodies. You need to be true to the characters… If that’s how they talk, be true to it. If you’re unable to hear their voice, write a couple scenes just in dialogue. Give characters something to argue about or some situation to think through together. Add the other details later. If you still can’t find their voice, you need to get back at your character, and try to find examples of those personality traits in the people and media around you. Find their voice, and come back to the writing process.
   If you get stuck at any point, put down the pencil. (Or the keyboard.) Write something else. Or try this. Lie down, and close your eyes. Do some deep breathing, move yourself close to sleep without slipping away, and then focus in on that character again. Imagine them in your minds eye, at the point that you got stuck at. And just watch. Now sometimes of course you’ll get nothing. They’ll turn into giant pink elephants or you’ll get distracted thinking about crazy zero-G sex or what you’re going to cook for dinner. But sometimes the characters will take over, and that block will melt away.
   This leads me to another point. If in the process of actually writing, your characters feel like they want to go in a direction that wasn’t in your plot diagram, for the love of whiskey let them. If it hits a dead end, the worst thing that happens is you have to delete a couple pages. As a general rule of thumb, if your characters don’t overtake you and your well planned structure and lead it in a totally unplanned direction at least a couple times in the course of writing a novel, you probably need to spend more time breathing life into those characters.
   Finally, and this one can’t be under-stressed: write something every day. Or barring that, as frequently as you can manage without learning to completely loathe writing. Or alienating all of your friends. That sounds really obvious, right? But you’d be amazed how many people do all the planning, and then peter out when it comes to the work ethic.
   A book is literally built a word at a time. I'm told the average novel runs somewhere between 75,000 – 250,000 words. You may have this romantic idea in your head of an author going in and hammering out his opus in a brief, intensely melodramatic fugue, like Handel in fact did with his Messiah. Every word is perfect, and it comes out full-formed.
   Sure, maybe it'll be like that for you. More likely than not, most of your favorite books were written slowly and consistently, a couple thousand words a day. At the end of the process 30,000 words might have been shaved off, and then another 10,000 added to tie together those desiccated loose ends. Not every day is going to give you a gem, that doesn’t mean you didn’t benefit from the effort. Just get up the next day and keep at it. Good luck!

Next I’ll be getting into the editorial process, branding, and the other intermediary steps between your first draft and the PDF you send to the printer.

Dead Language Now For Sale

2010-08-16T23:50:00.000-07:00

Foolish People have released DEAD LANGUAGE through their new imprint, Weaponized. Check it out. (And... check out my foreword.)

Y-Book-Cover

2010-08-17T13:18:00.001-07:00

Y-Book-Cover
Originally uploaded by agent139

Book cover design for hardback copy of "Y" script, BLUEPRINT OF A RITUAL EXPERIENCE.

Published by Weaponized. Design by me. Art by the incredibly talented Daniele Serra and myself. Release date TBA.

Fans of my books apparently like assault rifles

2010-08-17T18:25:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I get an email from someone who's been reading my books, a listener from a podcast, or an album. For several years they came in ten or twenty a day, lately it is more of a trickle thanks in part to the fact that many of the projects I've worked on have been delayed so it's been a while since a release, and people are also using email less I think. Be that as it may, sometimes these emails lead to interesting conversations, even future collaborations. (Though: No, I will not write your idea as a story and split the profits, and no, I will not read your 500 page manuscript about alternate histories and sacred geometry without having any idea of who you are or what I could do to help you.) Sometimes these conversations take on a more disturbing tone-- "I'm trying to figure out how to mic the inside of my head so I can prove that I can read thoughts," the occasional bizarre death threat, you know that kind of thing.

But this just amused me.

"I support the authors/artists I like when and where I can. A year or two ago I might've printed this out at work, but my co-workers get suspicious when I print out 400+ page documents at work and then explaining yourself can be just plain awkward. The first time I read JMC I had it puked out of a printer at this long-term care pharmacy I worked at, among several thelemic libers, and miscellaneous oddities. The faces the pharmacists would make when they thumbed through the documents made it all worthwhile though (we received RX orders on the same printers so they'd freak out an assume it was a fuckton of prescriptions to fill at first. Got one to at least start reading JMC, don't know if he ever finished).

Had to order the Cunt Coloring Book to qualify for the free shipping on lulu and just so you know, your proof copy is cutting into my incendiary rounds funds for my AR-15 for this weekend. There will be a significantly reduced risk of forest fires in my area thanks to you. :("

Free Audiobooks

2010-07-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

Back online: the first few chapters of the audiobooks I produced for Join My Cult! and Fallen Nation. These have an all original soundtrack (produced by myself and many collaborators.)

Download as .RAR, enjoy, and share.

Join My Cult! - episodes 1-13
Fallen Nation - episodes 1-6

Buy Fallen Nation on Amazon.

Immanence of Myth: Proof Copy Temp Available.

2010-08-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

I've decided to temporarily share the link for the proof copy of the Immanence of Myth that we're using for editorial purposes, as this is somewhat of an "open project."

This has been through one round of editorial (only @3 more to go! ... Before it's ready for a publisher to probably have another round.) This is for those of you who have been dying to get your hands on the material, and for those of you who actually want to have a hand in proofing.

For those of you interesting in putting a pair of eyes on it, email me with some semblance of credentials ("I am fairly literate" may do depending on my mood at the time) and I can also share the PDF version.

If you do- I will only receive proof input in the following format: page number, paragraph: ~~deletion~~ / addition (comment).

If your proof input is considerably helpful, you will be listed as one of the proofreaders in the credits. Don't expect that though if you provide two typos, or mostly stylistic suggestions. Proofing is for grammar, flow, typos. Stylistic suggestions are acceptable but not the bulk of what we're looking for. That's my job. Also, as a note, we have a proofreader already signed on for the project internally. I figure the more eyes on it the better at this stage.

This link will be taken down in 2 weeks. The proofing process will be running until September 30th, at which point I'm going to do one more copyedit pass with all the proof input and then start sending MS' to publishers.

Order a Immanence of Myth proof copy. 423 pg. book.

Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

2010-07-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

A Jungian analysis of Fairy Tales. (Or is it the other way around?) Though many Jungian analyists have a "pat" method, von Franz recognizes that this is contrary to Jung's own intention in creating guideline concepts like the anima/animus, shadow, etc. As I had been hoping, she uses fairy tales as a method of showing the various ways that our inner lives can become tangled, or confusing, and sheds light on these through the examples provided by fairy tales. (This is contrary to the approach which would use Jungian analysis as a method of shedding more light on the literary elements of fairy tales, which would be less interesting to me.) Part of her thesis is that fairy tales are often even better indicators of psychological tendencies within a people, certainly within the lower class people, (the "folk") than the more traditional myths of a civilization that we might now encounter in Bullfinch's. I'm not sure if such a clear distinction can be drawn, but generally, it seems plausible, especially within the context of this work. (Goodreads review.)

Purchase book.

Immanence of myth: submission review

2010-03-12T02:34:00.000-08:00

Now that I've wrapped up the first draft of the Fallen Nation screenplay, I have until April to pretty well tackle the submissions for the anthology and get everyone working on their second drafts, or other necessary writing or re-writing. I think a couple writers were a little taken aback by the fact that first drafts don't go straight to copy-editing-- frankly, I don't know a single writer who can pen a first draft that's ready for print. And I know some good writers. This is a labor of love, there's simply no other good reason to do it. It's not even about how good one is as a writer; the more we reflect on the subjects we are considering, the more refined the final result will be. I'm happy to see that so many of the contributors so far have understood that and are working to rise to the occasion.

While those pieces are being worked on, between now and mid-May, I'd like to offer an opportunity. I have a couple ideas for articles that I'd like to see penned, so I want to offer these as suggestions to the public. Even if they don't drop on your head like that apocryphal apple that whacked Newton on the skull... maybe something else will be shaken out of the tree.

Yeah, an iffy metaphor but it's 5:15am here so bear with me:

First, a piece on the mythological connection between sex and death. This is a well documented link, clearly seen in figures as disparate as Baron Samedhi and Kali. However, less explored is the significance of this link in our personal lives. If the link isn't strictly the result of a fairly obvious observation about the nature of reproduction, time and death, then what is it? How deep does it go? Most importantly -- and this is something to try to bring in to any piece written for this book -- how does it impact our lives? Bataille's Erotism might be a good place to start in terms of reference material, but as this belongs in the "personal myth" part of the anthology, if it starts and ends with one's personal experience of sex/death, it will work best.

A look at the mythology behind a specific animal or activity. For instance, beekeeping. Apiaries go back to ancient Egypt, possibly before, and the bee / hive has obvious mythological significance that can be interpreted in both psychological and social ways. Look at the behavior of bees and conflate those behaviors to metaphors, that is, mythologize them. There's also something interesting about the relationship of bees to beekeepers, which I think is ripe for some interpretation, along the lines of thoughts about all symbiotic relationships in nature.

The myths of class and race within America obviously define our perspective of politics within this country. I think a solid look at this issue through the lens of mythology and symbol could be very interesting.

I've received a few pieces about working with specific divinities, and interpreting those symbols in ways that are both psychologically potent and practically useful. They have all done so in a way that is very persona, but also refer to the historical / mythological record. However, I'd really love to see this for a few more divinities / symbols. The point of this diversity, among other things, would be to help demonstrate that it can really be anything that speaks to you, that the methods of interpreting these symbols and the way they can impact our lives is as diverse and unique as we are, even though they refer to archetypical images. So more along these lines would certainly be appreciated.

I could write some of these pieces but I feel like the more voices that we can fit between the covers, the better.

Also, if any of you have a piece ready between now and May, please feel free to pass it my way. Keep in mind that the closer to May that it is, the closer to "out of the park" it's going to have to be. So hit it hard!

Looking at the impact of symbols (part 4, Whiteboy Suburban Shamanism)

2010-03-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

Though I have already said a fair amount about shamanism in the mini-article I posted here about initiation (part 1 | part 2), I feel that my series on my personal mythology is pretty incomplete without touching on this subject in a more personal light.

In the article on Lilith, I said that she had been an initiatrix in my life. That is true. However, not only are initiations ongoing, but they are manifold. They are a breaking point between one psychological center and another; and in the life of any creative individual there about bound to be many of these "little deaths."

   When I was sixteen I had my first real contact with one of these crises. In every way, it falls in line with the "afflictions" that are listed for would-be shamans. Somataform, relapsing and remitting but essentially unending illness - a problem that still effects me to this day - visions, some of them so intense and unexpected as to be completely overwhelming, and a sudden contact with a world that anyone in this culture would describe as schizophrenic. I began talking to entities that I encountered in the woods, or at physical crossroads. They would ask me to do things, and I would often do them without a second thought. They would ask me for possession of my body for a time, and I would, with the usual "what the fuck?" nonchalance of a sixteen year old, give them complete and free access, just to see what might happen. I fed my blood as penance to trees in a forest where I was told-- by the forest, mind you-- that a burial ground had been disturbed. (Odd but possibly irrelevant fact: later research showed that there was indeed an Indian burial ground nearby, and the elementary / middle school I went to was actually built right near it.)
I could go on, my point is that, by all accounts within this society, I had gone from a sensitive, artistic child, obviously a bit odd, a bit of a loner but "normal" nevertheless, to someone on the very brink of some kind of complete and total breakdown. No one knew what to do with me.

(Click on post title for more.)

   And so the medications began. This is the prescribed course of treatment within our mental health paradigm: a couple questionnaires, ("do you hear voices? Y/N", "are you a deranged lunatic? Y/N", etc), and then a seemingly endless trial-and-error process with often clinically suspect substances. They threw one thing into me after the other - Paxil, Prozac, Depakote, drugs with names that sound like alien races from Star Trek - and each one produced worse results. I couldn't see straight, my penis stopped working, I couldn't stand, I was puking every day, I had suicidal thoughts so strong that I had to curl into a ball for hours until they passed - something that never happened before the meds. Paxil made me think I had a parasitic, symbiotic organism living in my throat that was controlling my thoughts, and on and on.
   Yet the doctors continued to say, "no, let us just adjust your meds. You're just experiencing mild side effects." After a point I couldn't tell what was my own insanity and what was a reaction to my body rejecting the chemicals they were haphazardly throwing into it. It was very quickly apparent to me that they were shooting in the dark more than I was. And part of it was because, rather than treating my psychological effects, my visions and so on, as symptoms of my body, my mind, my spirit trying to tell me something, and that whether or not you give any credence to the exterior existence of the entities I claimed were trying to communicate with me, they simply saw them as something no more clinically relevant than a fart in a patient complaining of gas. Perhaps if I had Jung as a psychologist, we would have made progress. But I did not, and when I mentioned Jung to my doctor, they dismissed him as "someone that could no longer be considered a real scientist." (Are you beginning to see why the psychologist and patient relationship is one that has worked its way into so many of my subsequent works?)
   This was another element of my personality that was still already well developed at that point; I always trusted my experience over that of the "experts." I was never afraid to come off like a pompous upstart, questioning a billion dollar industry, thousands of clinical trials, or the philosophy behind two hundred years of psychoanalytic history if it simply didn't jive with what I was experiencing, and, more to the point, what my gut told me. I knew I had to find something else, and after my hopes were dashed again and again that I could find the answers I needed within the culture around me, I started to look outside of it.
   What I needed, and what I never did manage to find, was a shaman. Forgive me if the following definition is unnecessary for most of you, but just to be clear,

"Shamanism is important not only for the place it holds in the history of mysticism. The shamans have played an essential role in the defense of the psychic integrity of the community. They are pre-eminently the antidemonic champions; they combat not only demons and disease, but also the black magicians. ... In a general way, it can be said that shamanism defends life, health, fertility, the world of "light" against death, disease, sterility, disaster and the world of "darkness."" - Eliade, pg. 508, Shamanism.

Now clearly some of this refers to what most of us would call superstition. And due to a mixture of superstitious "magical thinking," and cultural differences, the entirety of the shamanic role is essentially white-washed, (perhaps the unintentional pun is a poignant one.) This is a joke I play with in the screenplay for Fallen Nation, when the modern embodiment of Dionysus confronts his psychiatrist,

DIONYSUS

What experience gives you the right

to be my shaman?

DOCTOR FEIN

(blinks a moment before

replying)

I'm sorry? I'm a psychiatrist. And

I'm here to help you, but only if

you want it.

DIONYSUS

I just spent the past three hours

driving myself nuts trying to

figure out what caused my most

recent bout of heartburn. Could be

repressed childhood trauma. Could

be the awful food you feed me. The

meds. It could be the displaced,

angry spirit of an Ibo tribesman

who, for reasons passing

understanding, feels the need to

take out his vengeance on my

bowels. Any excuse I can come up

with to explain the sensation is

just that... an EXCUSE. A guess.

(beat)

If you don't know what is giving me

heartburn, then how the fuck are

you supposed to treat me? Not a

shaman, not even a real doctor

   Viewed from within the various myths of modernity, demons are psychological forces that either by design or happenstance are destructive to the integrity of the core identity; health and fertility have been mapped out quite elegantly in scientific terms, even if science excels much more at the "how" than the "what," of such issues. Within the frameworks of our myths, we understand how reproduction occurs with greater detail than a traditional shaman, but we are much in the dark as to what it means that we reproduce, from whence our consciousness comes or goes, if it does indeed do either at all, and on and on. In other words, within our present cultural models it is easier to look at a shaman as a sort of priest, even if their role within most traditional cultures was more somewhere between doctor, psychiatrist, priest, and honored outcast. I bring all of this up in light regard to our present discussion because the intertwined issues of spiritual and psychological "guidance" have mostly been pushed to the wayside in our culture. If there is such a thing, "guidance" comes in the form of pure indoctrination. (Which is not to say that this is a historically new occurrence.)
   To return to our semblance of a narrative, here is this uppity, sixteen year old kid that has the audacity to question the prescribed treatment. After all, what is adolescence for but brazen rebellion? And what else would an adolescent at that point do but turn to their peers? This is the point at which this story gets interesting, at least so far as I am concerned. While these effects were beginning to manifest for me, a small group of "outsider" kids such as myself had banded into a strange little group; full of adolescent posturing and all the rest, but there was something else going on there too. We would go out into the woods, and without having a clue what we were doing or why, we would conduct rituals. And, though in varying degrees and ways- they experienced their own versions of the "craziness" that I too was experiencing.
   The mythologized but nevertheless full tale of all of this was retold in my first novel, Join My Cult!, which New Falcon press, rather oddly, chose to publish with little or no revision or editorial. There is a large part of me that feels embarrassed about it now- I pulled absolutely no punches in revealing the histrionic absurdity of myself, or my friends; and some of that was a joke, there is a lot of humor in there, but there's also a lot of honesty too, which is I guess why, to my surprise, that book did find an audience, however relatively small it was. (Between my and their sales, the hardcopy has sold approximately 1,000 copies. No major success by most publisher's standards, but a surprising one considering the intensely obscure and bizarre nature of this book's content. However, the various free PDF editions has been downloaded more times than I can calculate- over 25,000 times, which does not rival its sequel, but is still a surprise to me for such an unusual cultural artifact that could hardly be called a "novel" in a traditional sense. My point being that, despite my better judgement, even after New Falcon changed hands, I have kept the book on the market and have the free PDF still available for download, so feel free to have at it if you so desire, and I will try to avoid blushing when you get to the points where my alter-ego feels the need to pontificate for three pages.)
   I am rushing you through those details because I want to talk about this from a slightly different angle than I could there. I'd like to look at it, fifteen years on, as a symptom of the "initiatory crisis" that we have discussed in several sections of this book. I was not the only one going through this painful crisis, even though all of our crises were our own certainly, and I could only write from my own warped perspective. That is what is culturally relevant; not the particular story, but the fact that it is a symptom of something larger.
   As we've explored, adolescence is always the crisis point, in any culture, when individuation has reached a point that a society must snatch up the unwary youth and consecrate them for a task. We have no such thing, and the outsiders are the worst off for it. To this day I know many people that I care for very much who are deeply in need of a shaman. They are in need of something that almost no modern psychotherapist can provide, because modern psychotherapy has been, forgive the dramatization, gobbled up by the pharmacological-industrial complex; by the mythology of homogeny that is a pre-requisite of industry. (Successful industry depends on homogeneous parts, and it depends upon predictable behavior, which un-trained humans do not follow. Without wandering the dirty halls of conspiracy theory, it is a matter of simple fact that over the past two hundred years, education programs have been geared more and more towards this singular goal: of making tools out of humans that best serve within the structure of a global industrial machine. Does that sound ominous and doomsaying? Perhaps. And certainly we can spin it through the myth of progress and make it a good thing- but the moral bias aside, it is a matter of historical fact.)
   So we have these people, people like me, who may very well have a great deal to contribute to the world, but who really have no place within this system, no culturally recognized value, because that value is not easily monetized. Though we are not shamans because, at the least, we've never been officially trained as such, even most trained shamans would have no place here. They would either need to "get with the program," or they might be that toothless man that just yelled at you as you were rushing down the street and into the subway.
   We are left without a cultural place, like many of those in third world countries who have been raped by this same system to such a degree that outsiders in this culture can't even begin to dream of. (I've never had to root through garbage to eek out a living). We are left to make the best of what tools are provided to us within our personal networks, we are left to fall back on another prominent American myth: the myth of the individual.
   Of course, many outsiders do stake a claim within the mainstream society, by hook or by crook as they say. I have met many self-made CEO's who never finished high school. I have met several - though fewer - self-made CEO's and entrepreneurs who went through their own "shamanic initiatory crisis," who traveled all the way to the "other side" of those Doors of Perception, and returned with the ability to traverse this world with a foot in the other world. To beat them at their own game, to use the system to their benefit and get away with it. This is quite a high-wire act, however. As Immortal Technique says on his first album,

Nigga talk about change and working within the system to achieve that. The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try to change the system from within, it's not you who changes the system; it's the system that will eventually change you. There is usually nothing wrong with compromise in a situation, but compromising yourself in a situation is another story completely, and I have seen this happen long enough in the few years that I've been alive to know that it's a serious problem.

   The idea of being a sort of Robin Hood is appealing. Robin Hood is actually an excellent example of the myth of a forced outsider, (forced into the role, stripped of rank), who, in following his heart's egalitarian values rather than the laws of the land, attempts to "stick it to the man" with the aid of his "merry men": all outsiders themselves.
   On its face, it even seems simple enough; looking at the corporate world from the outside, it seems like a fairly simple "secret society" to infiltrate. I've lost count of how many times I've seen people, and companies, tread this path and discover the paradox. I know I espoused "selling out without selling out," and I stand by that, but an easy task it is not!
   In reality, it is the very rare who manage this. Instead, most of people of the type I'm talking about struggle through life, half-broken, the walking wounded, fighting off visions and impressions that they can't begin to understand, perhaps not clinically schizophrenic, but quickly approaching that point for lack of any real guidance or assistance that doesn't come as part of a system aimed at nothing more than shutting them up and getting them out of their hair. If you don't start out on this "outsider" path as a schizophrenic, you will end it that way if you don't find a way of finding integration. What begins as a bad mental habit at age thirteen can become full-blown clinical depression by age thirty, and the more our mental pathways burn themselves through repetition, the more things become internalized and subconscious, they harder they are to yank out at the root. This might be a wonderful thing when it comes to training ones self to play an instrument, but it is a curse when it is the legacy of a gifted but troubled outcast who can't seem to quite "make it" in a world that, truth be told, wants nothing to do with what they have to offer because they simply don't understand it. (For the record, I'm not talking just about myself here, in fact I'm more talking about the literally hundreds of people I've seen walk this path. And it tears me up every time I see it, at least when it's someone that I really care about.)
   So I've gone a long way in describing the crux of this situation, the cultural challenge posed to outsiders, and yet I never explained how I went from this crisis on to being the person I am today -- still certainly searching for my place in the world and facing my own ongoing struggles as we all are, but also a great deal more grounded, at least on most days, than my past friends probably could have ever imagined was possible for me. (For starters, you won't find me feeding blood to trees.)

   Well, it was probably a multitude of things...

   For starter, on the more spiritual side, I think the rituals I did with my friends began a process. During most of them -- and some became rather elaborate despite the fact that we were stumbling in the dark in those woods, figuratively and literally -- I was trying to send some kind of message to myself in the future, to try to find a teacher in myself, and to find wisdom from that, because I had even at that age mostly given up on finding it in a physical person around myself. Maybe in some weird way, I set myself up into a frame of mine where I would have to eventually transform into that person who could give my past self some kind of wisdom, or guidance. The character Aleonis De Gabrael, in Join My Cult!, was my first envisioning of this person. (There is a historic precedent to this as well- many Indians who have been taught by gurus in various traditions have later revealed, without any apparent sense of irony, that their teachers were non-corporeal.)
   Then there is another method I used that some might consider rather dangerous. After having been pumped full of various drugs by the powers-that-be which did nothing more than exascerbate my problems, when I was released from the mental hospital at age sixteen, I decided that there was at that point nothing to really risk by taking hallucinogens. What, would they drive me crazy? Good luck with that one! I was feeding blood to trees and trying to communicate with entities from other time-frames with flashlights. I couldn't imagine what LSD could to me that my brain, and the awful meds I'd been given, hadn't already done. What would you know, my first experience with LSD was eye-opening in a way that I don't think many experience: I felt normal. Which isn't to say I wasn't seeing colors, and all the rest. But after that first hour of obligatory confusion when your neurotransmitters scramble and re-orient, I felt more clear-headed than I had ever before in my life. As an added bonus, the sunset was more beautiful than ever. But this was just an added benefit.
   After several years of experimentation with this, I eventually discovered that I was developing a resistance to the psychological ailments that had so traumatized me before. In fact, I may have gone too far with it. Now I am like a rock when I attempt to practice ritual that involves invocation. Very little can get in. I have become so nonplussed by psychological phenomena that it's like the "trick" no longer works on me. The machine elves can be screaming from my spine as the world dissolves and dances in triangles, and I'm simply not phased. It has turned a talented channel into quite the opposite-- but I don't have entities trying to hop a ride in my body every five minutes either. They have no way in. I think I know why this is, though of course it is all conjecture. The actual lessons provided by these chemicals seems relatively simple, and fits rather nicely into the themes developed in the previous section on initiation, as well as here. It's a lesson as simple as: let go. Hey look, the walls are bleeding. Let go. I'm fifty and my life is a wreck. Let go. That hawk headed God has giant tits and it's starting to unnerve me. Let go. If you hold on, it can become a demon, and if you let go, it becomes bliss.
   After a certain point, once you've grasped this, you simply don't need them anymore. It's questionable if any of we ever did- though during those going through a crisis such as I was, there may have been no other way. You can get to the same place by doing yoga all day. And sure, you'll lose that ability to just let go all the time and get caught up in life. You'll do that because you're human that's a part of the experience of being alive. But in the back of your mind now, you have that spot you can fall back to, that place where you learned you can fall back from anything and observe a sensation from the outside. And if that sounds a lot like a defense mechanism you read about in Psych 101, that's because it is. Like all defense mechanisms, dissociation is only pathological when it is out of control. The point is being able to do it - and to come out of it - consciously.
   Do I suggest this method to others? Only if they have no other recourse. And if they have the kind of strange psychological fortitude I have been told that I have. Just don't blame me if you try it as your method and it cracks you wide open and leaves you crying like a baby for eight hours: because that just might be your first step on the path. Go with it. A little crying while the walls bleed isn't going to kill you.
   In the counterculture since the 1960's of course, there has been a myth about the positive effects of psychedelics and similar drugs. While many people extol the virtues of psychedelics in circles such as these, mostly in opposition to the parroted rhetoric of the mainstream culture, I think it's simply meaningless to propose that a substance is inherently good or bad. The statement doesn't even make sense. Psychotropic chemicals have a variety of effects, most of which are not really understood, on a nervous system and consciousness that also exists more in the shadows than the light. The question of their use is whether exploring these uncharted waters is worth more than the risk. What could be a more American pursuit than blindly using a little of that Manifest Destiny machismo and plunging forward? That is a question that is, all political posturing aside, best left in the hands of each individual.
   There may be yet another reason why I've managed to go from there to here, with only the initiations that life has provided through happenstance, my own blind ritual explorations, and several years of self-medication. I was lucky enough to encounter several teachers in later years. They were not shamans, which in this day and age, is probably a good thing-- most people in the Western world that proclaim themselves "shamans" should be avoided at all costs. (You have been warned. That smelly long-hair at the trance festival all painted up in black-light paint that calls himself a "shaman" because he did ayahuasca? Beware.)
The teachers I refer to were practicioners of internal Kung Fu (Bagua and Xingyi), of Ericksonian hypnotherapy, of NLP, of various forms of yoga, and from all of them I developed still other skills for working internally which, even if atrophied from a lack of regular practice in recent years, still remains a part of who I am, now.
   Finally, there was the initiation I talked about earlier, with Lilith, which helped more to temper my emotional instability in a trial by fire.

   So I suppose my point is that, even though we don't have any tradition, and the world is full of very few true teachers, in a strange way, that is also a boon. We can find our own way, and find occasional guides through acts of serendipity when the time is right. Many self-proclaimed teachers will just lead you further astray. And if you look hard enough, and are willing to be a genuine human being and not hide behind a wall when you do happen to come face-to-face with another genuine human, you might be surprised. Be patient.

   If you are especially lucky, you might even find others in the wilderness. I hope this site, and the book(s) and media I have produced and will produce, might even provide a little assistance with that task. To quote Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world."

   And, to quote the West Wing, "why is that the case?" Because it is the only thing that ever has.

   Goodnight, and good luck.

the myth of aging

2009-12-28T17:14:00.000-08:00

From Wonderful Machine.

There is an idea bouncing around in my head today that require a little more space than a twitter update to explore.

I'm going to do something that is probably in poor taste- I'm going to explore these ideas as they occur to me, without forcing linearity as I've been attempting to do - with mixed success - in my IoM essays.

This thought-web is about our youth obsessed culture. (When I say "our" I specifically mean what's broadly called "Western Culture," though I admit that term is less and less useful especially as various elements of different cultures continue to intermingle on a micro- level. Still, it's all we have, even if I feel a slight pang of guilt every time I use the term, especially in essays intended for print.)

This long tangent aside, it's clearly evident that commercialism has really latched onto the exteriority of
youth. But why? Ours is a culture of the surface level, and of the eye, which only perceives surfaces. (Alan Dundes has an essay about this final observation that I highly recommend, discussion of it would take us further off-topic. Seeing Is Believing is the name of the essay.)

This has produced a simple duality- one is either "young," or "old."

I see this in my own life, almost upon the very stroke of turning thirty. Certainly, my friends mean it partially as a joke, "oh, you're old now!" But there is always some truth, some sublimated observation, hiding underneath such jokes. There is no real possibility for adulthood, for a continuum or gradation of aging. (In a society where most of us live into our 70s, 40 can hardly be considered "old.")

In an exteriorally focused culture, a culture of surfaces, physical material and the sensations provided are valuable. Status is perhaps the most intangible good considered in the most extreme view of consumer culture. However, it is represented best by material goods, the expensive watch, for instance, which signals one ability to buy an unnecessary luxury item to potential mates, but does a whole lot less. (Not that the absence of utility is the only vector to consider such things along- art, too, generally has little practical value.) The sexualization of youth follows a similar line, even as it butts up against the Christian plates of our ideological geography. I am the last to deny there is a certain appeal to the sexual energy of youth (I'm talking about early twenties, you freaks.) However, in the fact that those attributes are the only pattern that sexual attractiveness can adhere to- especially for women- we see the outline of a cultural psychological imbalance.

The values afforded by aging don't fit into this schema of physicality. Though some people do not change with age, merely experiencing the accumulated detriments of their inflexible habits there is also a possibility for increased self knowledge, wisdom. Many traditional cultures revere the elders for this reason, although it is a double-edged sword- the elders are the most likely to strictly enforce the mores of their day, thus creating a certain a-temporal quality in all such cultures that put the elder in exulted positions.

Youthcentrism provides a certain progressive bent. That can't be considered negative, even despite the repurcussions of the myth of progress (one of the ideas I'm exploring in Pretty Suicide Machine.) It is a contributing factor in a growing problem within our culture- generations of manchildren and womenchildren, who latch onto infantalism and all of the negatives that come along with childhood - including a complete lack of regard for repurcussions or whether a decision will actually yield desired results - simply because youth is so exhaulted within our cultural mindset.

The wisdom of aging is traded for the deterioration of the body. Certainly, there are choices we can make to stall this process. But there remains some truth to the saying "youth is wasted on the young." The height of the physical body does not match the height of the spiritual or psychological self. It comes then as no surprise that age should be abhorred so much, especially when considered in concert with the Western fear of death. However, it is our myths that make this process terrifying, and our myths that create the simple duality of "young" and "old."

At 31, I am neither young nor old. I am an adult, finally self-aware enough to begin taking responsibility for my actions, and make decisions with enough experience to be able to better guess the ultimate results of those decisions. This comes along with detriments- I am beginning to see the accumulated results of my habits, and my body is beginning to get less resiliant, (especially in concert with a chronic illness), but I see decisions I can make to begin reversing some of those unwanted results, and can at least take a shot at accomplishing my goals, rather than being lulled into helplessness by the obstacles.

I don't know if I'll actually attain any of my goals. I'm also not sure if it matters. What matters is our choices, not the obstacles that stand in the way. It may be a cliche, but only because it is so often said but rarely heeded. There is no immortal goal, no accomplishment that will long outlive us in a geological or even historical sense. But that isn't what life is about.

What do you think?

(Side note: aging NEVER has to mean losing a sense of play. In fact, it can mean what we want it to mean, aside from the biological necessities and imperatives.)

Myths of Capitalism (continued): The Inside Solution Fallacy

2010-07-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

In the face of ecological and environmental challenges, which I don't think I need to enumerate here, I've often heard people make an assumption: at some point, they say, people will have to "wake up," and bring about some kind of change from the bottom up. I've even somewhat flippantly supported this premise, that if people "vote with their dollars" that, within the framework of capitalism, if the vote comes from a majority, it'll force a shift of priorities and may be the only way for a capitalist state to maintain cogency in the face of declining resources (material and human) that cannot support a never-ending increase in profits, even with the addition of technological advance in the mix. I even once wondered if this was an underlying element of the Obama administration, though in light of actions taken since he has taken office, I can only see it as a part of the narrative of the administration, rather than the reality- though this could be due to external political, economical, or social pressures.

Be that as it may, having spent many hours thinking about this, I've been wondering if the underlying premise is flawed. We may be able to generate cultural reform from within the system in the way that counterculture attempts- and more rarely, succeeds at doing. But this does not extend nearly so far as we'd like. Consider instead the idea that the ecological and economic pressures are already intensifying, the destratification is already underway, though we have a hard time seeing it because even rapid change in a historic sense may still seem slow to our eyes. What's the result of these pressures? Depression. Wild hope. Fear. Panic. In that order, the hoi polloi may become more pliable, not less. All of these things make people easier to manipulate, not less. We do see anger and outrage, embodied, for instance, by the exaggerated posturing of the Teabaggers, but it seems fairly impotent in terms of enacting the kind of change that would actually bring our culture back into alignment. The new slaves don't build pyramids, they work in Walmart and Mcdonalds. It is a mistake to assume that at some point mistreated, underpayed peasants will inevitably rise up in arms. For thousands of years civilizations such as the Egyptians build their empire on the back of a workforce living little better than their livestock. This has been, if anything, the norm rather than the exception over the past 3000 years.

We may also want to look at the history of the rise of Capitalism to understand the seed of its undoing:

Capitalism is a system that is committed to an unbounded increase in production in the name of an unbounded increase in profits. Production, however, cannot be increased in an unbounded way. Freed from the restraints of despots and paupers, capitalist entrepreneurs still have to confront the restraints of nature. The profitability of production cannot expand indefinitely. Any increase in the quantity of soil, water, minerals or plants put into a particular production process per unit of time constitutes intensification. It has been the intention of this book to show that intensification inevitably leads to declining efficiencies. That declining efficiencies have adverse effects upon the average standard of living cannot be doubted. (Cannibals and Kings, Harris.)

This follows from Harris' general thesis, that the processes of human history shows groups and even civilizations following a certain pattern of production which, if population is not kept in check through internal or external means, results in a forced movement to another method of production which often has a decreasing effect on the standard of living. In plentiful times, effective hunter gatherers have to put in far fewer hours per day than farmers, who have to invest their energies into the entire life cycle of the plants that they are harvesting, as well as deal with the repercussions of the strain that may put on the environment as population increases.

My point being that the argument that the ills that capitalism produces will inevitably outweigh the boons, and that it may be unlikely that a transition to a different method of production can occur from within that same system. If history has anything to say about this, it simply cannot. What history cannot show us is the results of production on the scale that it is presently in place, nor on the effects of globally intertwined civilizations and economies. But it may not be very hard to guess... it certain stands to reason that this is one of the reasons why the apocalypse myth has so forcefully become the zeitgeist of our age, even as capitalism tries to pull a profit out of that.

Murder, Sacrifice, and Punishment

2010-07-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Photo by Katherine Du Tiel

I had a thought the other day. It was mostly a joke, an odd joke, that I repeated to several people. But, as often happens with jokes, it popped up again outside, and in a more serious context. Comedy masks and tragedy masks.

It goes like this. It is inevitable that we will all die. Murder is, in essence, the act of taking personal control of time, of speeding it up. A killer is a time lord.

The truth is, this idea actually mirrors many primitive ideas on the subject.

The habit of killing bad criminals by hanging them on trees is a very archaic one. It was originally practiced as a sacrifice: Germans in older days, for instance, hanged prisoners as sacrifices to the God Wotan. ... In Christianity you meet this archetypal idea in the form of the crucifixion of the Christ, and in the area of Asia Minor, Attis was suspended from a fir tree. We have to ask what lies behind the idea of killing an enemy not as social revenge or in judgement, but by the more archaic form of a sacrifice to the gods. I think that there is a much deeper and more meaningful idea than that of just punishment. If one has to fight against demonic evil in a human being, what strikes one most is that if people are outstandingly destructive, not just through the small mistakes of laziness and cheating, etc. which take place with every human being, but if they are seriously destructive, one's immediate reaction is that it is inhuman, ... and concomitantly so "divine," that one is overwhelmed. ... We use the word "inhuman" but one could equally well say "demonic" or "divine." (Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, von Franz.)

The linguistic linkage between devil, demon, and devi, divinity, is one I've already prattled on about here. The central point is that a criminal has essentially embodied - or has been possessed - by something outside of the human, or at least social, sphere. They must then be returned to their source, to divinity, through the methods most fitting of such a union. The myths of Gods and heroes being dismembered, hung, and so on are of course numerous. To name a few: Wotan, Orpheus, Attis, and of course Jesus.

And now for something completely different: butts.

2010-07-11T11:18:00.001-07:00

You're welcome.

Romantically Apocalyptic

2010-07-09T23:33:00.000-07:00

Something I happened upon a little while ago. Enjoy.

Read Romantically Apocalypse.

America's Creativity Crisis

2010-07-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

Newsweek ran an article recently on the supposed "creativity crisis" in America:

...after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

Read full article.

I'm actually dubious of the ability to perform a standardized test of creativity. What exactly is being tested? How does the bias of the evaluators color the results?

However, I will say that it seems patently obvious that if there is indeed such a crisis - which I don't otherwise doubt - then it is this very homogenizing impulse that is the real culprit.

Sloppy Vagina Circus

2010-07-09T21:16:00.000-07:00

Psst. Something mighty weird will be brewing at Sloppy Vagina Circus in coming weeks... starting with a teaser in an upcoming Gspot. Media soon.

Dionysus, Tequila, and Kung Fu don't mix.

2010-07-08T18:04:00.000-07:00

I don't want to give the impression that the only modern expression of Dionysian energy is to be found in drum circles. Far from it. Nor, as we've said, is ecstasy the only human experience that brings us in touch with it.

I've had many experiences which I think fall into this other category. However, one comes immediately to mind. It has the added benefit of being comical at my expense.

When I was in my early twenties I become very interested in Kung Fu, both Shaolin and Bagua. I never got incredibly good at it, but I was certainly more expert at it than the average person. This is always a dangerous amount of knowledge.

I was at a party over the summer. It was a picnic kind of event, with alcohol and live bands. I decided to dress up in one of my Shaolin outfits, and was already pretty punchy by midday. A friend was bartending, and lit a shot of what looked like Windex and 151 on fire. Quickly blowing it out, I grabbed it and prepared to down the thing. However, an invisible flame was still burning off the fumes, and the glass was scorching hot. I twitched, and the alcohol poured across my hand, re-igniting in the process. I stared for a moment at my hand, as the skin bubbled. My friend grabbed a bucket of ice, and very much like a cartoon, I shoved my hand into it, expelling a little huff of steam.

I wrapped the hand up, and then proceeded to wander around with the obligatory bottle of Patron, as I was want to do in those days. Afterwards, I started doing my daily stretching exercises and forms - a little bit of alcohol and a burned hand wasn't about to stop me. I'd also worked up quite a bit of the mad kind of enthusiasm that can come from an energetic practice like Kung Fu, especially when mixed with alcohol.

Some people noticed me, and somehow a short demonstration of some exercises turned into a full out sparring match. Ten or twenty of us were fighting in the back yard- some with shinai, others (such as myself) bare-handed. A couple minutes in, two people approached me to attack simultaneously with their shinai. Without thinking I took two sprinting steps and lept into the air, connecting with each of them with my feet. What I hadn't counted on was connecting slightly below their center of gravity, and I also had no particular plan for how I was going to land after landing this attack. So they fell on me, and there was a loud crunch.

When I got to my feet, I was greeted by a flock of people staring at me in disgust. I still remember the look on one girl's face- it was a look of horror that you might expect, say, if a giant centipede had just burst out of my chest. I couldn't imagine what was causing this reaction. I felt a dull kind of pain, but it didn't match what I saw when I looked down. My arm was bent at a near ninety degree angle, about six inches below my wrist. Both bones in my forearm were clearly snapped, though thankfully they hadn't punched through the skin.

I felt oddly calm. I went inside, sat down, and asked for someone to get me to a hospital. They called an ambulance. On the ride to the hospital, I had a great time retelling the story for of my arm had snapped, and why my other hand was wrapped in bandages. The nurses seemed to get a kick out of it, and I continued to talk it up once I arrived at the hospital- a performance which, I think, got me a couple extra shots of morphine in the process. By the time I left I was feeling on top of the world, and I proceeded to party when I returned, eventually passing out under a tree in the back yard at around four in the morning. It wasn't until I awoke the next day with wrenching pain in my arm that I realized what had actually happened.

Now, you may wonder how this in any way related to Dionysus. What I'm getting at is the frenzy of excitement that can carry you to a point like this- and potentially far beyond. If the circumstances had been different, I very well could have pushed myself to the brink of destruction, with a big smile on my face. This side of me stands in pretty stark contrast to how I am most of the time, somewhat reserved, peaceful, calm, at least on the exterior. Internally, the opposite is the case, and sometimes that inner nature can bubble into the outside, with anything from comedic to heroic to utterly tragic results. I've felt the same kind of potentially dangerous exuberance when performing with bands onstage, or even more, after the show, when you feel the need to keep that burn going or else face a very hard crash into depression. This is another facet to "creative madness": we aren't the one at the helm, and the destination, or even the trip, may not be in our best interest, even if it is a lot of fun to retell later.

BP and Obama: Where’s Our Kairotic Moment?

2010-06-25T16:55:00.000-07:00

"Obama has failed to step up to the plate, this is not because he is dealing with a recalcitrant congress or an obstructive opposition party, but because he has failed to step up to the plate and perform the kairotic act. Here we have an event that is going to have massive economic and ecological impact that will reverberate for years, an event is a direct outcome of deregulation and corporate greed, an event that will, in one way or another effect all Americans, and we have an administration that refuses to quilt this event into a whole series of events that have buffeted both the country and the world. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze speaks of repetition in terms of resonances, echoes, and reflections of the past. In repetition the present actuality somehow is haunted by all sorts of other past events.

...

The oil catastrophe echoes and resonates not only with past oil catastrophes, but with the financial collapse, the West Virginia mining disaster, the exploitation of American tax payer dollars by contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, the exploitation of American citizens by insurance companies, and on and on. If there were ever a moment to quilt together our economic woes, the impending environmental apocalypse, and rampant corruption among the corporations and government as a result of neoliberal ideology,this is that moment. Obama needs to step up to the plate and take advantage of this moment, performing a Kennedyesque moment not unlike that of persuading the American people to go to the moon."

Full article.