zenomax: On the doubling of the moon

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zenomax: On the doubling of the moon

Dieses Thema ruht momentan. Die letzte Nachricht liegt mehr als 90 Tage zurück. Du kannst es wieder aufgreifen, indem du eine neue Antwort schreibst.

1zenomax
Dez. 7, 2011, 4:38 pm

...

2zenomax
Dez. 8, 2011, 11:27 am

4zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jan. 1, 2012, 6:27 pm

And so to 2012.

I hope, all things being equal, and the planets being suitably aligned, to read more on the esoteric, the obscure, and maybe even the detritus of the ephemeral/mundane/everyday (which in some ways, if we look closely enough, provides the most arcane, unimaginable tales of all: "If i was to try to touch a wall I would never be quite sure whether my hand will go straight through it or not" - Hilary Mantel)

5baswood
Jan. 1, 2012, 6:32 pm

Happy New Year zeno, #3 good video

6Poquette
Jan. 2, 2012, 1:06 am

Zeno - Glad to know I will not be the only one here with esoteric and obscure interests!

7zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jan. 2, 2012, 9:39 am

Thanks Bas & Suzanne. Glad to see you back here again for 2012.

Current reading:



Personality Type: An Owner's Manual, Lenore Thomson



A Dark Muse: A history of the occult, Gary Lachman.

Lenore Thomson makes as much sense as anyone on the much debated and clouded subject of personality types. As I want to explore this subject in more detail this year, thought I'd ask Santa for this book.

I read Gary Lachman's recent book on Jung, and he is both easy to read and an advocate for the esoteric - I like it when authors do not claim to be writing impartially on subjects. The only writers who do write impartially (in my partial view) are the jobbing hacks who have no real interest in what they are writing about. This book summarising the history of the hidden paths of imagination was too good to pass up. Another present from Santa.

The themes of both these books may set the scene for my reading and avenues of thought this year (together, it must be said, with my reading of the bible with the hon. dchaikin - what an adventure!).

8zenomax
Jan. 2, 2012, 9:53 am

Speaking of personality types, I believe that David Tibet must be that rarest of creatures, a male INFJ.

As Mark E and the Fall were to me in the 1990s/early 2000s, so David Tibet & Current 93 appear to dominate at least one of the sound tracks in my mind in the 2010s.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq3UoExQ9O0

9zenomax
Jan. 2, 2012, 10:08 am

The Barn



They should never have built a barn there, at all -
Drip, drip, drip! - under that elm tree,
Though when it was young. Now it is old
But good, not like the barn and me.

To-morrow they cut it down. They will leave
The barn, as I shall be left, maybe.
What holds it up? 'Twould not pay to pull down.
Well, this place has no other antiquity.

No abbey or castle looks so old
As this that Job Knight built in '54,
Built to keep corn for rats and men.
Now there's fowls in the roof, pigs on the floor.

What thatch survives is dung for the grass,
The best grass on the farm. A pity the roof
Will not bear a mower to mow it. But
Only fowls have foothold enough.

Starlings used to sit there with bubbling throats
Making a spiky beard as they chattered
And whistled and kissed, with heads in air,
Till they thought of something else that mattered.

But now they cannot find a place,
Among all those holes, for a nest any more.
It's the turn of lesser things, I suppose.
Once I fancied 'twas starlings they built it for.

Edward Thomas

'Till they thought of something else that mattered' I love that line.


10zenomax
Jan. 2, 2012, 10:56 am



A reminder to myself.

11zenomax
Jan. 2, 2012, 11:01 am

One more reminder: Enantiodromia - everything turns into its respective opposite.

12theaelizabet
Jan. 2, 2012, 11:05 am

Zeno, as always, an interesting thread already. Happy New Year.

13baswood
Jan. 2, 2012, 5:55 pm

#8 Disappointingly tuneful.

Liked "The Barn". but as I was reading I could not help but think of the fuin (a stone martin) that has made his home in the attic space above my room. He is very noisy, but I think I have finally got rid of him. A radio tuned into an awful French pop music channel at loud volume and placed in the rafters has finally worked. I was sitting in my room with ear plugs in. It was either him or me,

14tomcatMurr
Jan. 5, 2012, 5:46 am

Happy new year Zeno. I hope we get to do Barthes together before too long.

15zenomax
Jan. 6, 2012, 2:25 am

Thanks for dropping by teresa & bas. Barry - wouldn't a martin in the eaves add to the bucolic atmosphere?

Murr - I recently purchased a book on the photography of Nadar and this reminded me of those splendid photos (together with Barthes' brief, pithy comments) at the back of his book.

I note he was born in November and died in March - so perhaps one of those anniversaries? Although November seems a long way away...

16zenomax
Jan. 6, 2012, 2:35 am

Received Timothy Beal's book on the history of the bible yesterday, and warned my wife that the bible itself was winging its way from amazon as we spoke.

She said we are not having that book in the house!

I reminded her that she had recently bought me a book on the history of the occult without any fuss.

What is it about the bible?

17zenomax
Jan. 6, 2012, 2:45 am

In quasi religious atmosphere let us have some appropriate background music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=778a9LuPMyo

18baswood
Jan. 6, 2012, 6:01 pm

zeno, I saw this film tonight and thought of you http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEZK7mJoPLY

I think your wife may have a point, having said that I have my grandad's bible in the house somewhere. (not on the shelves)

19tomcatMurr
Jan. 6, 2012, 10:22 pm

one should always have a bible in the house, for those emergencies when one runs out of loo paper. The bible is printed on excellent absorbent paper. Also useful for mopping up kitchen spills

20zenomax
Jan. 9, 2012, 3:22 am

18 - not sure how to interpret that comment bas.

19 - Murr, glad to see you are keeping a consistent line on this.

So as it turns out it is not the bible, but the first 5 books of Moses, which makes up the torah or as it is also known in the west, the Pentateuch.

With commentary by Robert Alter it is The five books of moses.

I have decided to read this, plus a history of the bible The rise and fall of the bible, together with A dark muse and an interesting book by occultist R A de Lubciz, Nature Word.

Given that my knowledge of the bible is only negligibly greater than that of the occult, it will be interesting to see how these books all run together.

21timjones
Jan. 9, 2012, 3:26 am

I liked the Edward Thomas poem a lot!

I am reading something differently arcane: The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics. It's good, but skips over most of the more philosophically interesting aspects of the quantum world.

22zenomax
Jan. 9, 2012, 12:12 pm

Tim - yes, Thomas always cuts through into interesting areas for me.

The literal world versus the imaginative world is an interesting battleground, which I am only just now beginning to become familiar with. Where Quantum mechanincs fits into this is potentially interesting too. Those at the edge of quantum mechanics and number theory do not seem too different to those who champion imagination over the literal ('parallel universes'!!, fractals that mimic nature - nature is often taken to be an enemy of the literalists who cannot comprehend nor control it)

23detailmuse
Jan. 9, 2012, 1:06 pm

Hi zeno, I’m interested to see Personality Type in your reading. The MBTI preferences are interesting but I think the real usefulness comes from interpreting them in combination (NT, etc) and it looks like the book goes deeply there. I look forward to your comments.

24zenomax
Jan. 9, 2012, 5:23 pm

Hi Mary Jo. Yes, I like the combination approach (David Keirsey was, I think, the first to do this). NTs, NFs, SJs & SPs and the broad commonalities that each type that falls within this group has.

I have found Lenore Thomson and Linda Berens to be producing the most interesting theories in this area in recent times.

25zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jan. 17, 2012, 1:41 pm

The Five Books of Moses, Robert Alter

The Rise and Fall of the Bible, Timothy Beal

Nature Word/Verbe Nature, R A Schwaller de Lubicz.

In progress with all 3. Still also reading A Dark Muse. Interesting reading all of these together. The 5 books of Moses is interesting and the thread lead by dan c is very informative and helpful. I'm learning a lot.

But I have to say the other side, the 2 books about the esoteric, are just so much more dynamic, imaginative and visionary. The bible appears (to me at least) to be always looking back. I have to work too hard to get to the messages - or conversely, are the messages too mundane and I'm only flogging a dead horse...?

I'm happy to press on as it is a cornerstone of our culture - and dan & urania's thread is stimulating me to keep at it.

But I see why those with imagination through history have become heretical.

Schwaller de Lubicz is a case in point. Mathmetician, Egyptologist, occultist, mage. And right wing fanatic - why are occultists almost always of the right?

RAS deL.

"Incarnation, in general, appears to be the concretization (or coagulation) of a power, at whatever degree of abstraction, enabling the same concrete state of the Universe's activities or functions to be known. For example: fluid knows fluid, solid knows solid and psychic knows psychic - because our physical form is only one aspect among other forms, that is, other concretizations, The Universe is a simultaneity of all Worlds.

from Nature Word. The universe as a simultaneity of all worlds really sparks with me.

Barking of course, but very interesting.

I think I like things that stretch my mind into new areas, new ways of thinking or perceiving, even if I have severe doubts on their veracity. The 5 books of Moses don't (as yet - still a long way to go), the esoteric so far does...

26baswood
Jan. 17, 2012, 5:52 pm

Interesting thoughts zeno

27Poquette
Jan. 17, 2012, 8:29 pm

And right wing fanatic - why are occultists almost always of the right?

It sort of depends on how you are defining "right." It is probably a good thing these days to be fanatically for liberty, economic freedom, free enterprise, individual initiative, the pursuit of happiness because they are under unrelenting assault by the left, at least in the United States.

But I see why those with imagination through history have become heretical.

I think this is true because once any belief system, whether religious, political or otherwise, once adherence to its dogma becomes the dominant interest of the "authorities," all initiative is killed. "You must obey." In studying the esoteric interests of Renaissance intellectuals like Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno, it has been interesting to see how they were attempting to use the newly rediscovered classical esoteric knowledge in the service of God, but at some point the Church fathers took exception, I believe, because their Neoplatonic ideas and their system of Caballa, among other things, went too far afield of the dogma of the Church. In other words, it didn't matter how pious the interests of these intellectuals, but what they were espousing could not be controlled and therefore what had been embraced by one Pope became the scourge of another and people were burned at the stake.

Your comment is sad but too true.

28tomcatMurr
Bearbeitet: Jan. 18, 2012, 7:48 am

they are under unrelenting assault by the left,

Rubbish. This is a right wing American myth, the sort of barking sentiment (love that word, Zeno) that makes the rest of the world look aghast at America. Don't fall for it.

29zenomax
Jan. 19, 2012, 7:23 am

Thanks for the heads up on the leftists, Suzanne. I'll bear it in mind.

I say of the 'right' because I classify those like Yeats and Crowley as elitist and I kind of associate that with the 'right'. Not to mention everything around the far right's adoption of the theme of 'the coming race'......

30zenomax
Jan. 19, 2012, 7:24 am

Thinking about it, I don't believe it is a good idea to be fanatically for (or against) anything.

31Poquette
Jan. 19, 2012, 3:08 pm

"the coming race" bit, sounds very foreign to anything I associate with the "right" – at least in my lifetime. If you are talking about those militant skinhead survivalists who are against everything, they are almost invisible in American discourse at least, and most people I know on the right would not recognize them as compatriots. They are just so far out there! For some reason I associate that phrase with the famously authoritarian regimes of the past, and by definition, authoritarian is the very antithesis of the right, at least as it exists in the conservative mainstream in the United States. It seems that many things are called "right" that really have nothing in common with ordinary conservative or libertarian values.

And I agree about fanaticism. I was engaging in hyperbole to some extent.

32zenomax
Jan. 20, 2012, 5:53 am

We may need to agree to disagree on this front.

To me the right is always willing to fall back on instruments of the state (police, army, judiciary, secret service) whilst espousing free speech. But that is just my view, and I have a tendency to be wrong on most things to do with the real world...

33zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jan. 20, 2012, 6:02 am

... however, in terms of that other world - I have had some quirky things happen since I started reading and thinking about the esoteric. Correspondances, I guess.

Blake used the term double vision to account for seeing things both physically and in the imagination. My dreams and that period between waking and sleeping (when I have always had an interior monologue/dialogue? which I have never fully grasped) have become more clear in my memory and quite philosophical in nature.

Also coincidences keep happening, having been reading about Hermes Trismegistus I was thinking about him as I drove the car and as I turned a corner there was a big building with the name 'Hermes' standing as bold as brass in fromt of me.

34zenomax
Jan. 20, 2012, 6:23 am

This reminds me of the other world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFiq1LMwh2s&feature=bf_prev&list=LL6A10G5...

Also puts me in mind of Life of the Bee by Maeterlinck - someone I know I need to read at some stage. As an interesting aside, let me add in parentheses that I recently discovered that another favourite, Edward Thomas, wrote a book on Maeterlinck. Now when is my next birthday due?

35deebee1
Jan. 20, 2012, 6:28 am

Very interesting conversation going on here, Z, though i have nothing intelligent to say...

Just to mention that the comment about right-wing fanatics and occultism brought to mind a book i just finished, The Lizard's Tail by Luisa Valenzuela which is about Jose Lopez Rega -- Argentina's so-called Minister of Social Affairs who acted as de facto Prime Minister in the mid-70s. He was leader of the right-wing Peronist movement and organizer of the dreaded Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, responsible for the Ezeiza massacre and the deaths of 1,500 persons which started the "Dirty War" that would later claim up to 30,000 dead and disappeared. Lopez Rega was a known occultist as he was deeply pro-fascist. An extreme example perhaps, but which shows that a relation does exist.

36zenomax
Jan. 20, 2012, 6:45 am

deebee - I can't believe you would ever have nothing intelligent to say.

Thanks for the note on The Lizard;s Tail. I have no more than an intuition about the link, but it is examples like Lopez Rega which have probably put that intuition there in the first place.

Somehow it all just opinion though, and in most things I have a strong affinity with Poquette (although she tends to put things better than I can)

37Poquette
Bearbeitet: Jan. 20, 2012, 3:00 pm

I cannot speak for other parts of the world, but here in the good old US of A, the right has no monopoly on instruments of the state. It's all very confusing.

I continue to be amazed that fascism is assigned to the right. No one on the right that I know thinks fascism, which is basically authoritarian, is a good thing.

You are right, zeno, it is all opinion, and our perception of things cannot help being colored by our own experience.

And thank you for your sentiments, which are mutual, of course.

ETA – Your Hermes experience made me smile. I had something similar happen just the other day, a similar coincidence, that is, but I cannot remember now what it was. Oh well . . .

38fuzzy_patters
Jan. 21, 2012, 1:31 pm

Poquette, the way I explain the right and left to my students is that the right tends to resist change while the left favors it. In other words, someone like Stalin or Lennin would be at the extreme left because they want to completely restructure society even if that means a total takeover by the state. Hitler or the Ku Klux Klan would be at the extreme right because they want to turn back the clock to some time real or imagined that they perceive to have been a better time, even if that means a total takeover by the state. Fortunately, most people are not at the extreme left or extreme right.

39Poquette
Bearbeitet: Jan. 21, 2012, 2:09 pm

Fuzzy, it is tragic that you consider Hitler to represent the right. Hitler was a socialist, and was in direct competition with the international communist movement because he was motivated by an interested in national socialism. His socialist totalitarian aims were the same as Lennin's in the sense they both wanted their socialist totalitarian schemes to dominate the world. Hence, the competition. No sane person I know of on the right has anything in common with the Ku Klux Klan. It is so marginal that it hardly bears mentioning and to use it to characterize the right is just irresponsible.

In the United States, the right is for personal liberty, economic freedom (i.e., free enterprise), smaller government, equality of opportunity, and at the moment, the right is all about change!

ETA – Apologies to you, zeno, for highjacking your thread!

40tonikat
Jan. 21, 2012, 2:55 pm

I can see an aspect of what you are saying about the socialism and competition with the communists, a sliver of how it could be seen that way, portrayed that way. It's interesting how we all see these things from our points of view and it only makes me want to say that I think its safe to say that a lot of the rest of thw world are pretty convinced they (the Nazi's) were of the right, but I have to listen to the distinctions you are drawing; of course lots of the rest of us also look at the american right from a very different perspecftive too and from my point of view your (mainstream) left is pretty far right. I can't really see the Nazi's as socialist no matter the use of the word nor that totalitarianism is confined to socialists, at best they misunderstood the word or used it to confuse or to state something very different. I like the definition of the conservative element of the right, but then the left can sometimes be conservative e.g. trade unions and labour practice. The right you define may be all about change but within a certain system of the way things should be, that they do not wish to change. In some ways it strikes me that the Nazi's were a sort of theocracy, which may be something else, and what they believed was soemthing else. But what do I know, now that is something I am pretty sure of.

41fuzzy_patters
Bearbeitet: Jan. 21, 2012, 5:23 pm

Poquette, socialists can be conservatives. What is conservative in one setting can be liberal in another. Hence, today's American libertarians are considered conservative today because they want to restore what America was before the New Deal with less governmental involvement, but they would have been considered liberal in the nineteenth century since reduced governmental involvement was a stark change from European monarchies.

Additionally, the Nazi Party was more nationalist than socialist. They were right wingeRs in that they wanted to restore Germany to its military strength from before the Treaty of Versailles. They also wanted to reinstate what they believed to have been a superior race before the influence of foreigners.

42Poquette
Bearbeitet: Jan. 21, 2012, 7:53 pm

Tony and Fuzzy – As Zeno said above — and this is his thread — we'll have to agree to disagree.

No one on the right in the United States has anything in common with Nazism or Fascism, regardless of what "the rest of the word" wants to think.

Unions in the United States are anything but conservative.

The term "liberal" in the 19th century actually meant "liberal." Today, it means something quite different. "Progressive" is another word that has been completely obfuscated.

By the way, I would recommend a book entitled Liberal Fascism, which is not a polemical screed and which lays a lot of this out better than I can — or should on Zeno's thread. Check it out.

Sorry, Zeno!

43fuzzy_patters
Jan. 21, 2012, 8:49 pm

Poquette, I am well aware of what people in the United States think. I live in the middle of the US and consider myself to be a conservative. I felt the need to respond because I have actually studied this (double majored in poli sci and history). I agree that mainstream American conservatives are no more fascists than liberals are communists, but the mainstream of either side isn't at the extreme, either. Perhaps using words other than conservative and liberal would help people feel better. Here is how I group them when I teach. Please note that all of these classifications apply to the US. What is conservative here might not be conservative elsewhere.

Reactionary (ultra-conservative) (wants to go back to some time that they perceive to have been better)-fascists, Nazis, KKK,etc.

Conservative (wishes to advocate the status quo or prefers small incremental changes)- Republican Party

Liberal (prefers larger changes to use the government as an instrument of improvement)- Democratic Party

Radicals (ultra-liberals) (prefers massive change to the overall structure of society)- communists, anarchists, socialists, Black Panther Party.

44tomcatMurr
Bearbeitet: Jan. 22, 2012, 12:36 am

>37 Poquette: I continue to be amazed that fascism is assigned to the right.

Murr is stunned.

>39 Poquette:
It is tragic that you consider Hitler to represent the right. Hitler was a socialist, and was in direct competition with the international communist movement because he was motivated by an interested in national socialism.

Murr is speechless. Jaw open, he contemplates new profundities, new abbysses of absurdity.

>39 Poquette:...no sane person I know of on the right....

surely an impossibility, even in America?

Murr leaves the discussion in bewilderment at how well-educated, literate people can be so hopelessly muddled, so brainwashed. God bless Meruhca.

45zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jan. 22, 2012, 4:44 am

No need to worry about hijacking the thread. I like political debate, and the politics of anger is particularly interesting.

Suzanne, the book you mention appears to have caused quite a stir in the USA. I can't help thinking that the author appears to have little understanding or depth of knowledge of the history he is talking about.

The key difference in my mind is not necessarily right versus left but those who think they know best for society and those who believe reality is too complex to prescribe. Those on the left and right could both fall on either side.

But those who push a laissez faire agenda in my mind very often tend to be of the think they know best school - I fear them ever coming to unfettered power.

46zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jan. 22, 2012, 4:41 am

fuzzy_patters welcome. I like your definitions in 43.

47tonikat
Bearbeitet: Jan. 22, 2012, 6:59 am

Poquette - I did not mean to say that being of the right necessarily meant Nazism. I had hoped I had shown I was listening to your distinctions but also gave my point of view. I suggested unions can be conservative on some issues and my example was on labour practice, so for example in the UK in the past unions fought against modernising newspaper printing practices to save printing jobs, as I understand it, excuse me if that is a bald over generalisation, but that sort of thing was what I meant, so conservative in that they fought change - I agree not conservative in other senses.

and Zeno -- now those Nazi's had an interest in the occult.

48Poquette
Jan. 22, 2012, 2:53 pm

Zeno, I am somewhat relieved by your comment, but I really didn't come here to sully your thread with a political harangue.

The book I mentioned, Liberal Fascism did cause a stir. The book is actually quite scholarly and is footnoted to a fair-thee-well. Some of the most vocal critics seem not to have actually read it!

Fuzzy, if keeping a list of labels is helpful to you, I say go for it. However, the problem with labels is that at best they amount to a sort of shorthand, they provide an excuse for name-calling, they obviate the necessity of actual thought, they frequently don't account for the reality of what is going on at a given time or place, and definitions change over time and from place to place. And your short list does not account for libertarians. Surely there are more libertarians than reactionaries today in the United States. In fact, I am having trouble coming up with the name of anyone current who is actually a reactionary in the U.S. I know that word is frequently thrown out in an accusatory fashion, but in my view it does not reflect current reality. Again, where are the fascists, Nazis and KKK in current American politics? To call someone a reactionary is to hurl an epithet. It is not helpful.

Tony, I appreciate what you are saying, and of course the notion of conservatism in England is somewhat different from the United States – Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan notwithstanding. I have tried throughout this to indicate that my thoughts filter through the prism of being in the U.S., so I can see how we might see things slightly differently.

49zenomax
Jan. 24, 2012, 10:16 am

Suzanne - how would you describe the difference between libertarians and anarchists or Nihilists?

50zenomax
Jan. 24, 2012, 10:25 am

I tried the double vision experiment a few weeks back, cleared my mind, and let it click into that neutral gear where the imagination becomes all. I came up with this:

'Everything in itself. Everything in itself, distinct.

Colour is control.'

What could it mean? There is nothing of depth or profundity in there. However, reading Lachman a week or so later I came across the importance of colour in alchemy. Synesthesia also seems to play a part - part of Baudelaire's fascination with using colour as a descriptor appears to come from his interest in synesthesia....

I still maintain that visions, such as they are, come from an internal source - the esoteric tradition which admits imagination, but suggests the source is outside the recipient seems problematic to me. I think it does come from the unconscious, because the themes spelt out above have something to do with the themes i ahve been thinking about. The interesting thing is I find important links to what I think I came up with above, but always after the event, not before.

Correspondances?

51Poquette
Jan. 24, 2012, 2:55 pm

Zeno, pontificating on the meanings of words is not my idea of fun, but it was fun to look them up in the dictionary and see what the words in question are supposed to mean, and I find they pretty much conform to my understanding:

libertarian — a person who upholds the principles of individual liberty, especially of thought and action and advocates only minimal state intervention in the lives of citizens.

anarchist — a person who rebels against any established order; one who uses violent means to overthrow the established order.

nihilism — a viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless and that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility.

Hope that helps.

52tonikat
Jan. 24, 2012, 3:27 pm

I sometimes like to think that words themselves don't mean anything, just what we agree they do, though I do like to use my dictionary. I suppose someone will come back to thgis with some word that does tend to signfiy something, say "atchoo".

53dchaikin
Jan. 24, 2012, 4:35 pm

wow, I just now finally getting to your thread Z and look what I've been missing!

I reflexively felt the need to look this up:

from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism )

"Nazism was founded out of elements of the far-right racist völkisch German nationalist movement and the violent anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary culture that fought against the uprisings of communist revolutionaries in post-World War I Germany."

...

"Nazism was officially presented by Hitler and other proponents as being neither left-wing nor right-wing but a politically syncretic ideology ... However a majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as being a far right form of politics."

54dchaikin
Jan. 24, 2012, 4:49 pm

Ok, after getting past that... Z - I'm fascinated to see your reading Beal, and fascinated to see your reactions to the bible relative to your reactions the books on the esoteric back in #25.

I've been meaning to post about my reasons for reading the bible. The problem is that I haven't really determined them. What strikes me is your comment about it's messages. I actually haven't looked at in that way. For me, on a personal level, it's largely about searching for foundations. So, if I'm looking for messages, it's only in trying to find the message the various authors intended, and not messages I can take away and use elsewhere. My point is that we are two different approaches, quite interesting I think.

Now that I'm caught up, looking forward to following along here.

55zenomax
Jan. 24, 2012, 5:09 pm

Suzanne - I was interested because I believed libertarianism was an anarchism from the right rather than from the left - it was interesting to get your view.

I am instinctively sympathetic to anarchist & nihilist thought - but I find it difficult to find anything to like libertarianism. The fact that you speak for it does make it more interesting to me, but I cannot pretend to like it in any way.

56zenomax
Jan. 24, 2012, 5:15 pm

dan - I was thinking of messages because it seems to me that it is the message that every evangelist or christian politician tries to push. And I don't see any message.

Your search for foundations is a lot more rational and considered. I'll bear it in mind as I read further.

57zenomax
Jan. 24, 2012, 5:29 pm

Tony - I like dictionaries too. I used to read them almost as books - especially the Oxford dictionary.

58Poquette
Jan. 24, 2012, 6:48 pm

Zeno, I didn't realize I was speaking for anything other than clarity. But just reading those dictionary definitions, it sounds to me like libertarians are more constructively positive than anarchists and nihilists, who seem to be destructively against everything. Being a natural optimist I would tend to find the positive aspects of libertarianism more appealing. So again, we'll just have to accept that we have a different world view on that one.

59zenomax
Jan. 27, 2012, 6:11 am

I like your certainty Suzanne, and always respect your views. However, I don't see why destruction cannot be the route an optimist takes on occasion.

In reading the Five Books of Moses, there has been plenty to think about. I came across this passage from Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections which I like:

"Man always has some mental reservation, even in the face of divine decrees. Otherwise, where would be his freedom? And what would be the use of that freedom if it could not threaten Him who threatens it?"

60zenomax
Jan. 27, 2012, 6:37 am

"... that episode of the imagination which we call reality."

Fernando Pessoa, 'A Factless Autobiography', in The Book of Disquiet.

Gary Lachman in his book on the occult, sees Pessoa as one who had more than a passing interest in the esoteric. I knew that Pessoa wrote under several noms de plume, but hadn't realised until Lachman pointed it out how this was part of a mania - perhaps similar but more than complex than Jung's own contact with his number 2 personality - his anima which helped him at difficult times in his life.

Pessoa had multiple personalities ('nonexistent acquaintances' as he called them), all with quite different characters, each with a unique writing style, probably with different personality types from him. Lachman alleges that Pessoa even used one of his 'other' personalities to write a letter on his behalf to a girlfriend, breaking of the relationship!

Lachman relates an example of Pessoa's ongoing problems with identity.

"Indeed, Pessoa's grip on his own self was so tenuous that at one point he took to writing his old teachers and schoolmates in Durban, posing as the psychiatrist Faustino Autunes, asking for their opinion on the mental state of his patient, Fernando Pessoa, who, depending on the letter, had either commited suicide or was under restraint at an asylum. Having no idea who he was, Pessoa hoped to gain some insight from those who knew him."

61zenomax
Jan. 27, 2012, 6:44 am

It strikes me, having read through Lachman's sections on various 'occult thinkers' that most had either mental problems or a high degree of other worldliness/spirituality. Most had a bit of both. Jung - despite his protestations that he was a scientist - should be taken as a modern example.

Is the esoteric mindset a function of a certain type of off-centre brain pattern where, depending on your point of view, one can see the reality beyond the horizon, or conversely, see an 'imaginative' view of the universe which in point of fact does not bear up to real world, rational scrutiny?

62zenomax
Jan. 27, 2012, 6:58 am

"None of the sophisms of insanity - the insanity which is put under restraint - have been forgotten by me. I can repeat them all. I possess the system"

Rimbaud, quoted in Lachman.

63zenomax
Jan. 27, 2012, 7:18 am

As I write this 2 modern day rag and bone men drive slowly past in a vehicle, stacked with old metal & steel detritus, as one of them tolls a bell.

It is like something from another age. I had to think to myself am I really seeing this? One of those times when, for a brief moment, you are never entirely sure.

Presumably it is a function of the times, money and security have become a scarcer commodity.

My immediate thought was 'wormhole'!

"Infinite prison - since you're infinite there's no escaping you!" Pessoa, 'A Factless Autobiography'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag-and-bone_man

64zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jan. 27, 2012, 7:51 am

I am jumping around topics like an adrenalin fuelled flea, but this portion, from the opening of Sebald's 3rd narrative poem (in After Nature), has been playing on my mind since I read it.

"For it is hard to discover
the winged vertebrates of prehistory
embedded in tablets of slate.
But if I see before me
the nervature of past life
in one image, I always think
that this has something to do
with truth. Our brains, after all,
are always at work on some quivers
of self-organisation, however faint,
and it is from this that an order
arises, in places beautiful
and comforting, though more cruel too,
than the previous state of ignorance."


"Dark Night Sallies Forth", W G Sebald.



In accompaniement, this wonderful engraving by Sebald's namesake from an earlier age, Hans Sebald Beham.

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

65dchaikin
Jan. 27, 2012, 8:32 am

#61 - about 90% of what I know about the esoteric comes from your thread (and maybe other threads here on LT), so apologies for any nonsense. My thought is that the esoteric mindset is not simply seeing a 'imaginative' (and doubtful?) new sense of the world, but then pursuing it to the point of bringing out more and more detail. I would think this would take not only a great deal of focused energy, but also an extreme self-confidence...and belief.

Or maybe these are the kind of people who just enjoy getting lost, or, more likely, need somehow to be lost, and this is simply another way to wander into an unknown.

66zenomax
Jan. 30, 2012, 7:25 am

Some interesting thoughts there dan, and nothing I disagree with.

Belief is often at the forefront, as you say. In many ways this makes the esoteric just a variant on the established religious beliefs. The other striking similarity for me is that both raise humans to be the central point. It is almost as if (actually strike the words 'It is almost as if') everything is created around man(woman)kind - nothing exists or at least nothing is meaningful without us. I don't think I can agree with this sentiment....

67zenomax
Jan. 30, 2012, 9:25 am

To bring this back on itself, the history of personality typing is closely tied up with the esoteric.

Jung's work in this area of course famously kick started a whole personality typing industry in the late 20th century, whilst another esoteric adept, WB Yeats, also had a theory of personality typing - based on the phases of the moon, such knowledge being transferred to him via the medium of his wife.

This seems to be an interesting area to explore further...



William Butler Yeats.

68dchaikin
Bearbeitet: Jan. 30, 2012, 9:31 am

#66 Interesting. That take is strange to me too.

69dchaikin
Jan. 30, 2012, 9:35 am

#67 - There is an obvious something that ties the phases of the moon with life cycles of his wife, presumably not what he's getting at...

70zenomax
Jan. 30, 2012, 12:11 pm

69 - you never know with these intellectuals, dan....

71detailmuse
Jan. 30, 2012, 12:15 pm

>63 zenomax: rag and bone men
I love learning this reference. We still have them in Chicagoland, driving ratty trucks up and down alleys on weekends and before trash pick-up days. Have to be careful not to leave anything unattended near the alley unless it's to be discarded.

72zenomax
Jan. 31, 2012, 3:59 am

71 - The concept seems so tied up in the idiosyncracies of the British working class that it surprises me to know they operate elsewhere.

They never made an appearance in New Zealand during my youth.

73zenomax
Jan. 31, 2012, 2:47 pm

Nature, endless

74Poquette
Feb. 7, 2012, 1:52 am

Zeno, I have just been rereading some of your earlier posts in the context of The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination which, thanks to you, I am currently reading. The first part of the book, incidentally, was very interesting and mostly unfamiliar territory – all the lore about the "other world" and how the dominance of monotheism over the past couple of millenia has actually tended to squeeze out a rather substantial part of imaginative thinking if it did not square with dogma. Harpur says: ". . . it is a purely a Western peculiarity to confuse the literal and the physical." Later he says:

One of the distinctive innovations of Western thought has been to turn the Otherworld into an intellectual abstration. It has been formulated in three main ways: as the Soul of the World; as the imagination; and as the collective unconscious. . . Historically, all three models have been largely ignored or outcast by Western orthodoxy, whether Christian theology or modern rationalism. But wherever they have as it were broken the surface and emerged from their 'esoteric' or even 'occult' underworld, they have been accompanied by extraordinary efflorenscences of creative life. In Renaissance Florence, and again, among the Germans and English Romantics three hundred years later, imagination was exalted not only as the most important human faculty, but as the very ground of reality.
This becomes really interesting in the context of Jung's archetypes: "Mythology is a psychology of antiquity. Psychology is a mythology of modernity."

It occurs to me that rather than thinking of occultists as possibly having mental problems, that they did indeed possess a high degree of otherworldliness and spirituality which we rationalists today have difficulty dealing with. They burst through the confines of both monotheism and rationalism to permit back into the psyche that extraordinary engine of imagination and creativity — the unconscious, which is today a key tool of depth psychologists. Ironic, isn't it?

This book really begins to get interesting for me at chapter 14.

75zenomax
Feb. 7, 2012, 3:22 am

Suzanne, I think I agree with all that you say.

It was interesting to me to discover just how much Jung fitted into this group. You just need to transpose collective unconscious for the more 'spiritual' terminology and it is coming from the same place.

My problem with ther esoteric is that it is ultimately another belief system in something unprovable (unknowable?), so no better or worse than established religion - and feasibly the same could be said of rationalist science...

However, what I like about it is that it frees the imagination and increases the boundaries of what is thinkable. Anything that increases ones knowledge and expands ones horizons is a good thing. Established religion and scientific dogma do not do this (the latter does to a degree in terms of evolving as we learn new things, but within rigid rules).

I liked Harpur's book because it opened up new areas to me and was full of ideas and interesting arguments. However it has almost too many things in it, so that I felt it lost a little bit of focus at times. Also some of his arguments were just too speculative for me - which didn't etract from the interest but did make me step back a bit from what he was saying.

But yes, the connection with modern psychology is interesting. Talking of irony, it is interesting that psycho analysis and personality typing (a tool used often in modern day businesses) are both ultimately influenced by the esoteric tradition.

76zenomax
Feb. 7, 2012, 3:23 am

I would also recommend Lachman's book A dark muse which gives background to some of the more prominent writers an artists with esoteric connections....

77zenomax
Feb. 7, 2012, 3:25 am

Rather than mental problems it is maybe a high degree of communion with another world which makes for fragility within this world?

78Poquette
Feb. 7, 2012, 1:29 pm

Zeno, glad we are back on common ground!

Regarding Jung, indeed, when he is viewed in this light, so much that was murky about him seems to fall into place.

I agree that Harpur's book feels like it is all over the place. I found that a bit unsettling as I was beginning to read. But I see now that he was laying as broad a foundation as he could for the points he wanted to make. On balance, I think it helped. Now that I have gotten into more familiar territory, it is proceeding better. I keep reminding myself that this is a history of the imagination, and that helps me from getting completely lost in all the minutiae.

And the ironies regarding psychoanalysis vis-à-vis the esoteric tradition are stunning.

The chapter on Ficino brings this squarely into the realm that I have been so mesmerized by over the past year.

Re #77, I am thinking if not "communion with another world," at least with the collective unconscious.

79zenomax
Feb. 7, 2012, 1:49 pm

Yes, and when it becomes collective unconscious then I am almost fully on board.... which is difficult because I want to stand at one remove to such things.

80zenomax
Feb. 7, 2012, 1:51 pm

81zenomax
Feb. 7, 2012, 2:10 pm

And I see there is a book called Against the modern world which looks at such interesting creatures as Julius Evola and Rene Guenon who 'rejected modernity as a dark age'.........

82zenomax
Feb. 7, 2012, 2:12 pm



Guenon

83zenomax
Feb. 7, 2012, 2:21 pm

From the Amazon description of Evola's book The Hermetic Tradition

"Evola demonstrates the singularity of subject matter that lies behind the words of all adepts in all ages, showing how alchemy--often misunderstood as primitive chemistry or a mere template for the Jungian process of "individuation"--is nothing less than a universal secret science of human and natural transformation. "

84Poquette
Feb. 7, 2012, 2:36 pm

Evola's take on alchemy squares with what I understand. Both Evola and Guénon were unfamiliar to me so I was just reading about them at Wikipedia. Will make a note . . .

85zenomax
Bearbeitet: Feb. 10, 2012, 5:55 am

Suzanne - now that you are reading Harpur's book, are you (as I did) having to make a readjustment from reading books about these philosophies (where you could act as observer) to reading an advocacy for the philsophies (in which case you are almost forced to come down on one side of the other)...?

86zenomax
Feb. 10, 2012, 12:37 pm

"Spirits are complexes of the collective unconscious which appear when the individual loses his adaptation to reality, or which seek to replace the inadequate attitude of a whole people by a new one. They are therefore either pathological fantasies or new but as yet unknown ideas."

Jung, Psychology and the Occult.

87Poquette
Feb. 10, 2012, 3:15 pm

Funny you should mention that, Zeno. He really does hit the reader over the head with his biases. Rather than coming down on one side or another, I find myself being of two minds on some issues. For example, while Harpur decries the rationalists who he almost accuses of having driven the "soul" out of humanity, I want to say, on the one hand, "Why those dirty rationalists! How could they?"

But the problem is that I actually think of myself as a rationalist mostly because I disbelieve in anything supernatural. So that means the "Otherworld" and its manifestations are out the window, so to speak, in my world view at least. However, I find the ideas around archetypes and the collective unconscious very appealing and I don't see that as particularly a contradiction, although Harpur might.

What is unsettling about Harpur's book is that he puts the reader in an uncomfortable position if one doesn't automatically agree with his point of view. He covers a lot of very interesting material and raises many interesting questions in his attempt to provide a history of the imagination. But he does make me squirm, to some degree, in the process.

88zenomax
Feb. 10, 2012, 3:26 pm

Exactly, exactly, exactly the same for me.

89zenomax
Bearbeitet: Feb. 12, 2012, 1:27 pm

In the spirit of these changeable, obtuse, de-rationalised times, let me share this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrUPXOG8_t0&feature=related

90zenomax
Feb. 12, 2012, 1:30 pm

....everything could exist, has existed and will exist again....

91zenomax
Feb. 12, 2012, 1:35 pm

Nothing is true, all is permitted”:Thus spoke Zarathustra.

92baswood
Feb. 12, 2012, 1:57 pm

Good sounds from the 1980's a good concert too.

93zenomax
Feb. 14, 2012, 4:49 pm

Thanks bas & agreed.

95zenomax
Feb. 14, 2012, 5:29 pm

Dreams & journeys....

96dchaikin
Feb. 16, 2012, 1:18 pm

@ 91 - thus (supposedly) spoke Hassan i Sabbah, founder of the assassins - a link :)

Wondering where you are/were headed with that one...

97zenomax
Bearbeitet: Feb. 25, 2012, 5:54 pm

dan - thanks for the link. Not sure where I was headed with that either, but sometimes that is when you find the best paths.

98zenomax
Bearbeitet: Feb. 25, 2012, 6:32 pm



Visitation, J Erpenbeck

"Heredity, will, destiny, all mingle noisily in our soul; but notwithstanding everything, far above everything, it is the silent star that reigns".

So wrote Maurice Maeterlinck in his neo Platonist tract, The Treasure of the Humble.

Erpenbeck's book (it does not feel right to call it a novel - it is more like a revelatory tract itself) seems to follow a similar philosophical trajectory.

Heredity, will and destiny. Each in its ways guiding us, but each somewhat beyond our control. And still further from us, but not beyond the reach of our imagination, the thought of some praeternatural guiding light.

The story, such as it is, is about a piece of land, near a lake. This piece of land is sculpted and moulded on the surface by a number of human dwellers. They themselves are in turn moulded by fates.

The times are changing. The life of the village mayor and his four daughters, recorded early in the book, are probably the last to be lived to the timeless traditions and rhythms of the countryside. The coming generations are to be affected by wars and by different ways of running things, by different revelations about the future.They are fated to live in interesting times. People come and go, change the landscape a little, add or subtract from the buildings, and time slowly flows on.The only constant now is the changing of the seasons- as personified in the form of the gardener - although even this becomes subsumed underneath the veneer of the modern times in which people now dwell.

What sets this book apart is the way it occupies different spheres to most fictional works. It circles above the world we normally see in fiction - the world of interpersonal relations as seen from the human viewpoint - instead taking the view almost of an alien visitor, or of nature itself observing the bipedal inhabitants and recording their pastimes and fetishes (although from a distance, once removed from normal emotional connection).

Yet this is not a cold book, it is a true book, a book of facts recorded. Whether facts about trees planted in a certain year, trees trimmed at certain times, the small architectural details a husband adds to a house to please his wife,or about the way a young woman suddenly crosses the threshold from sanity to a state of no longer being fully sane, it is a record of which Berliner - and at what address - purchases each item previously confisticated from a family of Jews, and it records how the last survivor of that family survives and survives through removal to Poland, the subsequent round up of all in the ghetto, the train journey by overcrowded cattle truck, only to finally not survive - to not survive by being taken aside and shot with the old people who equally are of no use as labourers.

While it is more distant than most books it is also far more near. From time to time we come right into the thinking, dreaming mind of one of the humans. The 12 year old girl - the last survivor of her family - about to be shot, somewhere in Poland, with the smell of pine trees (which she cannot see because of the height of the wall) reminding her of the house by the lake, is taken back to the times she swam in the lake, diving down under its waters to tickle her parents legs. She recalls how they pretended to scream because they knew that would please her.

When the girl is shot, along with the old people, and with those who had lost their minds on the journey, it is recorded that a vacuum came into this world - a vacuum small and maybe imperceptible to most, but a fact recorded and verified nevertheless:

"For three years the girl took piano lessons, but now, while her dead body slides down into the pit, the word piano is taken back from human beings, now the backflip on the high bar that the girl could perform better than her school mates is taken back, along with all the motions a swimmer makes, the gesture of seizing hold of a crab is taken back, as well as all the basic knots to be learned for sailing, all these things are taken back into uninventedness, and finally, last of all, the name of the girl herself is taken back, the name no one will ever call her again by: Doris."

It strikes me that what gives this book such impact is its ability to create a bridge between its distant, distancing view of the human world (suggesting a world where destiny & heredity hold sway, where we have no ability to change things) and its recording of human consciousness. Here, the big picture, the huge forces of time and destiny, merge with the little unimportant detail, the fleeting daydream or half forgotten memory in one girl's mind.

Perhaps the distant shining star is not a tangible thing, but an answer within us, and perhaps this book points us in a direction, no more than that.

99Poquette
Feb. 25, 2012, 11:12 pm

Very thoughtful reflections on Visitation, Zeno, and very beautifully expressed. Your insights remind me that there are deeper meanings to the book than I was willing to give it credit for at the time I read it.

100baswood
Feb. 26, 2012, 4:29 am

Zeno, Fabulous review of Visitation

101zenomax
Feb. 26, 2012, 12:19 pm

99 + 100 - Thanks both.

102detailmuse
Feb. 26, 2012, 2:53 pm

Beautiful review of Visitation, onto the wishlist.

I'm especially interested in your comments about narrative distance, which brought to mind this gradient I saved from John Gardner's The Art of Fiction:
It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
Henry hated snowstorms.
God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul.

103dchaikin
Bearbeitet: Feb. 27, 2012, 1:06 pm

Z - I'm not used to you writing full reviews. This is beautifully written. Noticed the dedication on the review page.

104zenomax
Feb. 27, 2012, 1:04 pm

Thanks dan.

Do you mean 'not used to you writing full reviews'?

That would be closer to the mark.

Yes, had a reason for doing it - hence the atypical effort....

105dchaikin
Feb. 27, 2012, 1:07 pm

yes, with the "not", now edited... :)

106zenomax
Feb. 27, 2012, 1:07 pm

Thanks MJ.

Yes, the distancing was an interesting device, but not out of tune with the way I like to view things.

John Gardner's example shows those gradients well - the interesting thing with Visitation was that it pretty much just used the first and last of those examples, nothing in between...

107janeajones
Feb. 28, 2012, 1:50 pm

Loved your review of Visitation -- I just finished it and thought it lovely. You might like House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk and In Red by Magdalena Tulli.

108zenomax
Feb. 28, 2012, 4:43 pm

Thank you Jane.

Just checked out both your recommendations, they look intriguing.

109zenomax
Mrz. 6, 2012, 3:44 pm





Stroke - Songs for Chris Knox

New Zealand musical enfant terrible, Chris Knox was felled by a stroke in 2009. This CD of songs from Chris Knox in his various incarnations came out as result of Knox's incapacity - and is performed by a number of his friends in the business.

The standout for me is the track performed by The Crying Wolfs, 'All my hollowness to you', originally from the Tall dwarfs wonderful '3 songs' EP.

The thing that strikes me most in this collection is that, once you strip away the eccentric, inner demon lyrics and the eccentric/imaginative stylings Knox uses (as a child of the punk/new wave age he retains the anti establishmentarianism of those years), what a good songsmith he is. Some songs have such stripped down but tuneful backgrounds, a couple even sound almost like Simon & Garfunkel when interpreted by the non Knoxians on this cd.

However, Knox is more than just a tunesmith and I'm not sure NZ needs a latter day Paul Simon. It is Knox's personal vision that makes him the pre eminent NZ singer songwriter, that makes him something other than a punk version of Paul S (the mind boggles!).

And let's not forget Alec Bathgate who so often is the perfect foil for Knox...

110baswood
Mrz. 6, 2012, 4:59 pm

Chris Knox has passed me by and I was then trying to think of other artists from new Zealand that I might know and like - I couldn't think of any. I must have a blind spot as far as New Zealand music goes.

111zenomax
Mrz. 6, 2012, 5:09 pm





An interesting card:

...this card signifies a time when the querent is feeling sensitive, vulnerable, introverted, suspended even as they also experience insight so deep that for a moment, nothing but that insight exists A time, then, when one changes one perspective. But a sacrifice is also needed.

"Great or small, spiritual or mundane what you gain from making that sacrifice and allowing yourself to see things differently is insights and solutions."

And most interesting to read this:

"One thing is certain, once you have been the Hanged Man you never see things quite as you did before."

112zenomax
Mrz. 6, 2012, 5:15 pm

110 - bas - nothing to be ashamed of, NZ has seldom made much impact in the musical spheres. I would mention Split Enz as well - although they disbanded years ago whenever I go back to NZ I hear their music played constantly...

113Poquette
Bearbeitet: Mrz. 6, 2012, 7:49 pm

"It is a card of profound significance, but all the significance is veiled."

"He who can understand that the story of his higher nature is embedded in this symbolism will receive intimations concerning a great awakening."

—A.E. Waite

"But though all beasts that meet your gaze boast varied shapes,
Their heads hang low, depress their senses dulled.
The human race alone lifts high its lofty head,
And poised with upright stance looks down on earth below.
Unless earthbound you lose your wits, this image warns:
As with head high and brow thrust forth you search the sky,
So you must bear aloft your thoughts. Let not your mind
Sink downward, lower than your body poised above."

—Boethius

114zenomax
Mrz. 7, 2012, 7:55 am

Suzanne - same wavelength...

A vivid, deeply colourful image of this figure (it was a non specific version of the figure, not the card) emerged unannounced in my mind a couple of nights ago. It took me a while to understand what it was . Hence my current interest.

115zenomax
Mrz. 7, 2012, 7:59 am

I need to get hold of Boethius...

116Poquette
Mrz. 7, 2012, 11:28 am

Zeno, you well know my enthusiasm for Boethius, and The Consolation of Philosophy (Oxford World Classics). Of the many English translations available, I favor P.G. Walsh for Oxford World Classics. The poetry elements are particularly well rendered.

The idea expressed in that excerpt were not original to Boethius. He cribbed from Cicero who cribbed from Plato's Timaeus. So there is truly nothing new under the sun.

117zenomax
Mrz. 7, 2012, 1:53 pm

"Below the threshold of consciousness everything was seething with life".

C G Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

118zenomax
Mrz. 7, 2012, 1:54 pm

I'll look out for the Oxford World Classics edition.

119zenomax
Mrz. 11, 2012, 5:27 pm

"Nature rejoices in nature, nature subdues nature, nature rules over nature."

- Democritus

120zenomax
Mrz. 16, 2012, 8:24 am

bas' reading list for the month has helped clarify in my own mind whom I should be reading next: Marsilio Ficino and James Hillman. The one a neo Platonist philosopher & occultist from the 15th century, the other a 20th century psychologist and alumni of the C G Jung Institut, Zurich.



If anything, this tells us that the Jungian psychologists are really just another in the line of esoteric mages that share in common a string of beliefs and outlook through the centuries.

The flip side of this is that many neo Platonists such as Ficino were, perhaps, the earliest 'moderns' - centuries rather than years ahead of their time in understanding the inner symbolic meanings of human life.

121Poquette
Mrz. 16, 2012, 1:42 pm

The sad thing is how brutally suppressed the Renaissance philosophers such as Ficino were by the powers that be. I agree that they were ahead of their time and their suppression set us back several hundred years in psychological terms.

I too have The Planets Within on hand to be read soon as part of my ongoing pursuit of pagan influences.

122zenomax
Mrz. 16, 2012, 3:41 pm

Suzanne - that's excellent that you have The Planets Within - look forward to your comments on it.

123baswood
Mrz. 17, 2012, 8:04 am

Zeno and Suzanne, Obviously one of you needs to get to read The Planets Within pretty damn pronto and then tell me if it's worth reading.

124zenomax
Mrz. 17, 2012, 10:24 am

That will be S. then....

125Poquette
Mrz. 17, 2012, 2:11 pm

LOL. All right. I accept the challenge.

126zenomax
Bearbeitet: Mrz. 28, 2012, 3:29 pm

The dreamer awakes.

127zenomax
Mrz. 28, 2012, 3:48 pm

"My life is a story of the self-realisation of the unconscious."

The opening line in Jung's 'autobiography', Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

128zenomax
Mrz. 28, 2012, 3:52 pm

Current reading

129zenomax
Mrz. 28, 2012, 3:57 pm

"Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science....Thus it is that I have now undertaken, in my eighty-third year to tell my own personal myth."

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

130zenomax
Mrz. 28, 2012, 5:00 pm

Just finished:

A Field Guide to Melancholy, Jacky Bowring,



...three particular enigmas haunt melancholy: madness, genius and beauty...."

Melancholy has fallen in and out of fashion through the ages, sometimes an affectation when associated with genius or beauty, at other times considered a sign of madness. Bowring tracks the history and attempts to get to grips with the meanings of melancholy over time and through cultures.

The difficulty with such an undertaking is that melancholy is inchoate in both its form and content. Bowring deals with this by liberally quoting or sampling the views of notables through the ages in order to build up an impressionistic view of the concept.

However, there is little of originality here. The best that can be said is that Bowring stimulates some thoughts on melancholy without taking them anywhere far, and provides some name dropping for those who want to take these leads further.

There is much that can be pondered upon with this subject, some of which Bowring touches upon:

- the link between melancholy and introversion (Sebald, Pessoa)
- melancholy times (dusk + autumn says Bowring; midday in the heat of summer?)
- the 1950s
- the english seaside town
- melancholy & silence
- de Chirico's trains
- Russia (almost any part of it you care to name)
- the outskirts of cities
- certain colours? but which ones
- odd numbers (or should it be primes?)
- brass bands, especially cornets
- waiting
- Sunday late morning/early afternoon
- Baudelaire
- the spaces between things
- unknown planets
- melancholy and the archetypes
- melancholy and the machinations of unconscious mind
- the melancholy constituencies of inanimate objects

"In the gloomy cowl of night and morning's semidarkness, time congeals like milk, yet I innocently try to see through it. All I see is the immense silence of worm - eaten objects, things oppressed by their own nocturnal specific weight, the suspended bell - clapper in the heart of things that are weighed down by oblivion...."

Danilo Kis.



Milk, congealed.

131baswood
Mrz. 28, 2012, 5:10 pm

Melancholy interests me too zeno, but from your comments I won't be rushing out to get Jacky Bowrings book

Great picture of congealed milk - ugh

132janemarieprice
Mrz. 28, 2012, 5:15 pm

Interesting. Did he posit any colors of melancholy? I have my suspicions but am curious what he had to say.

133rebeccanyc
Mrz. 28, 2012, 5:32 pm

Like Barry, melancholy interests me, but this book doesn't. By the way, I read Memories, Dreams, Reflections decades ago in college; I have no memory (or dreams or reflections) of it.

134zenomax
Mrz. 28, 2012, 5:32 pm

131 - bas it is worth a read if you come across it - as a starting point to further research.

132 - jane, Bowring is a woman, and a New Zealander too (she mentions the melancholy of the zeitgeist in NZ tending 'toward a gothic, brooding quality', which rings a bell with me).

I don't believe Bowring goes into colours, it is my own thoughts which converge on colours & numbers. She does however call one chapter 'The Blue Guide' - in which she looks at the use of melancholy in the arts. I guess blue is an obvious colour here for its connotations. But for me it is more about greens & yellows.

Oh, she also mentions 'Et in Arcadia ego' which remins me that sparsely populated, but inhabited rural areas always have a melancholy tinge for me.

135zenomax
Mrz. 28, 2012, 5:35 pm

rebecca - perhaps the writings of an occult-edged 83 year old had little connection with your college aged self (I would say the same for myself at college age too)....

136janemarieprice
Mrz. 28, 2012, 5:39 pm

134 - Sorry, responded too quickly I suppose. Yes, I was going to say greens and purples because they straddle the warm/cool divide.

137baswood
Mrz. 28, 2012, 6:21 pm

zeno, here is an interpretation of Durer's melancolia which I like http://www.alchemylab.com/melancholia.htm

138Poquette
Mrz. 28, 2012, 6:22 pm

Zeno, the notion of melancholy is something of an enigma for me because traditionally it is associated with sadness or even depression or a mood disorder! Even Hippocrates thought of it as a disease.

However, Milton's "Il Penseroso" almost seems to celebrate it, and Durer's famous engraving Melencolia I depicts an allegorical anticipation of inspiration.

Does Bowring touch on such seeming contradictions?

139Mr.Durick
Mrz. 28, 2012, 6:52 pm

I've added A Field Guide to Melancholy to my waiting-for-the-paperback wishlist despite the warnings and despite a problem I see in the description at BN.COM:
A depressive illness or a passing feeling? Mental detachment or a precursor to genius? Melancholy is a critical part of what it is to be human, yet everything from Prozac to self-help psychology books seems intent on removing all signs of sadness from contemporary existence. A Field Guide to Melancholy surveys this ambivalent concept and takes a journey through the articulation of melancholy in a variety of languages, from the Russian toska of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin to kaiho—which is expressed in the dancing of the Finnish tango. Melancholy is found in the historic traditions of death’s presence in paradise, the tears of nature, along with nostalgia, pathos, and melancholy’s presiding god, Saturn. In contemporary society, melancholy becomes a fashion statement in the emo subculture. This guide finds melancholy within the work of writers such as W. G. Sebald and Jean-Paul Sartre, the art of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto and multi-media artist Gerhard Richter, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Patrick Keiller, the music of Erik Satie and Tom Waits, the architecture and landscapes of ruins, and the 21st century’s predilection for memorials.
My experience with Prozac (80 milligrams a day for about 15 years ending about two years ago) was that it relieved my depression but allowed me my sadnesses. I like your comment, zenomax, that it is at least a good starting point.

Robert

140janeajones
Mrz. 28, 2012, 6:58 pm

I rather gravitate to the melancholy of the Romantics and Heian Japan -- nature-oriented with an intense awareness of evanescence.

141rebeccanyc
Mrz. 29, 2012, 8:07 am

#135 I'm afraid it's more the passage of time. I read it as part of a seminar on autobiography, and I don't remember the other books we read very much either, although I still have them and keep them mostly together. Some of the other books we read were The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Rousseau's The Confessions, and An Autobiography by Edwin Muir. But then again, maybe none of these writer had much connection with my college-aged self. Writing these titles here makes me think I should reread at least some of them (the Yeats and the Jung, at least), but there are so many other books I'd like to read too . . .

142zenomax
Mrz. 29, 2012, 5:31 pm

136 - jane, interesting choice of colours. I think colour is so subjective, but even so some colours carry a symbolism around with them, within them even.

137 - bas, thanks for the link. Durer's print plays a role in Bowring's book - and quite interesting that it is heavily influenced by alchemy. I am convinced there is a close link between melancholy & the occult world.

138 - Suzanne, Bowring does touch on the contradictory nature of melancholy - and how it was viewed differently through the ages. Both Durer & Milton are mentioned specifically. There is even a quote from the great Frances Yates.

139 - Robert - I think it may well be worth the read. Bowring does look at melancholy versus depression too.

140 - jane, a section is devoted in the Field Guide to interpretations of melancholy in different nations. Japan is mentioned. If memory serves, the various terms of melancholy in Japan are quite nuanced.

141 - rebecca - that was some reading list you had back in college. I'm with you on Yeats, getting closer & closer to getting his Autobiography. In fact I have it sitting on my amazon wishlist - along with Hannah Arendt, James Hilman, Fredegond Shove & Marsilio Ficino....

It would appear that the concept of melancholy is of interest to a number of us here.

It also strikes me that Bowring must have covered a lot of bases because most of what you guys have come up with she has mentioned. Perhaps the frustration is that that is all she does (in most cases) then passes on to the next thing.

143detailmuse
Mrz. 30, 2012, 9:29 am

the concept of melancholy is of interest to a number of us here
Count me in. Just bringing melancholic associations to mind as universal (e.g. #130) is very interesting.

Sunday late morning/early afternoon
That’s one of my favorite times of the week, but I’ve heard about (and experienced, even in great jobs) “Sunday night syndrome" -- melancholy and anxiety about the upcoming work/school week.

144zenomax
Apr. 1, 2012, 10:14 am

143 - which goes to show some elements of melancholy are almost universal, others are relevant to us alone...

Curiously, I have always liked Sunday nights - get myself psyched up for the week ahead, much as I would do before a sports game.

My wife used to hate Sunday nights when her job was onerous - I wasn't even allowed to draw the curtains or lock the door in her sight/hearing as that was the sign the weekend had just about ended!!

145zenomax
Apr. 1, 2012, 10:32 am

Suzanne's latest monthly list of books includes The Periodic Table which prompted me to look it up on my bookshelves.

"Distilling is beautiful. First of all, because it is a slow, philosophic, and silent occupation, which keeps you busy but gives you time to think of other things, somewhat like riding a bike. Then, because it involves a metamorphosis from liquid to vapour (invisible), and from this once again to liquid; but in this double journey, up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous and fascinating condition, which starts with chemistry and goes very far. And finally, when you set about distilling, you acquire the consciousness of repeating a ritual consecrated by the centuries, almost a religious act, in which from imperfect material you obtain the essence...."

Primo Levi, 'Potassium'



Potassium pearls under paraffin.

146Poquette
Apr. 1, 2012, 5:07 pm


Pelican

The purpose of distillation in alchemy was to extract the volatile substance, or spirit, from the impure body. This process was a psychic as well as a physical experience. The retorta distillatio is not a known technical term, but presumably it meant a distillation that was in some way turned back upon itself. It might have taken place in the vessel called the Pelican, where the distillate runs back into the belly of the retort. This was the "circulatory distillation," much favored by the alchemists. By means of the "thousandfold distillation" they hoped to achieve a particularly "refined" result. It is not unlikely that Paracelsus had something like this in mind, for his aim was to purify the human body to such a degree that it would finally unite with the maior homo, the inner spiritual man, and partake of his longevity. As we have remarked, this was not an ordinary chemical operation, it was essentially a psychological procedure.
Alchemical Studies by C.G. Jung

147zenomax
Bearbeitet: Apr. 2, 2012, 7:22 am

Thanks S. I was thinking very much of CGJ as I read Levi's passage.

... and more on Jung to come (see message 128)

148zenomax
Apr. 6, 2012, 6:37 am

... a single essence with an infinite number of manifestations...

149zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jun. 21, 2012, 8:06 am

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C.G.Jung.



Jung's 'tower' at Bollingen.

'Myths which day has forgotten continue to be told by night, and powerful figures which consciousness has reduced to banality and ridiculous triviality are recognised again by poets and prophetically revived; therefore they can also be recognised "in changed form" by the thoughtful person. The great ones of the past have not died, as we think; they have merely changed their names."

The closest we have to an autobiography of Jung. Short of reading his collected works, or getting one's hands on The Red Book, this is probably the best way to understand Jung's life, vision and work from the inside out.

The problem (and the book's strength too) is that it is mediated by Jung himself (of course). It is at times frustrating to see his bold unyielding statements made about life and the transitory worlds in which we dwell, but such is the nature of the beast, the corpus of thought and belief that Jung came to represent over his long life.

We are therefore privy to his inner thoughts and his battles with other worlds. Like most 'great men' he rises above the everyday, and has no air of modesty. His was a battle against, a confrontation with the unconscious. Others had been there before him, but had either succumbed (Nietzsche), or had backed away from the precipice (Freud). In fact, Jung (according to Jung) had prompted several fainting fits in Freud as Jung tried to show him the void - Freud was too afraid to look, he didn't want to see what Jung had seen.

As you can see Jung sees himself as at the very vanguard of understanding, prompting others to follow in his wake or turn away in fright. This is not a man who any longer (in his eighties) had doubts about the veracity of his vision.

If you can take all this with a pinch of salt, whilst retaining an open mind to the greater detail of his Vision (or visions, if one wants to be literal - he had many of them), then this book provides extraordinary tales. Everything Jung comes across he seems to interpret from the point of view of a visionary. This must have been what it was like to live near Blake or any other of the neoplatonists who saw the world as something 'other'.

The book has so much in it that I have literally stopped reading anything else. I have come to an impasse as I ponder on Jung's work.

I think the way ahead is to look at some of the chapters in this book individually, so that I can take it all in.

150baswood
Mai 21, 2012, 9:55 am

Excellent thoughts on Jung zeno - you have been a long time reading.

151dchaikin
Mai 21, 2012, 1:03 pm

I now have a sense of where you are. Interesting comments, and terrific quote at the top.

152Poquette
Mai 22, 2012, 4:10 pm

Zeno – your comments re Memories, Dreams, Reflections got me thinking about how different from the rest of us is the visionary who tries to share what he has seen with the rather deflating result that most people merely scoff at it. I am no visionary, but I do appreciate that people like Jung and Blake have something extraordinary to share, and it makes me wish I could see and experience even momentarily something like what they have seen and experienced.

153zenomax
Mai 23, 2012, 3:12 am

'akashic records'

154zenomax
Mai 23, 2012, 3:17 am

152 - Suzanne, Jung suggested that introverted intuitives are concerned mainly with the contents of the unconscious, and furthermore are distinguished from the other types by their prophetic qualities. So, according to CGJ, you are in the right ball park to experience something!

155Poquette
Mai 23, 2012, 4:00 am

Zeno, very interesting . . .

156zenomax
Bearbeitet: Mai 25, 2012, 4:15 am

The golden chain.

"By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus - and with even more branches yet to be traced”

James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology.

'with even more branches yet to be traced....'

157SassyLassy
Mai 25, 2012, 9:42 am

Just reading your fascinating thread today.

Going way back to 142 and 143, I learned recently that in the 1600s it was believed that a melancholic person was a person possessed by the Devil (Alejandra Pizarnik). Devil or no, it does make for some great literature.

158zenomax
Jun. 9, 2012, 6:38 am

Thanks for dropping by SL. Melancholy has been viewed in different ways at different times - sometimes an affliction, sometimes an affectation, sometimes the mark of a visionary.

159zenomax
Jun. 9, 2012, 6:58 am

My reading remains stuck on Jung and the ramifications. I have picked up 2 post - Jungian books which I am reading whilst re reading CGJ.

Ego & Archetype, Edward F Erdinger
Re visioning Psychology, James Hillman

One common topic is madness as an inability to maintain an equilibrium between the conscious and unconscious spheres. This brought me back to Ernst Herbeck, incarcerated in a psychiatric institution for the majority of his life. A poet who fascinated Sebald who said some word sequences from Herbeck's poetry "still seem to me to verge on the frontiers of a breathless other world."

The link with a breathless other world, after reading Jung, would appear to be the collective unconscious, which in one passage Jung compares to 'the mythic land of the dead'.

160zenomax
Jun. 10, 2012, 5:50 am

Timeless Writing

The earth, the volcano & the hum-
ming of the bee.

Migrating birds.

The vibration of ants.



E Herbeck

161zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jun. 10, 2012, 5:52 am

Herbeck reminds me always of Daniel Johnston, who was no stranger to the more esoteric side of the psyche.

162baswood
Jun. 10, 2012, 10:17 am

As esoteric as always zeno

163zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jun. 21, 2012, 8:13 am

I NEVER had noticed it until
'Twas gone,—the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill.
It was not more than a hedge overgrown.
One meadow's breadth away
I passed it day by day.
Now the soil was bare as a bone,
And black betwixt two meadows green,
Though fresh-cut faggot ends
Of hazel made some amends
With a gleam as if flowers they had been.
Strange it could have hidden so near!
And now I see as I look
That the small winding brook,
A tributary's tributary, rises there.

Edward Thomas

164dmsteyn
Jun. 20, 2012, 9:15 am

I really like Edward Thomas, Zeno. Thanks for the poem!

165zenomax
Jun. 20, 2012, 4:08 pm

Me too, Dewald.

There is a special quality to the English landscape - perhaps more a thing of imagination rather than empirical reality. Those who can capture its essence are few and far between.

166Poquette
Jun. 20, 2012, 5:20 pm

That particular poem is especially evocative Zeno.

167zenomax
Jun. 21, 2012, 8:10 am

166 - agreed.

168zenomax
Jun. 21, 2012, 8:20 am

Going back to Sebald's comment that sequences from Herbeck's poetry "still seem to me to verge on the frontiers of a breathless other world."

This is the description of akashic records from Wikipedia:

"The akashic records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. They are metaphorically described as a library; other analogies commonly found in discourse on the subject include a "universal supercomputer" and the "Mind of God". People who describe the records assert that they are constantly updated automatically and that they can be accessed through astral projection or when someone is placed under deep hypnosis"



Rather than astral projection, may it be said to be something embedded within the collective unconscious?

If madness is an inability to maintain an equilibrium between the conscious and unconscious spheres, do some people see the unconscious picture without the filter of the mores of the conscious world?

169JDHomrighausen
Jun. 22, 2012, 6:41 am

> 159

I'm overseas and don't have my Jung books with me. But I recall picking up Edinger's Jungian analysis of the book of Revelation. Looked interesting. Right now all my brain is doing is Buddhism though.

170zenomax
Jul. 7, 2012, 10:23 am

169 will be interested to get your views on how Buddhism fits in to the scheme of things....

171zenomax
Jul. 7, 2012, 10:59 am

"Although we human beings have our own personal life, we are yet in large measure the representatives, the victims and promoters of a collective spirit whose years are counted in centuries."

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

The collective unconscious and the archetypes pre date us and largely form us in Jung's view.

"Just as the body has an anatomical pre history of millions of years, so also does the psychic system"

Jung now pushes the boundaries back further to a time before humans as homo sapiens even existed.

The question is how does this fit into an operational system? Jung attended to the soft side of his views rather than the hard side - the vision without the means of operation.

Is GAIA theory, in either it's high or low position (where organisms consciously manipulate or unconsciously influence) a link?

If the universe is a living organism of some sort, does it retain vestiges of the distant past in some way that influences the present?

172therealdavidsmith
Jul. 7, 2012, 11:10 am

Hello, the clip brought to mind frau im mond, i must have a Fritz Lang night soon.
Perhaps the key thing to Herbeck is that he did not revise what he wrote, i fancy that a lot of what has been published would have never reached the shelves if this was the general case, shame. Perhaps there is an argument for schizophrenic editors.
Regards, David.

173zenomax
Bearbeitet: Jul. 7, 2012, 11:20 am

David - yes a lot in that - the Dadaists consciously tried to write from the unconscious, with some interesting results. Herbeck wrote similarly, but seemingly without mediation.

You must indeed have a Fritz Lang night, I can think of few better things to plan for.

174JDHomrighausen
Bearbeitet: Jul. 7, 2012, 12:05 pm

> 171

Well Buddhism IS the scheme of things....so it claims.

Jung is hard to get a grasp on since he developed his thought so much over his lifetime, and he never bothered to write a rigorous introduction to his thought (Man And his Symbols was for a popular audience). However Memories, Dreams, Reflections was definitely the best way into his thought. I've put him on hold since I need to read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams to understand Jung.

175zenomax
Aug. 20, 2012, 4:48 pm

I'd like to get your view on J versus F ... An odd, compelling relationship.

176zenomax
Aug. 20, 2012, 4:49 pm

The fourth door. That which can never be locked.

177JDHomrighausen
Aug. 20, 2012, 5:39 pm

Jung all the way. But I don't know Freud well enough to assess him fairly. Even if his way of answering questions was odd, he did open them up.

178zenomax
Aug. 21, 2012, 5:53 am

“The conquered sword that a knight breaks on his thigh on the stage,”

“The asparagus stalk put aside after it’s been bitten,”

“When a spade is being used, a worm that suffers a fatal accident”


Ruminations on 'things cut in half', New Impressions of Africa, Raymond Roussel

179baswood
Aug. 22, 2012, 5:18 am

If you are frightened of cutting a worm in half - don't dig the garden

180zenomax
Bearbeitet: Sept. 2, 2012, 5:44 am

Back from an overindulgence in holidays...

Sage advice bas.

181zenomax
Sept. 4, 2012, 10:45 am

I have now seen an aye-aye.

182therealdavidsmith
Sept. 5, 2012, 6:47 am

Was it in the wild or at a zoo, perhaps?

183zenomax
Sept. 5, 2012, 8:03 am

Not so lucky to see it in the wild. It was at
the Durrell park in Jersey....

184dmsteyn
Sept. 5, 2012, 3:41 pm

Aye-aye are fascinating. At least, that's the impression I get from books and television. I know some natives of Madagascar consider them to be bad omens - or that's what I've read - but they seem so interesting.

185zenomax
Sept. 5, 2012, 5:02 pm

I've always been fascinated by them, their strangeness and rarity combine to produce an alluring brew.

186tomcatMurr
Sept. 5, 2012, 10:56 pm

174
Well Buddhism IS the scheme of things....so it claims.

ha! like that!

187therealdavidsmith
Sept. 7, 2012, 2:45 pm

Strange and rare are good bed-fellows.

188zenomax
Okt. 3, 2012, 12:49 pm

Indeed they are.

Having just returned from a break in Berlin 2 things strike me.

1. East Berlin is still very much a second class citizen, in looks, investment and general ambience. I travelled across the city twice (the railways are excellent) from my base in Spandau to Kopenick where 1. FC Union Berlin (very much the second class team still, just as they were in former communist times) have their ground. The difference between East and West is stark. How could anyone have deluded themselves that the Eastern European version of a workers paradise was for real?

2. Dali was a certifiable genius. The Dali museum houses exhibitions of his later (and less brilliant) works, particularly drawings and prints. They are such perfect illustrations of the Jungian concepts of personal conscious/unconscious and the collective subconscious. Dali must have been familiar with Jung, although everything I have read mentions Freud, Freud, Freud....

It resonated so strongly with me.

And my ah-ha moment came when viewing a celestial picture when it dawned on me that angels and the collective subconscious were one and the very same thing....And actually Kafka's hilarious (to me) messengers are related phenomena! Which makes sense to me because any experience I have had with the collective subconscious has been laugh out loud funny, in the same sense that surrealism is laugh out loud funny. Which brings us nicely back to Dali.

I have to conclude that Dali was one of Jung's introverted intuitives. Jung himself was one I believe, although this is a minority view. Interesting to note Christ and Hitler, both of whom Dali were fascinated with were also (reputedly) introverted intuitives. Unsurprisingly, Jung was also fascinated by both of these.

189baswood
Okt. 3, 2012, 2:24 pm

your experiences with collective subconscious zeno?

190therealdavidsmith
Okt. 3, 2012, 3:37 pm

I made a special trip to St. Pete's when i was in florida a few years ago to see the remarkable Dali paintings there. Forgive me for being obvious, i presume you have read Edinger's books on these themes ? Berlin, i think, still resonates with all kinds of anaesthetised ghosts. Station to Station (played loudly in a darkened room) brings it back to me by association. Glad your visit seemed to lubricate your mind.

best, David.

191zenomax
Dez. 9, 2012, 5:05 am

189 yes, or call it the shared world of dreams, and perhaps it is just an illusory thing, I make no claims here for its authenticity. Maybe I should have called it my inner experience of something I feel to be the collective subconscious.

Angels are a representation of this, perhaps as emissaries. I equally do not claim angels are real, but might rather be our metaphor for the interaction we have with the unknown.

All I claim is there is the world of the senses and the other world of the imagination. How do we weigh the relative merits of each? Perhaps in the end both are illusory.

192zenomax
Dez. 9, 2012, 5:09 am

As I posted this, my son mentioned a comment from something he was watching on youtube:

'If you look closely, the elephant is fake'.

193zenomax
Dez. 9, 2012, 5:15 am

190: yes, read Edinger recently.

I always associate the music from Der Himmel Über Berlin/Wings of Desire with the city.

I was there in 1991 when it was all a lot starker, but I was young and on a drinking tour with Australians!

194tonikat
Dez. 14, 2012, 10:51 am

>191 zenomax: some interesting writing about angels in Common Knowledge by John Burnside, some along lines you suggest, I wondered if you knew it and if not, well, now I've mentioned it.