Wednesday, November 08, 2023

Thursday, September 21, 2023

Dark knight of the soil



Dark Night of the Soul

On a dark night,
Kindled in love with yearnings
–oh, happy chance!–
I went forth without being observed,
My house being now at rest.

In darkness and secure,
By the secret ladder, disguised
–oh, happy chance!–
In darkness and in concealment,
My house being now at rest.

In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide, save that which burned in my
heart.

This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me–
A place where none appeared.

Oh, night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!

Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping, and I caressed him,
And the fanning of the cedars made a breeze.

The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks;
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.

I remained, lost in oblivion;
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,

Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

St John-prisoner of Toledo



Tuesday, September 05, 2023

Piazza D'Italia

 My father took my sister and I to visit this plaza in 1985. Same year as the New Orleans worlds fair. I became a sculptor and teach at the college level now. My own work is highly idiosyncratic and improvisation and retro causation play a big part in my process. Often I make objects because of some intrinsic aesthetic value in the material initially and slowly allow the pieces to take a clearer objective form.  In thinking critically about the work I have come to recognize multiple instances where the influence of this plaza has worked its way into my psyche. Byzantine stripes and Corinthian capitals haunt me and necessitate exorcism at every scale.  It is poetic to me that the PIAZZA D’ITALIA is considered one of the first Post Modern ruins.





Saturday, May 06, 2023

Friday, May 05, 2023

opal

 

Upon watching the short animated feature Opal by Jack Stauber, https://youtu.be/I-GT5m5II2I  I was reminded of a passage from an Aleister Crowley essay on The Old Absynth House in New Orleans.

It goes like this.

II.

The barrier between divine and human things is frail but inviolable; the artist and the bourgeois are only divided by a point of view--"A hair divided the false and true."

I am watching the opalescence of my absinthe, and it leads me to ponder upon a certain very curious mystery, persistent in legend. We may call it the mystery of the rainbow.

Originally in the fantastic but significant legend of the

Hebrews, the rainbow is mentioned as the sign of salvation. The world has been purified by water, and was ready for the revelation of Wine. God would never again destroy His work, but ultimately seal its perfection by a baptism of fire.

Now, in this analogue also falls the coat of many colors which

was made for Joseph, a legend which was regarded as so important that it was subsequently borrowed for the romance of Jesus. The veil of the Temple, too, was of many colors. We find, further

east, that the Manipura Cakkra--the Lotus of the City of Jewels--which is an important centre in Hindu anatomy, and apparently identical with the solar plexus, is the central point

of the nervous system of the human body, dividing the sacred from the profane, or the lower from the higher.

In western Mysticism, once more we learn that the middle grade initiation is called Hodos Camelioniis, the Path of the Chameleon. There is here evidently an illusion to this same mystery. We also learn that the middle stage in Alchemy is when the liquor becomes opalescent.

Finally, we note among the visions of the Saints one called the Universal Peacock, in which the totality is perceived thus


royally appareled.

Would it were possible to assemble in this place the cohorts of quotation; for indeed they are beautiful with banners, flashing their myriad rays from cothurn and habergeon, gay and gallant in the light of that Sun which knows no fall from Zenith of high noon!

Yet I must needs already have written so much to make clear one pitiful conceit: can it be that in the opalescence of absinthe is some occult link with this mystery of the Rainbow? For undoubtedly one does indefinably and subtly insinuate the drinker in the secret chamber of Beauty, does kindle his thoughts to rapture, adjust his point of view to that of the artists, at

least to that degree of which he is originally capable, weave for his fancy a gala dress of stuff as many-colored as the mind of Aphrodite.

Oh Beauty! Long did I love thee, long did I pursue thee, thee elusive, thee intangible! And lo! thou enfoldest me by night and day in the arms of gracious, of luxurious, of shimmering silence.

https://ia600606.us.archive.org/24/items/CollectedPdfsByAleisterCrowley/AleisterCrowley-AbsintheTheGreenGoddess.pdf

Friday, January 20, 2023

MAGNETS-gravity makes the world go round


 "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting"-Mark Twain

I believe this was a quote about the scarcity of water in the western United States. I saw in Twain's sentiment a possible connection to classical philosophy. As I stood in a hypnagogic stupor at the back door of my house looking out into the garden at 7:30 in the morning, I thought of the elements as a cosmology similar to the pre Socratic philosopher Empedocles. I thought how interpersonal conflicts come in two varieties. One is over convictions we hold based on the element of fire (whiskey being associated with the element of fire). Those are the ideas connected to our desires, our projections, our illusions. The appearances of things, our expectations. Water is a necessity. It is nurturing so our relationship with that element hits on a limbic , serpent brain, primordial level. We tussle over our delusions as almost entertainment but we kill over our sustenance. 

Wednesday, December 08, 2021

About Me

My photo
St. Augustine, Florida, United States
I spill ink ,it collects here.