hell divers

Last week my friend told me the first spooky Brooklyn story I've heard in a long time. A student of his who'd been watching a rehearsal of the play he is currently working on made a point of speaking to him before class because he was concerned that the playwright's attitude towards some supernatural themes he included his script lacked gravitas. "You know, all that stuff is real and not to be messed with." The student went on to tell of an experience he'd had; upon entering a Catholic church in Brooklyn he'd accidentally become a witness to a young woman's exorcism. As the man watched, a group of alarmed priest and family surrounded her as she had some kind of seizure. Eventually the overwhelmed priests and horrified crowd heard the flailing girl begin speaking in a demonic voice. The man in the back watched as one priest became exhausted and wandered away. Praying quietly in the back of the church, this man made a silent pledge to the demon, leave her alone right now and you can have me when I die. At that moment, the girl stood up, looked at the man sitting in back, said OK in the demon voice, and passed out.

While I listened to my friend tell the story my heart seemed to grow three sizes like the Grinch's...who would be brave enough to sacrifice his soul for the redemption of a child? What will happen to him? Is it at all possible that certain brave individuals can actually sweeten hell with the scale of their compassion alone? Could they turn hell into heaven?

Perhaps this explains the Delok phenomenon in Tibet, in which various yoginis lay as if dead for a number of days and return to consciousness telling tales of various hells and the world of the dead, sometimes returning with messages from the departed. Jesus too descended to hell after his crucifixion, it is said. I assume this was no exotic vacation. What business did he conduct there, I wonder? When he ascended to heaven on the third day, did he bring souls with him? Did he lessen the devil's load? I can't help but think of the reportedly high burnout rates among social workers for whom the Sisyphus myth must get really personal.

On a related theme, the Black Metal Symposium, Hideous Gnosis, takes place in Williamsburg this Saturday. Herein a sampling of titles: The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling’s Underground • The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances • BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum • Transcendental Black Metal • Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya • Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration. More darkness here. I'm wondering if you dive deep enough into hell, do you wind up in heaven?

Terrified Freud

"This is the common psychiatric experience that the devaluation of the psyche and other resistances to psychological enlightenment are based in large measure on fear–on panic fear of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious. These fears are found not only among persons who are frightened by the picture Freud painted of the unconscious; they also troubled the originator of psychoanalysis himself, who confessed to me that is was necessary to make a dogma of his sexual theory because this was the sole bulwark of reason against a possible 'outburst of the black flood of occultism.' In these words Freud was expressing his conviction that the unconscious still harbored many tings that might lend themselves to "occult" interpretations, as is in fact the case. These "archaic vestiges" or archetypal forms grounded on the instincts and giving expression to them, have a numinous quality that sometimes arouses fear. They are ineradicable, for they represent the ultimate foundations of the psyche itself. They cannot be grasped intellectually, and when one has destroyed one manifestation of them, they reappear in altered form."

~Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self. My bold.

a sabella

Married with Children must be on a loop at Sabella these days, every time we go in, and that's often since I've accepted that my homemade pizza is lame, Peggy Bundy's giant smile and lofty quaff spice the otherwise barren restaurant up. It's of the old Windsor Terrace, back when the expensive sounding Prospect Park West was called 9th Avenue. There's no hint of the over-design or precious faux retro styling seen in newer enterprises. It's pretty much anti-design, spare, spartan, bare bones, bleak.

One of the few focal points in the shop is a small photo of Jesus that hangs directly in the back. A strange doubling happens when the man who's always there stands under it at work in the assembly of yet another wheel of dough, this profile so much resembles that of Jesus, wan and simple staring towards heaven, that the scene starts to take on a bit of a halo enhanced by the practically ascetic trappings of the place where people can still get something substantial to eat for 2 bucks. (Maker of pizza declined to be photographed, but it was worth asking to watch the blush bring new life to his face.)

There's also the curious placement of a small Pieta next to the soda fountain, so between that and the pie assembled under the Jesus looking skyward by the chef that he looks like, this is one of those places that suggests that the only thing limiting the Eucharist to the church is the long-standing negation of the mundane.

Windsor Terrace Window

I stopped to investigate this eccentric window display, how often do people face their personal artifacts to the street? How curious is that little green chair perched there on the ledge, who sits in it? From the look of the outgoing mail, the presentation seemed to have something to do with Jehovah's Witnesses and the intense faith of the residents, but I had trouble figuring in the exclamation I heard coming from within, an elderly person's loud proclamation "She bathed me so beautifully! She shampooed me!" Although "shampoo" is not biblical language, nevertheless I felt I was listening to an exuberant witness indeed. From what I hear and see, it does seem to be time for intense purifications, which is another way of saying "wisdom enhanced intelligence," but how does it happen?

6,000 children

“There are over 6,000 homeless children in Brooklyn and thousands more city-wide. While our efforts will not “solve” all of the issues related to homelessness, we believe that helping raise the spirits of families undergoing extreme stress can make a big difference,” said Marilyn Gelber, president of the Brooklyn Community Foundation. “Particularly in the holiday season, we want to bring some joy, hope, and help to homeless children who have been uprooted. We also hope to encourage people to Do Good Right Here, in Brooklyn,”

Read more about The Brooklyn Community Foundation and their efforts to boost the spirits of homeless children and families this season here. Partners in the Caring Neighbors campaign include CAMBA, Enchanted Lion Books, Heart of Brooklyn, Heights Kids, The JAR Group, and PowerHouse Books.

Low-Spectacle Adirondack Wilderness

Reading this passage (from a book borrowed from the BK sidewalk library) about the majority of the Adirondack Parkland makes me want to lunge for my copy of the Tao. In the essay, the not-so-dramatic landscape that no doubt filters our city's exceptional water is played off the image of "the matrix of human desire," a contrast worth teasing out for all its philosophical and aesthetic implications.

This is not rocks and ice and wildflower-meadow wilderness– this is swamp and spruce thicket and mile upon mile of hardwood forest and hemlock-height wilderness, thousands of mountains too short to be bare on top, never climbed by people because there's no reason, except maybe venison, to climb them. Even the hunters don't reach a lot of places–someone killed a bear last season that the biologists said was forty-two years old. It had been hiding out since the Truman administration. It's the kind of country where no one got around to naming a lot of things–there are whole small ranges of anonymous mountains, and pond after pond called "Mud" or "Round" or "Fish." Where instead of sweeping views you get strained glimpses through the lattice of bare branches. It's all curves and circles, dimples and bulges, woods that just go on and on and on.You see what the world must once have looked like.

Bill Mckibbens, 1994. "Wild Again" Heart of the Land, The Nature Conservancy.

Not so Schisty

I'm grateful for the illuminating comments my father, geologist William Melson, left on the recent round of Great Falls photography. Below find his remarks regarding the image above, turns out what I took for schist was a gneiss. I post the comment here for the wannabe geologist in any of us, or anyone who simply enjoys talk of a good deep-sea slump, trench or submarine avalanche.

These blocky rocks are probably gneiss, which, like schist, is a metamorphic rock but not as platy or schisty. Some of the gneiss in the Potomac River Gorge is derived froma deep-sea slump deposit termed a turbidite. If I remember correctly, the original turbidites were deposited as submarine "avalanches" into a deep-sea trench during the Ordovician Period, around 450 million years ago. This trench was later folded and added to the North American plate. There, it became deeply buried within the plate, subjected to high temperatures and pressures which changed the formerly sand and mud of the turbidite in a gneiss.

blade work

As impermanent as a Tibetan sand painting, this blade-rendered icy futurism was co-created by orbiting masses of frosty Brooklynites intoxicated with sliding over the slickness at the Kate Wollman Rink. It's a strange exhilaration. Odd, the gentle way I was told to "take the camera off the ice," I would have expected a much more forceful, direct statement but in truth all the staff I encountered was kind and sensitive, well apprised of how much it can hurt to fall. Good too was watching the man drive the Zamboni that seated him high like a general on an elephant, the hulking machine melting the jagged to smooth, slow and heavy, revolution by revolution, resetting the clock.

mother of wisdom

Looking at her I consider what happens when the hemispheres of symmetry are absorbed into the line of symmetry itself, so focused is her concentration on what she seems to hold in her empty hands, a luminous pearl whose light extinguishes the illusions that become the chains of attachment and the prods of aversion. Her radiant posture breaks the appearance of independent arising open, teaching again that nothing is, in essence, as you think, so do the impossible: stop grasping for truth and reducing the unknowable. This stick in the gears of assumption allows the peripatetic sphere of the will to drop to the level of the heart and be held there to make its peace with reality after the long, long war. In the stillness of no-fight, she sinks deeper into the freedom of unknowing and the effulgence of the unknowable, into the luminous contingent surfaces within the assertion "God is closer to the soul than the soul is to itself." Pearl merged with pearl, she is completely vulnerable and invulnerable simultaneously, streaming the nectar of deliverance.

with love

17th St. Pegasus

From among the dramatic illustrations found in the 3 volumes of Reader's Digest Condensed (1960's) I picked up on the way home a while ago. Too bad Pegasus' twin, the flying boar, doesn't also appear. Favoritism!

Jay St. Borough Hall

Anatomy of Landscape

There's more Great Falls pictures from our trip here if you have an interest. Friends of Brooklynometry, if you're out there, I'm especially fond of landscape/habitat terms of which I've learned too little... If the inclination strikes indulge me and write comments about the photos simply saying what the important features might be called on the flickr pages. I am currently working to get the input of my geologist father. Thanks mucho mucho if you manage it. And now back to Brooklyn, mentally.

Great Falls, Maryland Side

This visit reminded me that Great Falls brings me closer to those loosely brushed rocky landscapes I've seen hanging in Chinese restaurants than any other places I visit ever will. It slaps me a little silly to think that any landscape could be that dramatic, even the Grand Canyon seems a little tedious in comparison to the sporadic rock towers that thrust through torrential downsurges.

There's several small islands in the Potomac between Va and Md sides including one that's been opened to the public, Olmsted Island (seems no matter where I go that man turns up,) which represents a biome called a bedrock terrace forest, so we had to keep to the boardwalk constructed to protect the ecosystem, and perhaps to keep visitors from taking an unexpected plunge. Great Falls is a really great place for falling, or trying not to fall.

even light fractures

Great Falls, Md.

North via South

On the road to Virginia the fog was thick in places, sometimes so thick it was hard to see cars ahead, in other places so thin the half moon appeared in the sky like a glowing bowl that had spilled its stars. Mostly the fog, illuminated by street lights, back lit the bare trees, setting the stage for something that seemed far more numinous than what the cement barricades and tire shrapnel by the side of the road promised.

At one moment the fog, illuminated like a cross section by the headlights of oncoming traffic cutting over a barricade, lit the marbled vapors above us so we could distinctly see all the beaded drapery of air currents enfolded in the cloud blanket that clung to the landfall past the bridge. For almost nothing at all it was freakishly something, the closest I've come to the Northern Lights while heading South across the Delaware, for a moment creating the illusion that I could observe the diaphanous currents included in the unincludable.

It reminded me of a dream I had a while ago; through the window of my house I saw a figure in the East, a Madonna made of clouds stretching from the firmament down to the Earth. When I saw her I left the house, kneeled crying on the stoop. I can't recall ever crying in my dreams before.

The Pleasure of the Overstuffed

These days nearly every book I open floats the name Giordano Bruno before my eyes. Perhaps I also knew about him at some other point in my life but forgot? I am trying to explain why I wanted to name my son Bruno because of my unaccountable affection for the name, but yielded as everyone thought it a terrible idea. Pehrpas it indicates that what I really wanted was a puppy?

I know little about Bruno besides what I've gathered in scant reading, that some believe his execution for his beliefs in 1600 began modernity, that his work The Cabala of Pegasus influenced James Joyce, that he had formidable mnemonic skill. My impession is that he was one about whom people say, "he was too smart for his own good" and his death may have been indicative of his confidence's collision with his benefactor's belief systems and self-importance.

The paragraph below I excerpted from The Heroic Frenzies, which studies the dynamics within desire's alembic. It is so packed it nearly rips apart at the seams. I hope you enjoy the tension.

What a tragicomedy! What act, I say, more worthy of pity and laughter can be presented to us upon this world's stage, in this scene of our consciousness, than of this host of individuals who became melancholy, meditative, unflinching, firm, faithful, lovers, devotees, admirers and slaves of a thing without trustworthiness, a thing deprived of all constancy, destitute of any talent, vacant of any merit, without acknowledgment or any gratitude, as incapable of sensibility, intelligence or goodness, as a statue or image painted on a wall; a thing containing more haughtiness, arrogance, insolence, contumely, anger, scorn, hypocrisy, licentiousness, avarice, ingratitude and other ruinous vices, more poisons and instruments of death than could have issued from the box of Pandora? For such are the poisons which have only too commodious an abode in the brain of that monster! Here we have written down on paper, enclosed in books, placed before the eyes and sounded in the ear a noise, an uproar, a blast of symbols, of emblems, of mottoes, of epistles, of sonnets, of epigrams, of prolific notes, of excessive sweat, of life consumed, shrieks which deafen the stars, laments which reverberate in the caves of hell, tortures which affect living souls with stupor, sighs which make the gods swoon with compassion, and all this for those eyes, for those cheeks, for that breast, for that whiteness, for that vermilion, for that speech, for those teeth, for those lips, that hair, that dress, that robe, that glove, that slipper, that shoe, that reserve, that little smile, that wryness, that window-widow, that eclipsed sun, that scourge, that disgust, that stink, that tomb, that latrine, that menstruum, that carrion, that quartan ague, that excessive injury and distortion of nature, which with surface appearance, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, a Circean enchantment put to the service of generation, deceives us as a species of beauty.

mudra

Unrelated observation: I like very much what Jodi Dean wrote on her blog the other day, "Fullness suggests totalitarian capture. Split involves alienation. More alienation could be a good thing." A parallax ax is as dangerous as it sounds! Long live studied ambiguity and the vertigo of inconclusiveness in which we flail when reflective thought accepts complexity.

for all eyes to see

"The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young."

Via bloodcore, via.

full of empty

parallax bats

How long ago were the wings of birds designated for angels, and the wings of bats, for demons? Given this demonic trait and the close association that bats have with vampires and Halloween in the West it seems strange that in other cultures, as in China, bats are associated with good fortune, to the point that in Chinese, bat and good luck are both signified with the word "fu."

I didn't notice that the Chinese Scholar's Garden at Snug Harbor has bat motifs incorporated in various architectural elements, when I was there I was too distracted watching bees drown in the Koi pond. I only heard about this last week after my son's class visited on a school trip, and got the educational tour which included commentary on the compelling belief that ghosts can only travel in straight lines. What about bats? I think they must be very capable of ample zig, zag and swerve to nab the mosquitoes right out of the air.

A while ago I dreamed that a friend and I were having a meeting with a tall charismatic Latin woman dressed in a red and white cheerleader's outfit. In an accent that sounded like Charo she told us she liked bats. Then bats emerged and began entering the walls and ducts of the building, incorporating themselves into the architecture, perhaps reshaping the building with the sonic visioning of space they are capable of, finding a depth in spaces that seem shallow, tight and claustrophobic, retuning and expanding the structure from inside out. Maneuvering in tight spaces.

~

It interests me that in the throng included in the Andreas Pavias painting reproduced in Friday's NYT the demon flying to the right of the Crucifixion becomes the focal point on the basis of the gravity of the contrast of its graphic, primitive treatment in relation to the homogeneous field of the human and angelic throng. The dynamism of its darkness seems to suggest we look deeper, and perhaps realize the part torment plays in the motion of things and consider the contraction that precedes a revitalization of space grown static. Challenges and troubles of all sorts set new things in motion.

I realize that I always envision the yin/yang symbol as frozen, but this week I saw it move. Perhaps it is meant to spin to depict the interplay of light and dark and the imbricated flow of one continually giving birth to the other. It has to spin, just as the earth does, night chasing dawn, dawn chasing night, with endless desire, even if some nights seem to last forever. At the boundary between one force and another, the friction alternately sparks passion, friction, torment and bliss belonging to each interface woven of the dynamic tension between compression and its release.

fun for the whole family

...But if one is really engaged in inner work, one cannot break the seal. Repression is inappropriate; it is repression which has, at least in part, caused the problem in the first place. But breaking out is inappropriate also. It is a terribly difficult situation. Some of the images used to describe what goes on in the alembic when things begin to heat up are pretty hideous, and very violent. Wolves eat Kings, the lions get their paws cut off, and animals scream in agony as they burn. These are very exotic, raw portrayals by the psyche of its own suffering when conflicts are contained within rather than projected outside.

Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas, Dynamics of the Unconscious, p. 274

locust pods

dark walk

morning light

Parallax Cats

In the middle of the night 2 cats yowled right outside the window and I woke up alarmed, listening to the strange sounds feeling one moment terrified and in the next sincerely amused by the fluctuations in their screeches. I wished I could just feel either terrified or amused, it was tiring to keep switching between the two reactions, there was something exhausting about being unable to rest in either view. The same sort of thing happened when I cuddled with my daughter on the couch, one minute feeling incredible tenderness and the next wondering what mischief she'd be up to when back in full drive mode. Something bothered me greatly about the slippage from one view to the next. I suppose its just how things are. Like this cat I held at the animal shelter, and who I'd adopt if not for allergies. One minute she cuddled in my arms, stretching her neck back to nuzzle her forehead against my chest, her long thin arms reaching up towards me. The next minute she had my hand in her teeth, with barely any pressure but enough that I could feel the sharpness.

I feel like I'm watching things spin, something like a revolving door, where one moment there's welcome and the next, divergence. Where one morning the sun shines crystal clear, seeming to illuminate all things as they emerge in their distinctly luminous orders, and the next morning, there's gloom, dissolution and too much tragedy.

I'm tired of the switching. If there is a parallax axe, what would it be? Something like *naked awareness* I imagine. Very, very naked awareness. And perhaps the purring of cats.

tooth to tooth

When I had a root canal at a dentist's in Manhattan, the Immigrant Song played over the sound system and the irony of that particular wail was not lost on me. Today it was Amie (what you want to do) when I sat down in the chair at Jennifer Lombardo's office, and of course I would like to do most anything besides have my gums numbed with that long steely syringe that stays in for about a minute while the medicine eases its way into the tissue. It wasn't so bad, though, I only felt pressure as the drill head did its electron-powered dance of destruction in the cavity of a top-right molar. I couldn't see what was happening in my mouth, but could conceive of the principle of pressure's implication in the creation of space. As when a tunnel is dug, the pressure of the implement brandishing its marks on matter leaves an opening behind it. And so she carved out this space in my body, then filled it with "resin," which she explained is a kind of plastic. I guess I'd rather be part plastic than part mercury and lead like in the old days. The really surprising part was how she hardened the filling by shining a light on it. Light as catalyst, why is that so surprising?

coordinates coordinated

An annunciatory monkey stands before a 4-headed figure bearing heavy black moustaches and eyes intensified with kohl. I found the curious menagerie spicing up a rug designer's etalier. The black markings seem so bitter and sweet, the white so deathlike and ghostly, it is hard to tell which has more, or less, life.

bounce back

Buildings receiving light reflected off the windows of nearby structures might feel somewhat validated, but maybe they shouldn't take the beam personally. Anyway they may be too distracted by an elevator's lift and drops or all the tickling feet on the stairs to even notice the passing ray.