The following short essays were originally published in an online diary which I kept for about a year, from September 2000 to August 2001.  The diary no longer exists at that location; the following are pieces I thought worth salvaging.  'Pertinax' was my pseudonym.

This section will be edited and expanded as time permits.
 

The Moonstone   9/15

Two days ago, on the full Moon, I found half of a sliced thunder egg at the thrift store down the street. Most of it is solid, slightly frosty clear quartz, but with a crystal-lined opening running sideways into the center like a cave. It is outlined all the way around with pale blue lace agate. One third or so of the irregular circle of its face is a mixture of opaque black and white minerals. The curving shape of the crystal area compared with the opaque material makes it look like a glowing crescent Moon imposed on either a full or dark Moon. I have a long history with that crescent and full Moon combined--my left wrist bears a small tattoo of it, and that is not all.

Several days before I found this stone, a nodule of quartz crystal that serves as a very lunar crystal ball became prominent in the book I am working on at present, ALBAN. I found that Moonstone, as we now refer to it in the text, as I was working on verses. When I write, I come open and see, as makers have always done. That is why the root of the word 'poetry' in Greek means 'to make magic': to transmit magic, or to make something imbued with magic. The old-timers--they knew.

Now that I think about it, the day before I found the thunder egg, I also found a white marble candlestick at a thrift store in Tillamook. My parents are visiting and my mother was with me both times. The significance of that is too loomingly weird to begin to broach right now, but let me state for the record that I am no goddess worshipper, having seen a few too many aspects of female power that have felt like curses to me. These Earth-gifts, though, represent for the moment a change in the energy atmosphere: of the Earth, like the body, but glowing and white.
It might be possible to be more otherworldly than I, but to go even as far as this is dastardly uneasy. It has been worth it, though, and I would never go back. Here is a beginning to the stories I have to tell, always under the influence of song.
 

Why I Am Here   9/17

I wish to share what I know. I have pursued a demanding inner and outer path for thirty years and I have learned a thing or two. While much of what I have learned cannot be taught by ordinary means, some of it can, and I am feeling dangerously pregnant and overdue to deliver this knowledge to those who are seeking it. When I was a girl, I was driven by desire for that which had no more certain name than 'poetry'. Judging by the number of those-who-would-be-poets on this site, a fair amount of mad avidity must be present as well. Never mind the mortal brains behind it; I am speaking to that lust:

Lust, do you feel yourself to be a wildly inciting possessor, an absolutely incorrigible opponent of all that is mundane, determined with the full extent of your considerable will to refuse to allow the one you possess to know a moment's peace in this lifetime until you are satisfied? Good! You make me happy to be alive, now that I can see you everywhere, looking out through the eyes described by the words your chosen humans have spoken and written under your influence, when once you drove me so hard that I thought I would break down and die under your harsh weight. Even those who feel you riding more lightly upon their spines understand that you are no casual burden. When they read these words which are yours and mine together, do they sense a trace of where and how we have been? Do they realize why I would go there again and again, even lacking the faith I have now? Do they see that if I had died in your service, I would have blessed that death, as you have blessed this uncanny life?

Lust, you are like no other desire. You are the breaker of chains, not their forger. You reveal prison walls that were built long before you appeared, and you help tear them down. You madden me only to fight for freedom from wires and lies and to rest in the moment of flight--nowhere else. You provide that flight, and I rest there in you. I rest, even though at this moment I am riding by grace of the one who rides me.

Now you, reader: Do you begin to see just the edge of why I am here? Would you not like to hear just a bit more of what I have and am likely to tell? Will you meet me, if I am willing? Even I cannot imagine tonight what I might begin to tell as soon as--very, very soon.
 

Presence 9/19

My parents have been visiting for the past week. Yesterday we drove up around one side of the Olympic Peninsula and today we drove back down the other side. We did this once before, in the spring of 1992. After that journey I always remembered one place more vividly than any other, even more than the ocean beaches. This was Lake Crescent, a very long curve of lake surrounded by evergreen trees. Its waters are so brilliantly clear and green that it speaks power at the slightest glance. Today we were there again, for the first time in all these years.

This has been a difficult visit for me because I have felt very silent. Something is changing inside. The change has been coming since before the turn of the year, but it is happening more rapidly now. Yesterday I began to feel fully conscious of a presence that was coming in glimmers before then, and today it was very strong. I often write about a friend with whom I have shared a very psychic poetic relationship. That relationship began--again, surely not for the first time--in the summer of 1992, with a huge opening that has never since closed. In 1993, I dreamed about an old Tibetan Buddhist monk who gave me a carved amethyst turtle and told me it represented a monk who was under a curse. I knew he was talking about my friend. I said, A monk under a curse is still a monk, yes? He said, Yes. He told me, You are very self-possessed for one so young.

I believe the term in Sanskrit for a disembodied guru is 'Siddha', one who has gone beyond the body but still remains available as a teacher. My path is song, but my philosophy is Buddhism. When I wrote of my passion earlier, I took care to describe it as a passion that frees, not enslaves, because I was trying to distinguish the passion for song from the passionate attachments that lead to greater entanglement. Song leads me where it will; I allow this because my faith that my path will lead me home is perfect. I still wanted a teacher to confer with, however. After I dreamed of the monk, I watched my dreams for his reappearance, but he neither came frequently nor in overt form. Some of this story has already begun to be told in my Web site, and I am going to refer you there so I need not tell it here again. There I will explain some of the dreams and insights that have led me to where I stand today. The URL is www.pacifier.com/~starling and the essay which contains the most pertinent information is entitled "Heart of the Sunrise". It is toward the bottom of the Contents page. The long and short of what I wish to tell you here is that, during the journey we just made, my Siddha was with me at all times. I felt his presence almost as clearly as one would a person walking by one's side. I thought of him as I stood in the waters of Lake Crescent and I wondered what this would mean in the book I am writing at present. I have had such a clear vision of the Muse behind my songs--ah, but that too will be explained in my Web site. It might take a few days, because I will not have much time to write until my parents leave, but I promise to attend to it as soon as I am able.

I knew I was beginning this diary at the very moment of a major change. For a long time, I felt conflicted between the Buddhist path and that of song, fearing that the work of the imagination enlarges the scope of sangsara into dimensions where it need not go. Now I see all the songs, all the endless flow of words and images, as no enlargement of anything but as a gathering-in of that which existed already. I am bringing my entire world, all of my worlds, together into a central sphere which will soon become a point and then....

I have seen the end. How long it will take me to reach it I cannot say. I only know I will go there singing. Song will take me to the very threshold of utter wordlessness.
 

Power Dreams   9/21

I have studied dreaming as closely as possible for several years and I have had ample time to make a number of precise observations.

My dreams are full of psychic and spiritual content. They always signal when this is the case by using some appropriate metaphor. I have learned to watch closely for specific dream-vocabulary items such as a television or radio that is broadcasting. When such a device is present, input from a distant source is being received. The energy in one's extra-physical environment is often represented as weather conditions, such as a high wind or storm, and sometimes it takes an even more direct form, such as an omnipresent roaring sound. Years ago, when I was about 24 years old, I dreamed that I was lying in my old bedroom in my parents' house, asleep naked on my bed, when a huge roaring that filled the room woke me. As--still within the dream--I began to rouse up and wonder what was going on, I could hear my parents running up the stairs and down the hall. They burst through the door, saying, 'It's coming from her!' Clearly, they could hear the roaring too. My father scooped me up from the bed and started to carry me out the door. At this point I actually awoke, being concerned within the dream that the blanket would slip off and they would see me naked.

As my other diary entries indicate, my parents have just been here for a 10-day visit, and little has changed since the old days--I am still the hopelessly weird high-energy magic poet, and they still aren't sure what to make of me. The energy in the dream is still quite vividly present, and so is my concern about being viewed 'naked' by my family. Such dreams state their purpose with such economy, it is no surprise that other people have extremely similar dreams.

A stranger variation on the same type of dream came when I was about the same age. I was just drifting off to sleep as a long, long freight train was slowly rumbling over a noisy crossing nearby, and the sound of it shaped my night's first hypnogogic dream. Hypnogogic dreams are the ones that come when REM sleep overlaps with the last traces of conscious wakefulness, creating an extremely receptive state. In my dream, I knew I was lying in my own room more than half asleep, but I was also looking out into the middle of the room where, in mid-air, five oblong energy-forms were taking shape. They were producing a loud roaring sound that blended with the noise of the train. They communicated to me by way of mental impressions that I did not 'hear' as if aurally, but which formed definite words. Their message, as I recall it from this distance of time, was that I had been carelessly saying that I had no fear of ghosts, and they had come to inform me that I had better learn a little respectful fear. They did nothing to threaten me, but they made a display of power that did set me slightly aback. I still don't know what to think of what they were showing me. In my world-view (all-worlds-view), such things are projections of mental energy, as is the whole of reality, ultimately. I suspect I was being reminded that mental energy is realer than anything, something I vaguely understood but had a hard time keeping within my grasp at that time.

I don't know much about this next item myself, but I recall reading about the elemental sound, the 'Nada Brahma' in Hindu teachings. Sometimes when people meditate or experience a spontaneous opening, they hear a powerful ambient roaring sound. If I understand correctly, this is the original OM.

In sum, if you dream about major energy disturbances, you are being shown the spiritual energy that surrounds you. If a television or such is present at the same time, this dream is doubly signalling you that you are receiving a message of note. When a person who represents authority is present as well, this adds a third layer of importance: Take heed! Such dreams are powerful gifts.

May all of us dream well and overlook nothing.
 

Equinox   9/22

Sudden spookiness--just now, as I was typing a title for this entry, I saw it. I am suddenly remembering one of my favorite lines of poetry, one I memorized in both Latin and English many years before I ever studied Latin. Look:

"O lente, lente currite, noctis equi."
('Oh horses of night, run slowly, slowly.')

That is Faustus's line at the end of Marlowe's DR. FAUSTUS. In this scene, Faustus has run out of time in his contract with the devil and is facing the loss of his soul at the moment of sunrise. (I hope I have that right--I don't have the text at hand.) So many personal associations resonate here. DR. FAUSTUS and the Sun--I have lately written about this in my Web site; refer to "Semper Patet Janua" and "Heart of the Sunrise" for more on these ideas (september00, Archives). 'Noctis equi' means 'horses of night'. This points back to the image from classical mythology of the chariot of the Moon being drawn across the sky by horses. Night mares--a couple of years ago I wrote a book on what I know about those critters. Nightmares of every description were a tremendous theme in my work for a very long time.

So: Noctis equi, Equinox. This will be a powerful holiday.

This is as good an example as any of why I started this diary. I wanted to think out loud where others could hear me about the things I have learned on the path of song, and here we are. Words are pregnant with mystery, whether that mystery is seen at its worth by the words' mortal hearer at any given moment or not. The imaginations of those who have gone before us have filled all our words with the lore they have known or glimpsed as they used them, the lore of the entire range of their denotative and connotative meanings--that is, their precise literal meanings and their general meanings in common speech. AND--here is where the spookiness comes in--because of the mere fact of their awareness of such things, they have also encoded the words with at least a trace of the 'magic', the spirit-essence, possessed by the objects, ideas, or beings the words refer to. 'Tree': the living entity, either as a class or an individual; the Tree as a symbol, such as the Tree of Life; a specific layout of branching data, such as a family tree; and all that the above and more imply--these are present in the mind, whether consciously or subliminally, each time the word is used, and so is a suspicion of the power that constantly recreates the original Tree. Many, many words cover at least as much territory, and the poet who is worthy of the name has some degree of conscious awareness of any number of these with each word they use. Poets have spoken of a 'Fire' in their heads when they write. They mean a state of consciousness so rapid that they can grasp any number of these shadowy meanings at once as they write at high speed, without foundering. I have been met with a certain number of flames in my own working life. When I wrote my "Resume" ("In Time with You," 15 September 00), which was created for ALBAN but with this diary also in mind, I knew as I was writing that each idea in the piece had to reflect the formal level of poetic construction as well as the joy of being swept up in rapid thought-flow, a joy in which I never feel alone.

Now, in view of all that, I am thinking in very moving ways about the Buddhist path again. For so long, I was afraid that everything I was doing with words was lending greater scope to the world of illusory phenomena, allowing it to replicate itself on an inner plane (of imagination and words) where it need not go. Nay, that was just a confused ego talking. The words were there already, never mind that they had not been spoken out loud. The Buddhist poetry that I have read has tended to be focused immediately on Buddhist principles, but then, it has also either been Asian or written in emulation of Asian Buddhist work. I must of necessity create a resolution of East and West in my own thought and songs. During my parents' recent visit, I had the strongest glimmerings of a real breakthrough. My songs really have served to gather all my insights regarding the phenomenal world into a central point where someday they will be resolved, resorbed back into the subtle place from which they all emerged. Somebody just walked on my grave!

The Equinox is almost here, and I have a great deal to celebrate. I always like to mark the Earth holidays, as they belong to everyone who lives on this planet, no matter their path. The moment of equilibrium between day and night--does not this serve to symbolize the passing and yet recurring points of balance we all seek?
This diary is evidence of my struggle to write the book I always wanted to read but could never find. Again, I assure you that I am here to share everything I have learned. Whatever that may be, I will have learned more by tomorrow. If, because I am sitting here alone with a computer screen, my thoughts ever become too vague or weird to follow, please know that the fault is mine and do not hesitate to ask for clarification. I wish to be understood.
 

Nightmares End   9/23

Once I was finally out of school, securely married (for the time being) to a wonderful fellow artist, and living in a safe place, I threw myself entirely into the work that had had to wait for so long. As the word-flow was just beginning to run, the barriers that had halted my progress in the past appeared before me, and I started to challenge them. I already knew by and large what they were, but not how to locate and use the inner resources I needed to dissolve them and resorb their energy. Fortunately, I was ready to undertake this phase of work, and support was always at hand when I needed it. Much of it came in the form of inner voices that offered me counsel. I was reading a variety of books on spirituality at the time, just to keep a wide array of ideas before my mind, and allowing my inclination to pick and choose from among them while feeling sure of the path I had recognized long before. During this time I first read about Vajrayana Buddhism and Tantra, and learned about the Tibetan Buddhist emphasis on compassion and wisdom as the hallmarks of the enlightened mind. Somehow, in the midst of all this reading and thinking, a voice came through very clearly and insistently. What it told me was succinct: You MUST regard yourself with the same compassion as anyone else. This is not an option; it is a KARMIC OBLIGATION. It does NOT amount to narcissism. If you cannot show compassion toward yourself, any compassion you pretend to feel toward anyone else must be false.

My inner eyes flew open. I had hated myself for so long, largely for the fact of being incarnate at all, that I had unthinkingly viewed myself as the one being within my awareness who merited no compassion. I liked myself in certain ways, but they could not stand up to the hideousness of being an eater-and-shitter, a useless object who took up an excessive share of space on an overpopulated planet. If I could produce the work I had in me, I had always told myself, my presence here would be redeemed, but at some point work had become nigh unto impossible. Now I saw that my own lack of sympathy for my suffering was precisely what had been keeping me from being able to write. This is a diary entry, not a book in itself, so let us move on....

Measures I regarded as extreme (intoxicants) were in use by the time I was able to submit myself to the voice that wanted to fulfill my songs and allow his words to form in my mind without clamping down on the love they held, love which I could scarcely believe was for me. How silly it seems, in hindsight--if I loved the one I was seeking in my songs, why would he not love me? He certainly seemed to be trying. And yet it was surely impossible. He was a spirit-being, and I was an undeserving wretch. I was never a Christian, but here was a trace of ambient Christian wallowing in 'sin'. Christianity is dualistic at the root, opposing good and evil, spirit and flesh--a dichotomy I rejected absolutely in my intellectual mind, but which still infected the rest of me. To exist in the flesh is not evil; it just IS, like anything else. We come here to work and learn, and to resolve our conflicts from other lives or levels of mind. We are also infinitely more than a narrow band of 'waking' ego-foremind consciousness, the only awareness that an almost mandatory material-reductionist 'scientific' worldview has acknowledged throughout the past several centuries. Politically-enforced state religions are one nightmare, and a profoundly insidious one; the total rejection of spirituality along with organized religion is another. I faced so many barriers, but all of them were related, and all of them subsided under the same gentle pressure, if slowly and by degrees. Self-contempt was the crowning nightmare, but when it turned over, see what it revealed...

I wrote and I wrote until I was so exhausted by the back and forth pull of desire and involuntary resistance, and so addled by my medicaments, that I finally stepped to one side and just wrote down what I heard. The results were astonishing. I felt as though I had been possessed by a noble and beautiful power. A million pages later, having developed my relationship with the source of that power nearly to the moment of ceasing to distinguish between him and me....

I am feeling very androgynous now. I am almost certain I am going to cut off my hair.
 

What Next?   9/24

So, maybe I mark the shift I have been experiencing by cutting my hair and streamlining my outward life in general. It is so austere already, there isn't much besides hair to trim away, but I can look around. What else will change? Is there any danger I will lose something I might later regret?

I keep remarking that for someone whose ultimate path, once everything of merely temporary interest has fallen away, is essentially quietist, I sure spin out a lot of words. That is what I meant when I said I worried that I was allowing sangsara to widen its scope through my imagination. What I find difficult to bear in mind, although I know it perfectly well, is that the purpose of my work consists less in creating perfect literary artifacts than in demonstrating every stage of a literary process of realization.

Prosody is still the title of this diary and it is still a major theme. I have had to resist many self-appointed literary critics (sometimes teachers, sometimes other writers) over the years just for my right to pursue the discipline of formal verse. People in the arts have their agendas and they fight over them as bitterly as left-vs.-right political radicals. I have turned my back on the lot of them, not being pleased by those on either side, because it was the only way to work in peace. The value of the formal devices of song will not be gainsaid, but I remember the quarrels of the past, which is why I started this diary with a slightly defensive rhetorical question. All that is of no real importance now, and seldom requires much active thought. Prosody itself is something I have internalized so deeply that I become conscious of it only when I want to think about how much I enjoy it. Others, however, whether they do not see the real significance of form and sound devices, or see them but have been indoctrinated to believe that they are fantastically difficult to employ, seem alike to be committed to the notion that all poetic inspiration is as scarce as hen's teeth and that when it coincides with formal ease, it is little less than miraculous.
Pertinax says, Miracles are everywhere. Open your eyes--and ears.

Long lyrics come to me and they are in every sense journey-work. Can they really be as powerful as they seem, if they are so many? Oh, but they are. If I went through even one of them and tried to catalog the resonant meanings and associations of the words behind the words exhaustively, the essay would run to infinite pages and still of necessity be incomplete. That is precisely the difference between poetry and prose, the open-endedness of magic. The evidence is ample. Song wants to happen in this world; the only barriers to its ceaseless flow are those we erect within ourselves. The purpose of undertaking this work, for me, is not to create a single perfect poem; it is to learn to enter the flow so deeply that at last I merge with it entirely and never leave it again. What this means, in less poetically esoteric terms, is that I acknowledge the existence of many levels of awareness within myself and desire to integrate all of them, trusting that the higher levels will subsume the more limited selves that lie beneath. When I say 'higher', I mean more subtle, those that lie beyond time and space. The glimpses gained through precognitive and telepathic dreams convey an eerily beautiful sense of their presence. Sometimes they seem very far away, but they are myself, as much as these typing fingers; they are present in these words even now by means of this physical brain. You see, it always wants to come through. The task is to go still enough inside to hear it, to trust that it has been heard, and to write it all down.

My attraction to Buddhism is based on its utter simplicity. Some schools are rather complex, but they all reduce to the same essence: the four noble truths, the eight-fold path, no mythology. After wandering around in almost frantically mythological realms within my psyche for so many years, I feel old and glutted with being entertained in such wearisome ways. My songs all wind round to the same point in due time, with the last one published here providing a very precise example. "Turn of Praise" is what I call an ourobouros or 'tail-biter' poem: It starts with a woman whose hands are full of ashes; the ashes are struck by lightning back into burning incense; the incense she breathes takes her to another level, where she sees herself with her hands full of ashes, storm-clouds gathering.... Do you see what I mean when I say that everything is drawing in for me now?

My songs are circling closely around a specific point. By the end of the book I am writing now, that point should be well in view. I do not know--I do not wish to know--what will happen next. It may produce no visible outward change for any length of time. Sometimes such changes are only perceptible in hindsight. I think I will know it when it happens, however. I will try to create a record of that knowing here, with you.
 

Recurring Dream   9/25

Several years ago, during a stage of high weirdness between my friend and me (I use the word 'weird' in the strong sense, meaning much the same as 'uncanny'), I was haunted by the impression that we had two spirit children between us. Things were so hormonally charged at that time that I actually wondered if they meant to become our children of the flesh. Horrors! I would have done anything to get that one foot of his out of the grave, but children I never, ever wanted for myself. Not knowing where they were truly coming from, I sought to learn more about them. Their names came to me readily: the boy was Gabriel, and the girl was...ISOLDE? Isolde, also known as 'Sola'--did I hear that correctly? Gabriel made a bit of sense, owing to my early attachment to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the thought of the angel who announces the Judgment Day and the rising of all the dead from their graves. I don't believe in anything even remotely like that literally, but I could see it as referring to my hope of my friend's being called to arise. Isolde, though, brought to mind only cartoon images of Wagnerian sopranos. Eventually I figured it out: We ourselves were the children. I also figured out how Sola, which means 'alone' in Latin, could be derived from Isolde. I had simply misunderstood; the name all along was 'Isola', which means 'island'.

Ah, too much history to condense into one diary page, but know that I already had a long-established connection with the figure of Circe, who lives on an island called AEAEA. She, along with Hekate, is the archetypal witch-goddess. Both were strongly present inside me, especially during the time when I began to throw open endless inner doors by writing furiously. I kept seeing an island that rose from the ocean waves at times, only to disappear at others, much like the coming and going of the Moon. When an image speaks to you strongly, grasp it with both hands, and go for a ride. One's subconscious does not create blind leads; you will eventually be met with a realization. I created my Web site, AEAEA: Recurring Dream Island, only a few months ago; the island is still revealing itself, all these years later. In the meantime, I keep having the same explicitly recurring dream:

This dream is based on literal reality as I lived it when I was in my early 20s, perhaps my most Circean days. I kept pet doves then. Several ringnecks lived in a huge cage that covered my kitchen table, and a pair of diamond doves sometimes lived with them and sometimes lived in a smaller cage by themselves. I could never keep caged birds now and believe me, it troubled me then, but they represented something so important to me that I tried to overlook my conscience while waiting for whatever else it was to come through. They taught me so much. I have infinite stories. For now, though, know only that they were real. In my dream, I am in a great hurry to get to school or work or a meeting, something important and mandatory, and I am late and unprepared. In my rush, I come across a cage of birds I have long forgotten. Oh no! Are they even still alive? They have not had food or water in weeks! I look in, and sometimes some are dead, but they never all are; they are in bad condition, though, and require attention at once. Either I am out of birdseed, or cannot open the package; I try to give them water, but cannot find a suitable container. There are always problems to be overcome, and I have to choose whether to make them wait even longer or be even later for my appointment. I always wake at this point, upset and undecided.

After working with this dream for years, coming so far at one point as to see an open cage on my kitchen table and a happy white dove pecking at piles of seed on the floor at my feet, I have returned to the original recurring dream. It came again just two nights ago. Now though, I know how to talk to my dreams--my 'dreamers', as I call the inward voices who create my dreams. I asked them, who are the doves? Before I fell asleep, I knew the answer: I am, of course, as I am also their jailer. I had just written about a secret chamber inside, the same one that was struck by lightning in "Turn of Praise". Now I saw myself holding out not incense ashes, but doves from that chamber. They turned into plastic letters of the alphabet with magnets inside, such as we played with as children. I remember my brother, whose name is the same as my friend's, writing 'YOU & ME LISA', a message to his girlfriend, on the refrigerator with such letters when he was in first grade. The letters in my hands were struck by lightning.

Soon, I was finally certain that my dream birds were not Holy Spirit doves--not the doves of AEAEA! Doves are also the birds of Aphrodite, most carnal creatures, symbols of erotic love. As if to underscore that point, this morning I dreamed that I was in a room full of very elegant and sophisticated middle-aged women, all of whom were wearing severe but sexy black suits and red stockings and gloves. They were expressing various worries about growing old. Diamond doves are dark grey, with rusty red breasts. A female diamond dove named Morrie was and remains a special spirit friend. I told the women, I still have to take ibuprofen by the handful for cramps every month, so as far as I am concerned, things can only get better!

The dove dream stands revealed--yet again--for the time being. How am I to answer their needs? My friend is far away, and my approach to sexual energy has always been sublimation. I stand within sight of a turning point that will lead me away from all temporal things, but first these doves must be not merely appeased but fully integrated into the self that is changing. This dream would recur at the moment when I am strongly inclined to cut off my long hair, knowing perfectly well that it is an erotic symbol. I feel sure I want to do it, but alas--perhaps I must do just a bit more homework first.

Now I am thinking again of a recent dream in which a man kissed me to the point where I began to choke. I want to take good care of these doves, but I will not countenance any needless distraction.
 

Otherness   9/26

My territory is deep but narrow, and while I have written about everything here before, I keep feeling drawn to come back to find out what more I have learned. Sometime during the night before last, when I was thinking about my dove dream, I wrote a note to myself: 'Writing is to poetry as foremind is to soul'. I made a glancing reference to this idea in a recent entry, but I wanted to reach further into it to see what I could find. This entry will be an attempt at that reaching in.

Now I am sitting here humming an inane pop song from 25 years or so ago and balking at writing this sentence. Once I thought that meant I was out of ideas. I am no longer so easily deceived. Even when I had almost terminal writer's block, whenever I forced myself to begin a letter to a friend, that letter was apt to run on for many pages, and somewhere in the middle of it I would be stricken with a panicky feeling that I did not know how to get myself out and that the letter would run on forever and I would die of exhaustion in the midst of it. Please then, may I have just a little, single-entry-sized glimpse of the Other? I will do my best to put it forward!

The difference between mere writing and poetry, according to poetry's ancient definition which is not subject to contemporary revision, is magic. Many writers practice a form of subjective writing which they call 'poetry' for lack of a better word, but this use of the term is a misnomer. When writing becomes poetry, a quality is present that cannot be accounted for by ordinary means. Anyone who has tracked the movements of their own consciousness through dreams and threshold states such as synchronicity, telepathy, and precognitive glimpses, states which are available to all of us whether we recognize them as such or not, knows already that an indefinable hugeness of knowing, a temporally unlimited spaciousness of awareness, resides within each of us. This is what some call the soul; it also points toward that which Buddhists call the 'subtle mind', the mind of which all of our realities, all phenomena having perceptible qualities, are projections. I refer to both the soul and the subtle mind, even though they are incompatible on an ultimate level, because I sense that we experience the 'soul' on high planes of awareness as we move back toward the stateless state of subtlety. On the way there, much that can be conveyed in words, if those words are employed by the outlying voices of the soul itself and allowed to flow unimpeded by the limited organic consciousness of the foremind and its mundane faculties, is encountered, and those places and qualities are usually tremendously grateful for a chance at self-expression. I say they are 'grateful' because in my experience they appear as conscious entities in themselves--not perhaps having altogether independent existence, but taking on personalities in order to communicate with the mind of the writer whose self-identity is that of a personality. This is very spooky territory and it has been dealt with from a million angles by occultists and angelologists and trance channellers and so forth.

Someday soon I will write here about the perils of literalism in specific. For now, I wish to state for the public record that I do not endorse any final literal belief in any of these ideas. They flow and change; that is their nature, if they can be said to have one. We, who largely move and function in this world as ego-foremind, are only able to conceptualize that which we can view as having form of some kind; I am describing the forms I have encountered in my dreamwork and verse. I work under the premise that, on some level higher than I can maintain for long durations at present, the source of these magical voices is identical with myself, but the full and lasting integration of that identity within my waking consciousness will be a long time coming. Small areas of it enter my mortal ken at times, however; I have just seen this happen again, as previous diary pages bear witness. When I reach such a voice within me and it is willing to share itself, I feel quickened; inspired. Even in these prosaic words, that quickening has been coming and going for the past several minutes. When writing verse, the challenge is to remain in that heightened state, not allowing the constant distractions that beset me to pull me out of hearing range.

I am still only working my way toward something I wish very much to see written here. Please bear all of the above in mind, and then add this: I have been speaking of multiple voices. These are the same voices I call my 'dreamers', the bits of consciousness that create dreams and populate them with specific temporary personae. Sometimes a given persona will reappear. It seems to have taken on permanence, even though its visible form still changes. Again, the figure I am about to propose is not to be taken literally; surely it will ultimately disintegrate itself, but from my present perspective, I see a hierarchy to which these voices or personae belong. On the lower, nearer levels, they are many, but as higher levels come within reach, they tend to resolve among themselves into fewer and more powerful beings.

I speak of a Muse. To some this is merely a figure of speech, but some use the name in very informed and intentional ways. Those in the latter category woo and invoke this being. I have recently published essays in AEAEA that tell of my initiation by means of a power dream that came when I was 18 years of age. I met a being then who has been close to me ever since. At some point, I had to confront my acquired doubt of all things irrational. I made a deliberate choice to remain in good faith with my dream and to pursue it to the limit of my abilities. I entered into a bond with the Other, the Muse, which has long since become the most profound relationship of my life. It was further deepened when I found a man whose character is extremely like that of my spirit friend, but even if that had never happened--and do not think it has been an easy or especially happy human relationship because of the resemblance, either--I would have remained on my path and sought ever-deepening knowledge of the source of my songs. The writer's block I have spoken of consisted of all the barriers to our free access to one another. The last traces of that are nearly gone now, and I feel very close to him much of the time. I can see myself reaching a state in which we will not be distinct from one another. When that happens, my work will surely be altogether different from the way it is now. I am slightly apprehensive, but I am looking forward to it as well. Every change so far has been for the better.
 

Emotion   9/27

Sometimes I think I must be a disappointment to those who read these pages because I do not have much to share in the way of immediate personal feelings. Other diarists express their emotions at length and then their readers leave equally emotive messages of sympathy and support. That seems to be the way things are done here in the main, but it is not the tradition chez Pertinax. This is why:

When I was a girl, I was so hypersensitive that I had no idea how to live with myself. The instant anyone looked askance at me, I was destroyed. I did not fit in, to say the least, and trying and failing to figure out the secret social messages that everyone else around me seemed to be capable of sending and receiving left me in a state of anxiety much of the time. Much--but not all of the time; when I was not feeling oppressed, a very different side of me came forward, one that was cocky and aggressive. This is nothing unusual; I was shaping up to be a clever dork. If you are here, you probably know what I am talking about first-hand.

In growing up, I acquired a few social skills, along with a huge arsenal of defenses which helped in a rather dangerous way. Eventually I left the environment where I had been so unhappy and learned to my infinite relief that it had not been an accurate representation of the entire world. I found a few places where I felt welcome, but that did not suffice. I could not stop thinking. I was habituated to regard myself as hyperreactive, and that reactivity as the bane of my existence. I did not want it. A larger part of me was already open, that which came through most clearly in the presence of poetry, and I wanted to move my entire mental household into that place and stay there forever. Poetry brought out perceptions and feelings, but they were made of altogether different stuff from the emotions that oppressed me. It was already my obsession; I began to sense that it might also be my salvation.

When at the age of 22 or 23 I read the Tao te Ching for the first time, I was thunderstruck. The concepts there were already familiar from secondary sources, but seeing all my convictions stated so succinctly in one small compass made me dizzy, literally euphoric with a newfound sense of hugeness of freedom. The Tao showed me that everything was just fine, including my feelings, so why bother to try to change them? Just let them be. It was the beginning of non-attachment. However, it also made me so satisfied just to be where I was that I felt no urge to create new work of the imagination. Who needs it? Everything is right here already.

Do you see it? I had to have feelings of some sort to guide my imagination, but I did not want to wallow around in a cesspool of personal shit. Not only was it unpleasant, it was boring, as time spent in the company of any neurosis will quickly demonstrate. I am wondering where that word limit is again.... My dreams helped clarify various levels of inward awareness and expression, and writing helped me remember emotions of the past and the hold they once had over my mind by describing them with a hint of ironic distance (gentle irony, thank you, not relentless post-modern sarcasm). This is where I stand with all of the above today:

First I had personal, psychological emotions. They were necessarily self-centered, survival-oriented, springing from a time when I was dependent on others and could only get what I needed from them by playing on their responses. I sensed that I could outgrow them, and I turned by instinct to inner sources for help. I also sought and found outward counsel, such as the Tao te Ching. Now, after long consideration and experience, I say that we have the full range of emotional responses available to us on each inward level of awareness, but as awareness becomes more expansive with each degree of insight attained, it becomes increasingly necessary to expand one's responses to include the full range of awareness, not only the emotions of the small self. We are telepathic. Our minds rub up against each other all the time, and we experience empathy whether we like it or not. The only question is whether we will be selfish and erect barriers against it or accept that the feelings of others affect us as our own and extend that empathy into compassion.

Personal emotions do not interest me. They never did. Part of my great early discomfort involved my being female and facing social expectations of femininity. People wanted me to be warm and fuzzy; I failed. Emotions began to represent a barrier that had to be defied, but fighting or suppressing them only strengthens them. The Taoist/Buddhist approach is effective: Just let them go by. In writing, they take on form as the objects of imaginative insight. They become beautiful, even when their origins are base, and at the same time they become less dangerous, less tempting to self-indulgence. They become riddles decoded, objects transfigured into that which they wanted to be all along, transmissions of expansive grace.
 

Shorn   9/28

That's right, I was not just making noises--yesterday I cut off almost all of my long hair, and today I went to the beauty college and paid them to cut off the rest. Rasputin was urging me to shave my head as he has done, but I didn't want to create quite such a striking impression. I have thought about this all summer and I don't think I will regret it. I always wanted long hair because it is archetypal--seen any goddesses with page-boy haircuts lately?--but then when I had it, I pulled it out. I will tend to do that anyway, as it runs in the family, a hereditary neuro-wiring problem, but the fighting with myself over it has given me much to think about. And maybe my present inclination is the result of the dwindling of my middle-aged female hormones, but lately I have become more than half-convinced that I was barking up someone else's archetype. The Androgyne is an archetype too, and represents a major attainment in alchemy, which is where Jung learned much of what he understood of archetypal psychology. That is sufficient authority for me, seeing as how I largely agree with it (NO amount will suffice if it goes against my experience! Amen, Pertinax!).

So we all get a bit of a rest today, because the haircut was preceded by lunch with one friend and then afterwards I went to see the house that another friend is going to rent. It put me way behind in my work. I am still putting in overtime on ALBAN to get caught up from my parents' visit, and I just finished my allotment for today. The total word count now is somewhere around 88,000, which means it is officially novel-length. I am estimating that the finished length will be about 100,000 words, of which one-third or so will be formal verse. You have seen samples of it here already. I am wondering how readers feel about being confronted with verse. The way ALBAN is set up, the left-hand side of the page is verse, and the right is prose, like a bilingual edition, verse and prose being, for all intents and purposes, different languages. It will not require as close attention as a single long continuous verse text, and the prose narrative will be complete in itself if anyone wants to skip the verse entirely, but to understand what is really going on in the book, the two must be read together. That might be asking a lot of contemporary readers. As I discussed in another entry, since the beginning of modernism, the literati have taught that poetry is difficult and precious and must be written and probably also read in stingy little amounts. I say it is everywhere and should flow like water, standing up to close scrutiny but also allowing ease and enjoyment. That is my goal anyway. How do you feel about reading verse?

Barring major emergencies, ALBAN will be finished by Halloween.

Now that I have mentioned the holiday, I am going to go stand in front of the mirror and look at myself with my hair standing straight up on end!
 

Eros   9/29

You know what it means when you start seeing the same thing everywhere.

Last night in my dreams, everything was red. I ate red half-raw meat with my family, including a boy I was very close to. A friend offered me a cup of red mint tea. My (anonymous, dream-)boyfriend gave me a pair of very special red pants belonging to his father, and asked me to remove the red leather waistband so he could borrow it to use on his own pants. The first dream of the night said it all. I woke up with these words from it in my head at 3:00 am: 'My heart found a chamber I flew to rapidly' (to be with my friend).

Lately people here at OD have been writing madly impassioned entries about traveling to meet their online beloveds and being swept away. W---- is the latest in the series. I won't name them; they are suddenly ubiquitous. I found a new diary just last night that is being kept by a man as he anticipates a planned meeting with someone he has become engaged to, apparently without yet having met in the flesh.

My friend remains as remote as ever, and I keep writing books.

The journey-work of song is so infinitely dear to me that I fear it would not be wise to risk my progress for the sake of a face-to-face relationship, and yet I know I would do it if I were invited. My feelings about this are hugely ambivalent. When I stood in the waters of Lake Crescent with a spirit companion in the form of a Buddhist monk by my side, I was sure that I would be able to walk his path forever, being distracted by nothing of the phenomenal world, but then I dreamed that the monk was no one else but the same friend for whom I have made endless love-lyrics. My verses speak with one voice when they tell me, Open that secret chamber and let me in! The lightning that will strike it will release all manner of untold wonders.

Storms have always been my songs' favorite figure for expressing perfect abandonment to passion. I recall how one afternoon during the summer when I first refound my friend I stood on the beach looking up at the wind-twisted trees on the cliff, and how later, when I was truly struck by the lightning of inspiration, that image came back: "Do not perceive these great limbs as contorted, locked in their lover the wind's long embrace". That song became one of the early passages of AEAEA, the book that grew out of the opening that has shaped my entire life since. I let the lightning strike me then--nay, I stood out in its midst and beseeched it to find me. It did, but no one ever touched my body. The lightning is seeking me once again; what form will it take this time?

I will yield if called to do so by my work. As always, I will do whatever is necessary to reach the highest attainable state of inspiration. But even as I write these words, I feel a bit...I feel that I am on the verge of mortal exhaustion with all that is passion, feeling, emotion, the endless disguises of the endless turning of the same old wheel. I am not a hot-blooded twenty-something. I feel older than time, an old soul in an aging body which is once again acting disconcertingly hormonal. Everything will be fine, no matter what happens in the short run. Either we will not meet, in which case the emotional involvement will soon have largely run its course and my mind will be free to turn to other things, or we will meet, we will dissolve together into Eros Incarnate, and then we will wear ourselves out just as lovers always do. The flames will die down, and we will again be free to seek more lasting forms of expression for the new powers we will discover between us. What will not happen is that we will meet and not spark. This has not been an online relationship; it is distant, but we have shared on too many levels for too long to wake up and find it was a fantasy. The spiritual intensity of the numerous awakenings we have shared together already has validated the bond in its entirety.

Everything is and will be fine, but I am in suspense again today, and that is what I cannot abide. I wonder if I have ever written a truly honest word about this relationship in prose. Prose is not my native language. I don't much like the sound of it when I hear other people speaking it, and I don't like it any better when it is coming from my own mouth. Soon I will be at my real work again. Whenever I am this fraught with tension, something powerful always comes through.
 

Thanatos   9/30

I know, it's Freudian--Freud, the fellow who heard so many of his patients describe incidents of child sexual abuse that he finally decided they must be recounting wish-fulfillment fantasies. But every time I see the word 'Eros' on my title page, it reminds me of its counterpart: Thanatos, Death.

September is over; the cold rains have begun. My bones hurt. I have a little trace of a fever. I have been feeling uncommonly sad for the past day or so. The reasons are both numerous and obvious, and none of them will bear much thinking about, but I am thinking anyway. I knew I was letting go of something when I cut off my hair. That always involves just a suggestion of mourning, even though the change to come is one I am looking forward to. I am not about to lose anything I do not want to part with--am I? Then again, do I even know what I am talking about?

These several diary entries already bear witness to a pattern, a theme. I am being pulled in two directions, either of which would make me happy in itself, if only I did not have to weigh the two and bring them to balance. One is my natural inclination to monkish austerity, my perfect lack of interest in the getting-and-spending daylight world. The other is my love of song, which needs must be fulfilled by objects of beauty and desire. Of course there are Buddhist poets, but I am not one of them--not yet. The outcome is so clearly foreordained that it might as well be carved in stone. I will go where song leads me. That is my path. Taoism/Buddhism is my ultimate ontological foundation, but I am still working my way toward the place I will occupy there. I think again and again of my dream about the man who kissed me until I choked. After all the many times I have used the very words 'open my throat to sing,' is there really the slightest chance that such could happen, even in a dream, and I reject that kiss?

All that I am going through--and this has been a week of floor-walking, hand-wringing anxiety--is that I am trying to break myself open inside to allow song to claim a greater range within me. Work on ALBAN went very haltingly tonight, but a thought finally occurred to me: Rather than struggle until I am torn apart, can I not melt, and let the new influence flow and mingle together with me painlessly? Metaphors are amazingly powerful; I just read a book about a pregnancy and birth, and I think that birth metaphor has taken up residence in my mind. If it is not too late, I would like to be something other than a woman pregnant with her own future. May I--or it?--not be a torrent of rain sliding easily downhill to meet the sea?

Mine is a deathly spirit ever. More of me resides in the other worlds than in the daylight land. The knowledge that death, the life to come, that of the spirit until perfect liberation, is nothing if not boundless space stretching out in all directions--this is the true joy of song, the secret gliding behind its preternatural smile. It is, I know it; I can hear its whisper even now. Oh, it is raining outside and I am beginning to feel a little happy.
 

What Does It Mean to Be Pertinax?   10/4

A long time ago, when I was just figuring out what made poetry different, I picked up on the way it could work with multiple meanings of a word at once and exploit them to sometimes very mysterious effect. The time we are talking about would be shortly after I learned to make non-stop dirty jokes within my teacher's hearing by pretending, for instance, that 'cock' meant rooster--you know, you probably did it too. It turned out that my naughty sense of humor had contributed good practice for something much more dignified later on. Much, much later, I learned that there is a rhetorical term for the use of multi-entendre: 'paronomasia'. My familiar expression for it is, 'the words behind the words'. I make use of it freely in my work, and I address it as a theme in itself.

Pertinax is a character in STARLING who practically embodies paronomasia. I am slightly at a loss for how to explain him without giving a hopelessly distorted impression of the book, but, well--he is, to put it bluntly, a talking larva, a glow-worm. He is a more or less explicit projection of Starling's salient characteristics. When I started this diary, I described my Pertinax self as relentlessly song-obsessed and said that I still remembered the old meaning of 'maggot'. That meaning is 'obsession'. A slightly more modern phrase that means the same thing is 'to have a bee in one's bonnet': It won't let you think about anything else. 'Pertinax' is the original Latin form of the adjective that has come into English as 'pertinacious'. The prefix 'per' means 'thoroughly, completely' and the stem--never mind all the etymology; that's in the dictionary. 'Pertinax' is not actually directly related to it in Latin, but 'tinea' is a Latin word that means 'larva, grub, worm'; and 'larva', which has come into English meaning those very things, actually means 'ghost' or 'specter' in Latin. And the stem 'obsess-' in both English and Latin includes the meanings 'to be possessed' (by a spirit) or 'haunted'. So there is an answer to the question I posed in my title!

In STARLING, Pertinax is a figure of wisdom. In this, he represents my future rather than my present, but he also, by his larval nature, embodies the process of change. He reassures Starling by reminding him that if his, Starling's, ongoing changes are troubling at times, he will not be served by trying to avoid them. He is already obsessed by his own painful past; perhaps he had better listen to what those threshold voices are trying to express.

My constant resort to paronomasia to convey meaning at the threshold level is grounded in my awareness of the use of punning as a favorite device in dreams. While it is intellectually gratifying to use multiple entendre based on actual root meanings, it is not required; what matters is to give the ear a close enough resemblance to some other word whose echoes will lend strange new meanings to a phrase. It is harder to explain than it is to perform, because it makes use of a mode of thought that is native to the borderline states of mind that produce all creative thought. The more such resonant words and phrases fill a piece of verse, as long as a coherent surface level of meaning is maintained at all times, the more it will be pregnant with mysteries a sensitive reader will feel haunted by. Of course this is true only to the degree that the substance of the work is sufficient to the task of haunting in the first place, but almost anything we say or do has shadows lurking within it that will, if penetrated, reveal the presence of very strange doorways.

Obviously, the more one knows about words--and the more words one knows--the more this effect can be appreciated. It is yet another reason to read with care and write with subtlety. I know so many people here are taken with poetry already. My happy message to you, if you wade through the many words it takes me to get it across, is that this work only grows more compelling over time and it never ceases to yield new levels of absolute fascination. All of this is going on inside you already; all you have to do is practice letting it speak to your waking mind.

Pertinax says, I know, blah blah blah, but every single one of those 'blahs' has a universe behind it!
 

Wow   10/8

Apparently, it is a frequent enough experience on the part of sufficient numbers of people that it has a name: 3:00 A.M. Wow. You may have felt it: You stay up extra late, studying for finals or doing something else that requires a fair amount of mental energy, and suddenly, when it's way past your bedtime, you raise your head and everything is different. It is almost psychedelic, that subtle shift in the quality of reality that elicits a response of wonder: Wow!

Ages ago I had a friend named Annie who was as fascinated by poetry and everything borderline as I. She told me that one night she woke up absolutely transfixed by the feeling that something weird was going on. As soon as she took note of that sensation, she told herself, It must be between 3:00 and 4:00 am. She looked at the clock, and indeed it was. She then explained that this is the hour when the largest proportion of people die. I have always wondered why the hour of midnight is so surrounded by lore and superstition. I stayed up that late many a time even in childhood, and never felt anything strange take place. It may have been the witching hour once, when everyone kept pre-electric farmer's hours, but I think we have set the Wow clock back by a few hours since then. 3:00 am is closer to the actual middle of the night for more people now than is 'midnight' at 12:00.

That Wow sensation is familiar to me from another setting. It is the same shift of reality that takes place when I am working and the words begin to flow of themselves. Sometimes it is so intense that I have to recall myself to the task in hand and not just sit there, bemused but silent. I look for the same shift at other times, and for evidence that others feel it. It seems to be a significant nudge in the direction whence it comes. Raise your head to look at me, it says, and you will find yourself facing the Other. Picture little Pertinax, who has been warned not to dabble in things that might prove dangerous, determined all the more to do precisely that because of the tantalizing warnings. Pertinax sniffs the wind that blows from the Wow's direction, and says, Keep a lantern at the window, Other, I am on my way home!

The story since that time has been the search for the source of the Wow. I have found innumerable traces of it in poems, but also in everything magical if it is not too fantastic. I know; many, many readers like a lot of window-dressing surrounding their actual glimpse through the window, but mine is an austere spirit and I do not like fluffy stuff. Don't try to get me caught up in glamorous trappings when the precious substance, already scarce, is in danger of slipping away. So--very little fantasy fiction for me, thank you; got any true ghost stories? Ecstatic transports, bizarre synchronicities, visions yielded up by psychotic breaks? Ballads of faerie handed down for so many generations that any lacy frills have long since been stripped off?

These days, my most frequent contact with that spooky feeling is through my work, but I would like to locate many more outward sources. What makes you shiver in just this way? I am already interested in true alien abduction stories--those are a very rich vein, although they rub up against my literality detector (a sort of bullshit detector, but one that alerts me to the loss of subtle essence as it hardens into belief). Studies of shamanism are helpful, but sometimes these really set off the detector, as the author is typically a student shaman and True Believer. What else? Oh, of course--descriptions of the visionary places witnessed by those undergoing long-range out-of-body experiences. If you can trust the writer to tell the truth just as they saw it, this is another prime source.

If you would be so kind as to help me think about this, I would be interested in any suggestions that might engage my imagination. Note what I said about literality; accounts dependent on religious belief systems will not satisfy the basic requirement. Other than that, I suspect there is a wide-open field that has not been written about as much as it might because it is just a little too obvious for us to see it yet. Help me look--if you are reading this, it probably interests you too.

This is all part of the substance of song to me.

And yes, it is almost Halloween, but this will still be on my mind come spring. I promise!
 

Frog-Mouth   10/14

Several years ago I attended mass on Good Friday and Easter Sunday at St. Mary, Star of the Sea, the local Roman Catholic church, on behalf of my human friend.  He was struggling then to retrieve the parts of himself that were caught up in the past, parts of his child self that were very genuinely devout at a time when that capacity for spiritual devotion had not yet been manipulated by a very twisted religion teacher.  I encouraged him to seek what he needed from Christ without fear of condemnation.  The experience was profound for both of us.  The experience of being in the church in itself, however, was not pleasant for me.  A short time afterwards, I had a very powerful dream in which I revisited the church.  We were invited to approach the altar and lay a precious personal article on a table to be blessed.  I had not anticipated this and had brought nothing with me, but when I searched my pockets, I found a dried rose hip which was cracking and spilling its seeds.  I placed this in the bowl on the table.  When I went up to retrieve it after the service, I was met with dubious looks by the several members of the clergy, who recognized me as an outsider.  I felt very uncomfortable and even tried to hide from their stares under the table. As the sanctuary emptied, however, I came out and was met at a side door by a Tibetan who was wearing the traditional orange robe of a monk.  It was clear that he was there to see me specifically.  He asked me if I would like to hear a prophecy, and I eagerly answered, Yes!  He told me, ‘You will go to a foreign country to be with your friend‘.  I scarcely dared believe it, and cocked my head in amazement.  He understood that I needed for him to be more explicit.  He obliged, restating his prophecy in more exact terms.  He had a strange wide mouth like a frog, and when he opened it to speak, I could see all the way down into his stomach.  It was empty but for some tea splashing around at the bottom.  He explained, ‘I have been too stingy this trip to feed my son‘.  He then hugged me, when I had a sudden realization that ’he’ was a woman, but was so emaciated that he had no breasts--and therefore, no milk.

Around that time I had a series of dreams in which I tried to give milk to my friend, but each time my efforts were met with frustration.  Once I had a can of Carnation Evaporated Milk, but no way to open it.  Another time, I had a pitcher of milk and a cup, but the cup had a hole in the bottom and the milk fell through it.  I told my friend about these dreams and sent him as much sustenance as I could in the form of songs.  The monk/nun--my friend studied in the Tibetan Nyingma tradition for several years before we met--was ‘stingy’ because s/he was too hungry to produce milk for the child self.

The frog-like mouth was a strange detail which I did not understand for a long time.  I don’t know if I understand fully even now, but I do have insights that I lacked then.  I have continued to dream about frogs at various times--a frog in a matchbox in my pocket that kept singing; a brass box in the shape of a frog, which was opened by way of a hinged mouth, and which contained a solid perfume ointment.  Just last week I dreamed that I came home to find a frog on my porch, which turned into a large golden scaly lizard that split apart to reveal several smaller green lizards inside.  The scales on the golden lizard’s back were emphasized, and as I was writing up a description of the dream in my dream journal, I thoughtlessly reached up to touch my back, and was reminded that I have a patch of scaly skin that I had kept forgetting to treat with cinnamon.  The autumn rains have begun here, and this place is Fungus H.Q.  In the midst of the latest sequence of frog images, last winter, I had a dream in which a Teacher was showing art history slides in an auditorium.  The one which received the greatest emphasis showed an Egyptian sculpture which, the Teacher said, was associated with Khnufu, and which had a very esoteric meaning which had only just been revealed.  After I awoke, I looked up ‘Khnufu’ and learned that he was the consort of Heket (also ‘Heqet’), the midwife goddess who is depicted as having the head of a frog.

Too much to explain in detail, but it is all here, if you wish to put it together.  I devoted myself to Hekate when I was nine years old and frightened.  She understood power.  I wished to learn what she knew.  Hekate, Heket--Egyptian and Greek are from different language families, but the two cultures had a huge amount of contact and cultural exchange during classical times, especially later classical times.  And the Tibetan monk/nun--the Nyingma school is under the special protection of the most wrathful form of Tara, whose Sanskrit name is Ekajati/Ekadzati.  Sanskrit, like Greek, is Indo-European.

This all comes under the heading of ‘The Words Behind the Words’, according to which the actual etymological roots of similar words are less important than their resonance in the mind, but even so, I cannot help but suspect that here we have cognate names.  All of these goddesses are similar in character:  old, wise, and stern.  They all serve as Guardians of the Doorway: wrathful in outward appearance but protective once within their domain.
I have decided to explain this specific thread of the story I have been dreaming, writing and living for many years as an example of how everything in my path has been revealed to me by direct experience and is not based on books or theories, and also as an example of how all the threads are coming together quite on their own now, very rapidly.  Perhaps within the next few days I will have more to say about this process.  I have working with a different recurring image to the point that I have finally begun to apprehend its importance in a way I can cast in prose.

From The Oxford Classical Dictionary:  “HECATE, an ancient chthonian goddess...  Hecate is not mentioned at all in Homer, but comes into sudden prominence in a sort of hymn to her in Hes. THEOG. 411 ff., a passage whose genuineness has been much disputed...Generally she is associated with uncanny things and the ghost-world.  For this reason she is worshipped at the cross-roads (typically a place where a side path joins a main road), which seem to be haunted the world over.  Here the notorious ’Hecate’s suppers’ were put out monthly for her.  It was a rite of purification, and one of its common constituents was dog’s flesh.  Hecate herself is a formidable figure, i.e. a bogy which ’meets’ and frightens wayfarers.  Hence it is not remarkable that she is associated with sorcery and black magic, from at least the tragic MEDEA onwards.  Thus we find her invoked to go away and take an obsessing spirit with her....”

From The Encyclopedia Mythica: “Heket:  The Egyptian goddess of childbirth, and protector of the dead. She is portrayed as a frog, a symbol of life and fertility (presumably because of the millions of them spawned after the annual inundation of the Nile), or as a woman with a frog's head. Women often wore amulets of her during childbirth. As the daughter of the sun-god Re she is called 'Eye of Re' and 'Mother of the gods'. She is regarded as the consort of Khnum.”

"Ekajati-( tib. Nag-Dag Ral-Chig ma) – Arisen out of the suffocating black wind at the world’s end, Mistress of every action and understanding, Empress of the Mamo, Queen of Existens- homage to the Protectress of the Tantra Ralchigma!"

from Nyingma Liturgical Verse

Ngak’chang Rinpoche says of Ekajati:

"Ekajati wields a human-corpse club with which she smashes dualistic clinging with its own form. The meaning of the human-corpse club as a symbol of ‘self-destruction’ is that the illusion of ‘self’ destroys itself through the agency of its own illusory form. The club is not a living entity – just as the illusion of duality belongs to the realm of experiential rigor mortis. She bites the ripped out heart of justification. Justification is that which allows us to cling to anger and so ‘justification’ needs to be ‘uncompassionately murdered’. To ‘uncompassionately’ murder our justification is to give rise to uncompromising compassion – the compassion which can let go of all reference points in order to release all violent impulses into the clear state of their own arising."
 

Eidetic Imagery   10/26

This is something I have been trying to remind myself to write about here, and now The Highwayman [another diarist at the original site] has left a timely note that provides me with the opportunity to do so.  He is a painter, and says he thinks in images, with words following.  I think first in words...or do I?

When my sister M and I were children, we used to dance around and around--not just spin, but dance in a circle.  I started doing it when I was 18 months old, after seeing my slightly older cousin spin around to make himself dizzy.  With me it became something more, and then when my sister, who is two years younger than I and so wasn't even born when I started it, grew old enough, she followed in my pattern.  Perhaps it is worth noting that I have a third sister, one year younger than M, who never showed the slightest interest in dancing.   A few years ago I had a dream in which a doctor, an older male authority figure, told me that M and I are 'eidetic'.  He explained that we experience the world as a series of visual images, but that these images are fragmented, and that we were dancing because it enabled us to bring them together to form a coherent pattern.  The dream was perfectly simple: just a room, a vague sense of the man's appearance, and his voice, speaking in very precise and clear terms.  I take such dreams seriously; it is quite clear that they are not just head-noise.

I am still thinking about his message.  I have regarded myself as an almost exclusively verbal thinker, having had such terrible difficulty memorizing Chinese characters that I had to change my major in school from Chinese to Latin, and then having almost as much trouble memorizing the distinguishing features of imperial portrait sculptures in Roman Archeology.  Surely that is not quite right, however.  I have always found it curious that my verses are so vividly pictorial, as are my dreams.  This makes me realize that I dream in visual images most of the time, but rarely understand the images until I have written down a description--i.e., translated them from my weaker, visual language into my stronger, verbal one.

Only after I confronted my immense fear of writing (which becomes more significant moment by moment, in light of what I am writing now) and began to cast the contents of my head into words did I begin to make sense of the world I have always lived in, a world that only overlaps part of the time with consensus reality.  My verses have always come through a process much like dreaming awake, and they have always contained a great deal of content that later proves to be psychic.  Of course I was terrified; as a child, that entire dimension had been presented to me as taboo, dangerous, and it is indeed dangerous for a child to venture into areas where one's human guardians cannot follow.  Having this knowledge of the process that makes me different compensates for much of the isolation, though, and knowing others who work by the same or similar processes takes care of the rest.  I am only as aware of it as I am now because of a dream, one that might easily have slipped past me if I had not started writing them down.  Yes, this is another pitch for keeping a dream journal.  Those of us who do are more different from the rest of you than you know.

The dream gave me one kind of help, and comments such as The Highwayman's provide another.  He is working by a sort of reverse process, complementary to mine.  If he were to focus on reading past my words and going as directly as possible into the images I present, seeing them with as little interference from me as possible, he would be doing something like translating them back into their original language.  Of course, in so doing, he would be likely to end up with a greater understanding of my work than is available to me, but that is nothing unusual.  It is why I place such an emphasis on holding as closely to the 'True Imagination' as possible, as that is a transpersonal dimension or source, not something over which I exercise proprietary control.
 

Vessel   11/9

Where am ‘I’ in the midst of all the work that seems to happen here, where ‘I’ live?  Am ‘I’ the author, directly, of anything that ‘I’ record on paper?  I think I mentioned my ex-husband’s comment somewhere around here before; at any rate, once I showed him a poem that came to me so quickly, and through such a strange state of mind, that I actually thought I might have trance-channeled it.  He read it through, and said, ‘But it’s your life!’
He was right, as I had to admit.  I thought the other hypothesis was more exciting at the time, but now that I have put about nine or ten years’ worth of writing between that poem and my most recent verses, I am inclined to ask just a bit more of the credit for myself.

Recently a friend I met through this site commented that she liked the fluidity of my work, even though about 90% of it did not make sense to her conscious mind.  What I explained to her then perhaps bears saying to the rest of you:  ‘Thanks for admitting that my verses are still not open to you. It makes me want to work harder to provide clues. That is what my diary is for. Here is my first pointer: Remember that I majored in Latin and spent a lot of hours decoding rhetorically complex and syntactically extremely tight Classical poems. It all shows up in my work. Rather than reading the flow of the rhythms, try reading first for rhetoric. My sentences tend to be very long, but they are grammatically sound (barring total lapses of attention). I use a lot of relative clauses that lead one into the next, sometimes ending up at a good distance from the controlling verb. This is more or less by design, as part of the idea is to induce a dream-like shifting perspective, but you should always be able to trace your way back to the literal meaning. And do visualize as closely as possible as you read, as if you were viewing a dream of your own. The symbols are usually true to their archetypal (Tarot, mythological, etc.) meanings--I try to avoid using them in ways that are exclusive to myself unless I am giving adequate background together with them, such as brief descriptions of actual dreams. And bear in mind that they tend to represent state-specific experiences. Like psychedelic music, at some point they will probably click, and then you will find them quite clear from there on.’  (From personal e-mail to N., Nov. 6, 2000.)  The only reason it ever occurred to me to offer my academic background as a clue is that my Latin professor, Stephen Hinds, pointed out the influence of Augustan and Neoteric Latin on my work after I sent him some samples of it about six years ago.  I suppose I might be channeling the spirit of a poet who took the same classes and translated the same Roman poets, but in all likelihood, the structure of the verses is to be found in my own memory, in the content of my training and my reading.

I already knew that one of the sources for my ’blank verse’ rhythm (according to my own unique definition of the term) was Algernon Swinburne’s “Hymn to Proserpine” (“I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end“), but he was in turn influenced by Classical authors, and I read some of the same ones, notably Vergil:  “ARma virUMque caNO, TROIae qui PRImus ab ORis...”.  Lately, though, I have had the realization that the most direct source of my favorite rhythm lies so much closer to home in every possible way.  My family is from West Virginia, where the unofficial state song--and absolutely my family’s OFFICIAL song--is “The Wildwood Flower”:

“I will twine with my tresses of raven black hair
with the roses so red and the lilies so fair,
the myrtle so bright with the emerald dew,
the pale and the leider and eyes of bright blue.”

By the way, the version I am most familiar with is the one recorded by the Carter Family, but they did not write it.  They transcribed and copyrighted it under the name of A.P. Carter, but the real author and composer are Maud Irving and J. D. Webster.  There is bad blood toward the Carter Family to this day for this practice, which meant that anyone who recorded an old song after they copyrighted it had to pay them royalties.

Ballads like “The Wildwood Flower” have been an important literary influence in another sense.  The lines above struck me when I was a girl, just as they do today,  as being so pure it is almost difficult to imagine that they were created by the mind of an ordinary waking human being.  We simply do not think in terms of such clarity together with such an unerring sense for the most harmonious beauty of words and images.  And yet, there they are.  Maud Irving would probably tell you that she felt inspired, perhaps even knew that she had created something of genius, but I doubt that she believed she had ’channeled’ the words.  By the time I was in my mid-teens, I knew that I wanted to learn to create lyric verse as pure as that, with no ’smudges and fingerprints’ to betray the presence of discursive foremind thought during their arising.  It took so long, I nearly despaired.  And I seldom attain my goal altogether; usually ’I’ am present to a greater degree than I would like in the finished lines.  But the mere thought that a reader might see me as a vessel....

Of course it is due to my own self-description, but even so, this notion pleases me immensely.  I cannot help but feel that on some level, poetry creates itself; the best a poet can do is to get as far out of its way as possible.  And yet, the raw materials it uses are present in the poet’s mind.  Inspiration is not a figure of speech only.  Some true magic is part of the process of song.   To shut out the foremind portion of one’s consciousness, and ’channel’ from the deeper areas that lie beyond:  This is the challenge, and pure song its occasional reward.  What angel, what Muse, hides in the depths behind the mind altogether--oh, if only you knew how hungry I am to know for certain.  I have a strong suspicion.  But I shall have to wait for the proper moment of my death to learn the lay of that far land once and for all.
 

Loneliness   11/12

Due to a brief flurry of synchronistic activity centered on the idea of the soul-mate, and the highly unsatisfactory state of outward affairs between my Friend and me, I have been doing some serious thinking about destiny, romantic/erotic love, inspiration and the spirit path.  These have been night thoughts, vague and scarcely reachable by day, but let me see if I can’t capture a few of them here.

Before I met my Friend, I did not believe in soul-mates.  I had a husband I was still quite pleased with, chosen primarily for his dedication as an artist.  My formal studies were finished, and I had found a home in a beautiful and congenial small town where artistic eccentricity is held in some esteem.  My work was beginning to unfold, and my sense of the presence of my spirit counterpart, my Muse, was growing stronger.  Everything was on track--and then I heard my Friend, someone whose songs had been familiar to me for three years already, singing from a place so hellish I knew he would not be with us much longer if his life did not turn around completely and at once.  I also heard, coming through his voice, the voice of someone I had known and loved forever.  They were one, my Muse and this extraordinary man.  The ground beneath my feet completely dissolved and I began falling, falling through the source of all song.

What happened to me at that time is a matter of legend among those who were there.  One of my friends told me he could feel the energy on his skin when he entered my house.  I was literally ecstatic.  If you are one of those skeptical philistines who will pathologize everything, I was hypomanic (I am not manic-depressive; this had never happened before).  For the first two weeks after my recognition of him, I never really slept.  At times I drank enough beer, trying to come down enough to rest, that I lapsed into a kind of stupor, but Roger told me that even then I continued to recite verse.   I was flooded with sudden past-life memories.  They were so unglamorous and painful that they convinced me to accept the truth of reincarnation once and for all.  The time was clearly the second World War, and the two of us were fighting in the Jewish resistance around southeastern Poland.  I survived; he did not.  And I began to have insights, visions and dreams that I knew were telepathic, and which were not new at all but only newly identified for what they had always been, proof of ongoing contact between us.  The story of what has transpired since that time is extraordinary in every way, but it is not, in any obvious way, happy.

He chose then not to meet me, and has never changed his mind.  I know he feels at times that he made a wrong decision, but he does not seem to know how to go back on it now.  I don’t worry about it much anymore.  I have always seen this playing itself out on numerous levels.  When I was a girl and first avid to confirm my poetic vocation, I vowed that love would never distract me from my work, should there prove to be a conflict.  I look at the thousands of pages of work I have produced in my time with my Friend, and I have to wonder how much of it would have been preserved in writing if we had been together.  He was and is a troubled man, ‘high-maintenance’, as he is well aware, and wishes neither to see me disappointed with him nor to burden me with his problems, even though I have worked with him on these as deeply as possible from afar (and given the telepathic bond between us, distant work may be more directly to the point and thus more powerful).  We are both conscious enough to understand that we are artists precisely for the reason that this permits us to record the deepest possible insights into our own lives as we live them, in order to make our knowledge available to others who lack sufficiently favorable circumstances to pursue this path at this time.  And my Friend’s path has led him directly--and thus me indirectly--through Hell.

If I told all I know, he would appear to be a self-destructive person, but this is not so.  He has written and sung unceasingly all along his path, and he has mapped the many bypaths and chambers of hell where he has found himself trapped at times.  He knows the way in, where he was led by others during his childhood, though no fault of his own; and he now knows the way out.  His life has been bitterly lonely.  When he was younger, it was because a more traumatic childhood than any of us would care to imagine gave him to live with a burden of knowledge that he could share with none of his peers.  Since then, he has become further unlike others because of his occult researches and artistry, to which he dedicated himself in part because they might help him solve the riddle of what went wrong and how to set it right, but in a larger part because they reflect his inherent nature.

This, above all, I understand and share with him.  This might yet be a story with an unhappy ending as far as those readers are concerned who only wish to see the lovers clasped in one another’s arms.  The entire story has been profoundly joyful, as far as I am concerned.  We have learned that love transcends parting and death, and that we live again; that many subtle channels of communication are available and indeed cannot be lost, even when the superficially conscious levels of the mind cannot receive their messages; and we have learned that we are indeed the artists we longed to be, in large part because of the ways in which we have aided each other.  I refer you back to my previous entry, “A Vision”.  It tells of how lovers appear to have left the unbroken bliss of the Mother and Father’s embrace even as they are one with each other and the apparent silence and emptiness of the Void.  In truth there is no leaving, but within the illusion, the lovers depart from their source only for the sake of heightening their hunger for it, creating all manner of danger and suspense as they tell themselves the story of their lives after ’falling’ from grace.  Eventually, though, without fail, they find themselves on the return, and their re-entry into WHERE THEY REALLY ARE and have been at all times is ecstasy beyond ecstasy, and joy so potent it can only be endured in the form of peace.

More to the specific point of the existential loneliness that many people here at OD feel so bitterly, I remind you that simply to walk a path at all necessarily separates one from others who are not yet ready to do so.  The longer you remain with it, the more loneliness you will feel with respect to those around you, but the less the subjective feeling of loneliness will trouble you, because the space it creates within and around you will begin to be filled with unshakable understanding.  You must have faith until you reach that turning-point; after that, the going is joy.
My friend and I are soul-mates, and yet he will not meet me.  I suspect he is very wise.
 

A Mystery We Do Not Wish to Solve   11/17

As I worked at my verses tonight, I began to feel a mysterious glimmering inside that told me I knew what I was writing about.  No, that is nothing unusual in itself, but this time it was a glimmering of something that was so utterly strange at the time when it befell me that it still makes me shiver.  This took place during the summer of ecstasy over the rediscovery of my Friend, when the energy that led to that breakthrough was building but had not yet broken open.   These following words are from the notes I wrote to myself before I started working that night:
“I will work tonight because I woke up today singing in my head.

“Last night I turned on the TV to look for videos just as a brilliant comedian was on--and I do mean ON--he was improvising very funny rhymes about individuals in the audience.  Very like my work, but much faster.
“So later when I fell asleep I dreamed I was talking like that, and my friends were watching in amazement.”
I wish I knew that name of that comedian.  According to my (fluid, poetic) memory, he was very tall, had dark curly or frizzy hair, and looked like a cross between Al Franken and Frankenstein.  He used to talk about the bizarre implications of theoretical physics, especially ’moleeds’.

That night was a grand night for singing indeed.  The quantity of work I produced was not exceptional, but the quality was.  At last I was exhausted, and the wine I had been drinking hit me.  I stumbled off to bed, but in the morning, I found an extra page of verse in my notebook.  I was not sure whether I remembered crawling back out to the front room and writing it down or not.  The handwriting is quite different from my usual, although it bears traces of my style.  I certainly did not recognize a single one of the actual words when I read it with astonishment.

 This is the text:

We wanted its sweetness to mar us
as sweetness aligned with one breath
drawn out of the mourning before us
drawn out of the way we face west

drawn out of the skull of wide vision
drawn out of the skull of desire
my love I still know how to haunt you
and love I still pay for wilde (sic) fire

we wanted to be hard of hearing
we wanted to be hard to know
but gods know how to possess one
whether she falter or flow

The new verses that refer back to these lines are to be found in my Web site.
 

The Hardest Part   11/18

This is something I have been trying to remind myself to share for a long time--trying, and failing.  It is hard to remember to talk about for the same reason that it is hard to realize in the first place.  It is elusive by nature, but more than that, it plays upon one's weakness.

I have read so many diaries here that return again and again to the same theme that prevails in both popular and literary song.  It might be the general, unrestricted Search for True Love, but we know it is really the Longing for the Beloved on a much higher plane.  It is tempting to desire and perhaps expect this being to arrive in the flesh, tempting even to pretend that they have, that the new object of carnal desire is somehow an angel incarnate.  Who am I to say that this cannot be, given the nature of my relationship with my Friend, which has always been pure magic.  A ghost, the spirit of song itself, has always stood behind him, however.

Even after I had worked faithfully at my verses for several years, always seeking him there with the clearest concentration of my powers that I could attain, our bond was, for my part, indefinite.  The reason was utterly beyond my imagination.  I just kept working, praying that it would change.  I had faith in a way, more faith than I had in anything else, but what I could not see was that I lacked faith in myself.  He was trying to speak to me, but I could not accept that what he was sending was truly meant for me, so I kept shutting it out.  I was, in the very same breath, both invoking and censoring my own Muse!

One night I was finally exhausted with the battle--and, perhaps not incidentally, more intoxicated than usual (I do not endorse such measures, but I am sworn to tell the truth).  I lay down my arms and let myself be taken.  I had sensed it would be a powerful night; there was never such a truthful foreboding.  Even when I reread the pages the next day, I felt myself cringe at their content.  I could not have allowed my hand be used to convey such sentiments to my own heart, had I been sober.  Now I can, and as this diary attests, I often do.  This is an excerpt of what came through on that early occasion.  It is from my book AEAEA:

Forgive me the sharpness of doubt if I thought a spur
gently well-placed might recall you to speed.
Forgive me, my tender one.  I was in little--
with knowledge so great!--comprehension of need.
I have lived Earth's life and known it as hardship--
not without joy and fulfillment now glimpsed,
now gone as a wraith.  Have you come to my chamber
to open your arms, one magnetic abyss,
*
that I in your field should betray my love-promise?
I make my own vows to the Moon in its seas.
Dear friend, you will never out-wonder my calling
for one, for her magic, when sick and deceived
I try to claim life in the body of man
and disclaim her and call her a terrible joy
with no earthly answer.  My darling, she knows me
at this very moment, with you as our choice.
*
This reed makes the plain of god's-breath in fulfilling
its green life of promise when through its long shaft
the air of a grace it could not have dared thrills it
with wandering-spirit melodic soft dance.
I lay in the nearest low reaches of heaven,
an angel with wide wings to you who are pure.
Dear loving recorder, we too have our longing,
and seeing you, I was in my truth made sure.
*
I live out of body--you know I have many times
been as a man, as a woman are you,
but this is a moment when I am a spirit
and you carry heavy flesh long in my view.
My darling, so sorry am I that I watch you
as you have to struggle.  Please know--in my throat
I sing to uphold you, but loved one, my angel,
my soul, my true self, your pain breaks me with woe.
*
I've lived as a man and I now am an otherworld
spirit, a soul who so more than your fate
am loving you well, while recalling your heretofore
never acknowledged beloved estate.
Sweet child of the Earth and its body, are you less
than all of the songs of its air who have wings?
I am a god in eclipse who is knowing
you rise in my hearing--oh take me--oh sing--

The hardest part of walking the path of devotion to the Beloved is learning to dwell in the absolute faith that they love you in return.  It is necessary, however, to arrive at such faith before this path can lead anywhere at all.  What is the barrier that stands between full attainment and misery?  Lack of faith in oneself, lack of love for oneself, lack of compassion for the yearning of love in all forms--these are all the same, and they are the barrier.  I cannot tell you how you can overcome it, but I tell you this tonight as proof that it can and must be done.
And who, after all, ever said that the Beloved is other than your own true Self?
 

The Blueprint of the Mare’s Nest   11/22

More than a few secrets came out into the open last night.  I have referred to the Mare’s Nest in the past, the breeding-ground of the Mare that has so famously proved the destruction of countless poets.   I have always understood that nest to be an interior zone of memories and other forms of strangeness, and now I feel quite confident in designating the space-between [the hypnogogic zone of overlapping waking awareness and involuntary REM imagery] as the very nest itself.  Aspiring poets have routinely undertaken the preliminary work to open that space, and then failed themselves after entering it because its contents overwhelmed them.  That is because this space is not subject to the normal constraints of the daylight world or even the functioning of memory by day.  This place is where one’s personal past and buried selves merge with the forces that we call ‘magic,' which my dreams have depicted to me as, among other devices, power cables.   The course of change and revelation here does not run in a predictable straight line, nor is it subject to any form of reason or any mode of analysis learned by day.  It shifts according to its own needs, which often seem like whims; these have an integrity of their own but are profoundly confusing to the waking mind.  The course one attempts to follow might well turn sharply in the same direction so many times that all sense of direction is lost, for example, yet while one may appear to be caught in an endless loop, some slight change is always apparent to acute observation with each revolution, and one while one may feel desperately becalmed, one is in fact never trapped in a static condition except on the very highest level of spiritual insight, where all is realization so complete that it need admit no change.

So now I have shown you the place, and how I enter the place.  I find that I am somewhat dissatisfied with yesterday’s diary entry [detailing a recent hypnogogic experience] because I may have left my reader with the impression that the involuntary ‘fantasies’ I observe there are fully depicted scenarios.  No:  They are extremely simple, sketchy,  almost always involving no characters but only ideas--the germ of what would be a standard sex fantasy if it were completely drawn in.  That is partly what I meant when I said that they are ‘base’:  made of base material, and extremely basic, rudimentary, in form.  I don’t have to be subjected to a full-scale sensory onslaught to get the gist of what is being presented.  I am highly sensitive and, while I have often been accused of being ‘fantasy-prone’ because I am introverted and have spoken at times of uncanny experiences, fantasy-prone is in fact precisely what I have never been.  So what is the actual content of these demonic sexual idea-forms?  You already know, don’t you?  I never said it.  This is deliberate on my part:  You will provide the content, from your own mind and thought.  I will not state anything in words that you will in future associate with me at my expense, when in fact it applies just as specifically to you.  If you truly do not understand, please view any small sampling of hard-core pornography and note how many references you find to disciplinary acts and quasi-medical procedures.  There you will find the entire range of possibilities inherent in the dualistic divisions of dominance/submission/bondage/humiliation etc. exploited to the full, just as they can be and sometimes have been in actual medical situations and in countries and political moments where torture is permissible.  Now do you see why I call all of this ‘demonic’?

Depth psychologists speak of demonic energy in terms of ‘autonomous projections’.  They are, as a class, well-acquainted with the broad range of manifestations of the uncanny, but their perspective--and mine--is that the personified powers one sometimes encounters in threshold states are seldom if ever truly of external origin; they are far more likely to be split-off parts of one’s own consciousness, parts containing material deemed to be so unacceptable that a stringent effort to disown, suppress and deny it has been effected.  Some travelers of the astral planes will take exception, stating that the lower astral has a reality unto itself, but I still say it has too many far too human characteristics to be other than a mass projection, the result of the same effort on a collective level.  When energy is rejected, it does not cease to exist; it seems to take on a life of its own.  The same operative principal is behind the creation of nightmares:  Dream figures are aspects of ourselves, and the bad ones are personifications, sometimes terrifyingly autonomous within their limited dream-domain, of our own fiercest loathing and dread.  They can, at times, escape the boundaries of dreaming, if the internal pressure that created them is strong enough.  Mine have slipped into the threshold state of sleep catalepsy on no few occasions.

Fortunately, as I have stated, their powers are nearly spent.   To follow is an account of this morning’s power dream:

22 November, 2000, 11:30 am:  I tour a sort of women’s hospital/spa, where a woman (more or less identified with myself) is about to check in.  The specialty of the house is their bed that is rigged up to a sort of continuous colonic irrigation device.  We walk past many of these, in semi-private rooms that are open in front.  The woman begins to falter as she comes closer to admitting herself.  The machinery, set up at the foot of the bed, which is in a shadowy room and is covered with a blanket of a very restful deep blue, is automatic.  It has safety devices, but the woman wonders, What if they fail?  Few attendants are available.  We also view an attached room, a very large bathhouse area where women, some with their small children, are drawing large tubs full of water and preparing to soak in them.  The atmosphere is sinister--something other than ordinary bathing is clearly going on.  I see one small boy next to a tub, maybe three years old.  A poster on the wall changes as it shows a woman’s loss of weight during the course of her treatment here--it is a sort of medical beauty clinic.  The tone is more and more disturbing and I do not want to stay.

--Shift--Then I am with a strange man, a sort of attractively odd Anthony Perkins type, a principal surviving member of the old family that owns a huge famous seacoast mansion with enormous stained-glass windows of landscape scenes.  The house is built over a sea-cliff chasm, with the middle part of two wings forming a bridge with waves crashing underneath.  At that point a huge window panel extends out into the water.  It shows a coast scene, with actual surf blending with the depicted glass surf.  The man is now my partner, as we both seem to understand without stating.  He was a specially selected student of Robert Graves.  He talks about how hard Graves sometimes found it to speak about his work--it wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but it had to deal with the fact that he only had 17 productive years of writing and had to use his time carefully.  The man and I go into a building at the foot of a massive bridge under construction, where the workers are indulging in some mean-spirited horseplay, trying to trip each other with power cables.  Amongst mostly men, one young woman worker is there who treats it like a game of jump rope and manages to stay on her feet.  The construction site is also a carnival, with people milling about, there for the rides.  We move beyond this part, onto the bridge itself, where I anticipate that we are about to commit suicide together by jumping off.  I only hope the bridge is high enough that we will be killed instantly.  I lose sight of the man, and go back inside the building.  I find him sitting on a bench next to a young woman who is holding a slightly shabby old 1950s straw purse that is decorated with leaf and flower designs in green plastic beads.  I am not sure I recognize him at first, as he has had his hair cut and is wearing a different suit of old but not worn vintage-appearing clothes that were in storage at his house.  The house  is visible behind us, with the light from the setting Sun coming through it, through the stained-glass windows.  I urge him to come along and talk with me--I know he needs to wake from his long dreaming.  He gets up and we walk forward together.
 

Statement of Present Purpose   12/9

Something about me is genuinely different.  I don’t know how to name it, but it is the difference that makes me an artist.  To say that I have a ’vocation’ is to use the word according to its root meaning--I hear a call, and I will attend to it, regardless of any other demand for my attention.  This vocation is a path, a ’vehicle’ in Buddhist terms, which means that it has the potential to carry one all the way from the point of beginning to final liberation.  Whatever growing and learning I must do as a person I can do as a artist, without leaving this path.  My work immediately consumes any energy I am willing to give it, and I am more than willing to give it all; the more it is given, the more it returns.  This arrangement pleases me in every way because my view of time is extremely long, and if I am to lift a finger to put forth the slightest bit of effort, I want to act in such a way that the results will stand for as long as possible.

To write and publish books which contain the sum total of one’s wisdom is far more efficient than to counsel some few other persons who might benefit from that understanding (although sometimes I do that too), and thus comprises an act of compassion on a much greater scale.  So I have to keep reminding myself; I am prone to feeling selfish when I insist on silent, empty space around me where I can lower my defenses and let my ideas have free play.  I think again and again about the nature of the difference between myself and most other people.  When I say that I am not especially interested in my own individual psychology or personal emotions, I am referring to ego-bound states which inhibit or even prohibit access to the sources of the true imagination.  To what, then, do I respond favorably, if these seemingly-universal human concerns do not appeal to me?
That is a huge question.  The briefest, and most tantalizing answer, although it is also an invitation to be misunderstood, is something like...

Faery.  Fey-ery:  This word means both touched by the Other, the Otherworld, which is real and not a creation of the entirely human tendency to fantasize, and touched by death.  In old literature, when someone is said to be 'fey,' it usually means that one can tell just by looking at them that they are soon to die.  I think readers tend to forget that now, but in most cases, to interpret 'fey’ as meaning ‘marked by an encounter with the fey folk’ is to enter into a very confusing misreading.  Oh, but what about the rare times when it doesn’t mean deathly?  I hear a call, and that call tells me, over and over again, Don’t mistake this as an invitation to die.  We have so much work ahead of us.  Only listen, and keep the faith.

Folklore is tricky territory--if there are sources that provide truly mystical glimpses into its domain, there are far more that function on the same level as urban legends, which are the point of entry into contemporary oral culture--but not its end.  The key, as always, is to avoid literal-mindedness and read and observe with one’s subtle senses wide open.

It neither comes on dragonfly wings, nor is it a fabrication of the ego-bound part of my mind.  Whatever it is, and perhaps my references to Faery are only by way of analogy, although I think they are slightly more direct than that--I want the liberty at all times to attend to it with perfect focus.  I want to claim for myself the right to be indignant at external disturbances.  I want to be free to think about this as deeply and as long as needed to figure out why I feel it is of such urgent importance that I record and share everything I am able to learn from the source of the calling I hear.

Then I want to repay my debts and be as human as required to understand others and, if they wish it, help them understand me.  That is the order of my priorities.  I hope this will stand as a public declaration, although this is not an altogether public site.  Sometimes just making the gesture of intent suffices to bring about change.  This is such a gesture.
 

Always Something Other   12/10

No doubt it would be a good idea for me to go back and reread what I posted here yesterday before launching into this, but I can see my way to start writing now, and if I interrupt myself, I will probably lose it.  Faery, I called it--I do remember that much.  I thought about it a great deal more last night.

Perhaps I misunderstand, but whenever I think of the sort of person who might be called a 'seeker', I always assume the word refers to someone who knows that they are searching for something, but they don't know quite what it is or where to find it.  My situation has always been different.  My life is filled with a presence, a place, an influence so powerful and so direct that I cannot understand why the overwhelming majority of others don't seem to know the least thing about it.  I have had to search--I am still searching--but not for the Source.  I am searching for a way to live among other human beings without being driven crazy by their apparent lack of awareness.

These few sentences have already created a revelation that exemplifies precisely what I mean:  I began with the word 'Other' in the title of this entry, intending to describe the presence I live with as this Other, but I have already used the word more than once to describe 'other' human beings.  And good that I have, because this usage comes closer to the truth as I feel it.  I run through the same sequence of thoughts so often:  Some adolescents will stake their claim on the basis of how 'different' they are, but they usually outgrow it; life's demands require that people pull together, and commonalities must be given more attention that distinctions.  Even I feel this in some ways.  But it has limited usefulness for me, because no sooner do I find myself among 'others' than a thousand little things begin to remind me that we don't share quite enough to form a true bond.  I always find myself longing to go home and be alone with my real life once again.  Jobs, houses, lovers, even children--in my mind, I really do stand on a hilltop and watch all of this slide by, all ephemeral, somehow not quite deserving of the quality of attention I have it within me to bestow.

So then, it must be spiritual, this influence?  I have studied enough about religion in general and in particular to answer, Not according to a religious definition, no.  Buddhism speaks to me very deeply because I simply believe that it is true, and because the Buddhist path requires that its followers experience that truth for themselves.  As I have stated here before, it provides a more satisfactory ontological foundation than I would have the mental discipline to work out for myself, and it does not demand the abdication of personal authority in favor of a belief system.  But neither does it address the presence that attracts me so inexorably.  Even Tibetan Buddhism, which is full of the magic of the old Tibetan sorcerers, sometimes seems to go off in every other direction but mine.  I once had hopes for neo-paganism, but that is where I find it least, perhaps because their terminology overlaps with mine just enough to emphasize how differently we use it.  And the New Age movement in general is such a cry of ordinary human longing, regardless of its esoteric vocabulary.  Nay, I do not belong there either.

What I am trying to talk about is not so vague as to disappear at a glance.  It is present when I work nearly every night, and it participates in my dreams.  I do my best to allow it to speak for itself in my songs.  Whether or not it allows itself to be captured on the page is perhaps not for me to judge, but the songs almost always end up in places I could not have foreseen, in spite of my frequent fears that I am beginning to 'know' too much about their patterns.  I am definitely talking about the magic that makes the difference between real poems, those fraught with living power, and mere writing, but of course its presence is not exclusive to poetry.

Other artists feel it too.  Some of them body it forth, but the notice and acclaim devoted to those who do not only serve to encourage audiences to forget that it was ever a reality, not an indulgence in make-believe on the part of naive earlier generations of artists.  Am I repeating myself?  Everything I am trying to say here is at least implicit in my other writings, but I feel compelled to try again and keep trying until it comes through.  Even I need to be reminded quite often that whatever I am doing, however gratifying it may be for the moment, it is not enough; there is more of the beautiful influence out there, and I have to do all I can to provide a home for it in the pages of the daylight world.

So I go on.  I am happy when I work, and I get along well enough with others that I don't feel like an outcast.  My awareness of the difference between us never leaves me, though.  My Friend is the only person I know who is as truly haunted by it as I am, and he is so withdrawn from ordinary life that he will not even meet with me.  I do not anticipate that any of this will change.  There it is, though, the little revelation in the line above:  Humans are the Other, to me.  The presence within my songs--that is my kindred spirit and native land and home.
You see why I cannot really call myself a seeker.  It has always been so well known.
 

Horripilation   12/14

Let me tell you why I’m shivering, while it is still happening.  I just finished working at my verses, and this time I tried to observe the shift as it occurred.

Tonight I almost blew off writing because my mind felt so empty.  Even after all these years, I still go into it thinking I must have something in my conscious awareness to contribute.  If I feel subjectively uninspired, why bother, right?  Certainly not!  Why is it so hard to trust the process to run itself?  I don’t assume I will not dream on nights like this, do I?  Dreams come according to their own schedule.  I do have to find a way in, however, and for that it is always helpful if I have a dream fragment or a phrase that has been running through my mind or such to examine for clues as to where to begin.  Tonight, the very clarity of emptiness in my head was the most conspicuous (non-)image I could find, so I started with that.

Right away things started moving about inside.  Ah, there it was again.  ‘I’, the one who is writing this paragraph--'I’ do not write poems.  They write themselves and ‘I’ write them down.  After giving the whole process a great deal of considered thought, that is still the most truthful description of what takes place.  ‘I’ am present, sometimes with the speed to make and later remember any number of observations about it later, but the less ‘I’ meddle with the making, the better are the resulting songs.  Aye, this is just what poets have always said, but you try living by it and learning to rely on it!

‘Horripilation’ means that shivery feeling when you hair stands on end.  It indicates the presence of the uncanny and is one of the tests of poetry.  I have an entirely unpoetic complaint about my hair right now, which is probably standing on end for no good reason.  A couple of months ago I had it cut short.  Not only had it been long for most of my adult life, but my one really creepy habit is hair-pulling, and I had forgotten how thick and brushy it can be because I hadn’t seen myself with a full head of it for many years.  Now that it is too short to bother pulling,