9 May 2000

I requested a Statement of Purpose for the readers of this journal, and this is what came:

The Softly Breathing Net

The sharing of strange, subtle ways to remember with that which cannot be perceived by plain sight
or plain hearing--in this lies my duty and pleasure.  Forever the threshold, forever twilight,
forever the pale trace of movement appearing within or beyond a bright shimmering veil
of white mist or a heavy pearl grey water-bearing cloud shadowing softly the day--without fail,
I shall swiftly return to the place that has seen me so often and always rejoiced in the sign
of devotion I make when I seek subtle meanings for words formed of breath that this world will refine
to the point of such clarity, even my weak-witted waking-day mind cannot wholly forget.
Your hand’s been at play on this page--I shall keep it about me at all times:  I see a great net
of silk thread spun so fine it is like an illusion of shadow or mist, yet it captures the gaze
which must not be deranged by plain senses’ confusion--and when it meets mine, I remember--always.
 

***
 

10 May 2000

AEAEA

Because a powerful reconciliation of dreaming and waking has been effected by means of long familiarity with this place, because here total domination by the rational, critical foremind--ordinary waking consciousness or 'ego', if we can agree not to place too strict a value on that term--does not and must not obtain, all writings from and about AEAEA must partake of its nature, which is mysterious, liminal, and hypnotic.  Sometimes here such a state of mind will be called 'dreaming awake', but again, please do not interpret those words too strictly; nothing is literal here, and seldom or never can anything be reduced to a single meaning.  Poetry--a frightening word to use, one of the very most powerful--means, at root, 'to make' but no simple order of making is intended; nay, it means 'to make magic':  to create or invoke  magic, and to make or reveal as magical that which seems mundane.  Many levels exist in the spirit and mind; many levels likewise exist in our languages, reflecting their manifold places of origin.  To make the magic of poetry, as many levels as possible must be invoked and entreated to speak for themselves in their own favored imagery.  Thus, the words to be found here cannot be simple:  They cannot be single in meaning.   If the verses and occasional prose writings in this journal do not seem readily accessible, please be patient with them--or with yourself.  The sincere intent is to communicate, as effectively and as deeply as circumstances on either part will allow, but sometimes we will be entering places where, perhaps, neither of us has gone this nearly waking--this near to the daytime state--before.  If, even after time and patience have been allowed, the work remains unclear, please know that the nature of the songs and insights given here are, as one might have expected, cyclical, and the same themes will return in different forms.  Usually the connections will be apparent.  The first mode of approach might not engage an individual imagination, but another one will, one which will discover itself by and by.  In the Net above, please observe how a mist or shadow that might seem to obscure the object sought is revealed as the intermediary substance through which it is possible not merely to glimpse that goal--and to meet its answering glance--but to return from that meeting with a written record that bears more than one's own mark.

Dreams and all threshold places implicitly seem to be pregnant with death; how is death not what has drawn me here?  Now that I am sharing this knowing with others, and have spoken death's name, what is to be declared?
 

Why I Will See This Through

The under-the-leaves light of shadowy green seeing plays through a window within a great wall
as a tune, a wild musical sadness, is keening away at the back of one side of my all-
round obsession:  within or without?  I am thinking, and thus I am certain to fail to begin
to remember which side I am on when the sinking I quite recognize takes its hold and I spin
into gentle entrainment of unspoken reels of articulate vision:  The tip of a leaf
by the breath of a strong wind is quickened and feels itself whirling and tracing a circle of brief,
narrow compass again and again on a parchment that might be the back of my hand or a page
on one side or the other.  Whose spirit is marching in triumph across the round barbed-wire cage
of handwriting that holds untold magic's potentially dangerous charge in its toilsome embrace?
You are mine in the day and the dream, the essential design by which all rightful joys find their place,
which is--everywhere.  Love, did I mention a window, a wall, maybe one or more sides, out and in?
This is highly amusing to one who is pinioned for far and high flight, whose vast shadow, no thin
hurricane or bombardment of hail, but an Ocean-wide shadow thrown over the whole world as far
as my half-mortal heart can encompass--that woken world’s light-in-reverse haunts its leaves:  Here WE ARE,
who are all celebration, whose howling is laughter broadcast on a splendid expanse of near sky--
nearer--nearer--now what is a cage but live rafters of leafy green branches and wings?  You are why.
 

***
 

11 May 2000

 Not merely does this island AEAEA appear and disappear by what must seem to be some private whim, but to do so is so deeply and inextricably a part, and a central part, of its nature that this mysterious recurrence must assume a role of its own in the telling of this story.  Long ago, when it was being rediscovered for the infinite time, in a very different way this time because I was taking another person with me, the concern that was uppermost in my waking foremind was that my friend might be tempted to the point of being overwhelmed by what I experienced myself as 'the suicide craze'.  All of my work since that time has been, in addition to any number of other things, a protracted act of magic in the prevention of suicide.  He gave me to think of the many other sensitive, perhaps hypersensitive, and hyperresponsive men and women of grace who have died as a consequence of their inability to reconcile their powers with the noise of the waking world, a place of true mental illness.  Supply your own list of names; you know of many such persons.  At that time, I was only beginning to attain sufficient understanding of my own grace to make use of the power of obsession that had kept me true to my path to the exclusion of almost all other things, even when it was outwardly unrewarding.  I had felt too tainted by the nature of my thoughts and the way they colored my perceptions, making everything within and without me feel unbearably dirty, to face the hugeness of the work that awaited me in what I felt was the necessary purity of mind.  My resolution was that, if I could not offer myself in a state I regarded as acceptable to the work that was calling me, I would destroy myself as thoroughly as I was able, by way of apology for my failure.  An irrational way of thinking, aye, but the best I could do; it was my way of attempting to articulate a position which is entirely reasonably according to the intuited terms of my real world:  If I cannot give you my life in the sense of living out the day and succeeding in the work I have been called to do, I will give you my life in the only other sense I know.  That was the view from one level.  Of course, from another, I was simply stating, 'I cannot figure this out by myself; if I make a drastic gesture, will that which has been calling me intervene?'  (Need I tell you--it did.)  And from another, the very much deeper reasons begin to swim ever so briefly into view:  'Subtle glimpses and sidelong hints have never been absent, but they have never been sufficient; I need more, and I know of no other way to find it; others who have attempted to reach their desire have so often met this end that I am half-convinced that they chose rightly.'   Aye, and there is more:  'Someone is calling me.  I have dreamed of this one.  There is an old, old story, one never given in full in any single account, yet a story that everyone knows without ever being told:  The Demon Lover.  Aye:  If that is you, and you have found me, I have no further use for the world of day.'  I have entered into engagement with someone so mysterious that I know him better in every way than any other one, without ever having seen his face, assuming that I will never, in this lifetime, see him or meet him in the waking world.  I was leading myself step by step to the conclusion that best suited my real inclinations as they had already formed:  that I would only know him fully if I joined him in his world, the shadowy underworld which mortals can only enter by way of dreams that end all too quickly or by the endless dream of death.
This is not a fantasy, and that is why, the more I struggled to reach an understanding with the several selves inside me who were debating over this, the more a great pressure began to build up inside me to do almost anything that would shift the miserable burden.  I made the attempt; I created a ritually powerful but physically feeble means of approach by death should it choose to claim me.  Death stood well aside.  Later I knew very clearly that my true goal had been attained in full by my act:  I had destroyed some barrier of fear or shame that had kept me silent, and the words began to run.  The very first thing they--he--told me was that death would truly part, not join us, and thus thoughts of suicide must never again be entertained.  Such knowledge does not come to me because I am unusual; it comes because I was once so desperate that I reached a decision that I maintain to this day:  I will use my considerable power of will for one purpose more than any other.  I cannot help but hear anyway; one of my secret names has always been Hearer.  From now on, I will LISTEN.

When I listen, I do so on behalf of more than myself.  I still care deeply for the well-being of the same friend who helped me relearn the lay of AEAEA.  Now, by this public offering of my work, I rededicate myself yet again to that which he embodies to me:  the grace that is always--but never forever--disappearing; the grace that so often dies with its most gifted human bearers because their desire for it overwhelms all else and leaves them isolated and lonely; the grace that must by all gentle means be encouraged to remain in the daylight world which, although it is all too often entirely oblivious of its presence, can never flourish without it.  Here grace, if it so chooses, will speak for itself in the form of song, as song is elemental to my nature.  Through long attention, I have learned many means of approach to this place.  AEAEA has already provided a few examples; these are merely the beginnings of songs and visions I myself cannot imagine as yet.  That will change over time.  This is where we are today.
 
 

This Work Is Never Done

A very faint stirring of air as of breathing surrounds me.  How strange that I happen to know
why it is that it touches my senses with reeling incitements to high-flown imaginings.  Go
forward, body of hope, daring will to be spoken aloud, scarce-aloof source of boundless recall
this benignant transport so conveys.  When the choking that once was my portion dissolved and the all-
healing glimpse was permitted to see me as holy, I drew in as much of its spirit as I
could attain, and its fragrance came over me slowly and sang out its name in the form of a sigh,
and the beat of my heart was transfixed and then lengthened.  A horse-gaited rhythm, it seethes and I flow
through and over the Ocean, my bloodstream, my strengthened desire having entered this hearing:  You know
who is breathing and sighing, who called and recalling the magic YOU ARE and possess, while your shade,
like the sense of sheer strangeness around me, is falling and rising in waves.  I cannot but be swayed.
I imagine the rush of pure speed, and directly the ground disappears and high winds ring me round.
I ride gasping an air that is singing.  When next we touch down, I will likely have lost the frail sound
at its center, but I will be changed by that hearing, and some tender trace of its spirit will run
through the surge in my veins when the thought of it nearly transports me all over again:  Never done.
 

***
 

12 May 2000

From Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), as quoted in The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981):

"Think of a medical student attending a course in the X-ray diagnosis of pulmonary diseases.  He watches in a darkened room shadowy traces on a fluorescent screen placed against a patient's chest, and hears the radiologist commenting to his assistants, in technical language, on the significant features of these shadows.  At first the student is completely puzzled.  For he can see in the X-ray picture of a chest only the shadows of the heart and ribs, with a few spidery blotches between them.  The experts seem to be romancing about figments of their imagination; he can see nothing that they are talking about.  Then as he goes on listening for a few weeks, looking carefully at ever new pictures of different cases, a tentative understanding will dawn on him; he will gradually forget about the ribs and begin to see the lungs.  And eventually, if he perseveres intelligently, a rich panorama of significant details will be revealed to him:  of physiological variations and pathological changes, of scars, of chronic infections and signs of acute disease.  He has entered a new world.  He still sees only a fraction of what the experts can see, but the pictures are definitely making sense now and so do most of the comments made on them.  He is about to grasp what he is being taught; it has clicked."
 

This was on one of the first few pages of a book I picked up after adding the entry above to this page.  It provides a fine description of the process of entering a new mode of thought.  This is what I dreamed afterwards:
 

12 May, 5:25 am:
‘Illimit La, Limit Da, ___ ___’--two or three slogans on a record cover I look at as I talk with my brother and a man about a boy whose hand has been drawn on and scratched in what we know but cannot prove is a black magic ceremonial marking--a territorial claim.  At the same time--and in the same place?--a young man who works in a resort? has to crawl down into a basement area secretly, as it is off-limits.  There he encounters a girl his age and helps her?, or she helps him?, as one of them has gotten their clothes hung up on a nail.  He then offers to pay her for something, as she is connected to the owner.  'Not on your life,' she tells him, 'I like you.'  My brother shows us, using scratches on my own hand as an example, how to look at places where the skin peels upward at the intersections of scratched lines as a way of retracing the original order in which the lines were drawn and thus demonstrating the intent of the design.
 

The Outer and Inner Map

The map in my friend's hand--and likewise my own--has been marred by a superimposed scrawl of lies
in a chaotic mare's nest of ill-drawn designs, a sore angry reminder each day of the dyes
and the saturate fetor unholiness bathes in before it seeks refuge, in part or in whole,
in some private enclosure.  It wanted to know him; a savage idea possessed it; no soul
could be seen to shine forth from it.  Mother of ashes, his hand bears a scar from an all-burning brand.
My own is as tainted.  The story I tell to myself as to why is so...conversely grand,
I can feel some reluctance to leave it unspoken aloud, yet why aid the most back-breaking wheel
to refurrow an innocent palm with such snarled contradictory ruts, like an arrogant seal
that reflects foreign ownership's hostile intentions?  It should be infertile, the plain that this map
represents, the misuse of this hand as a weapon of offense, when once it was given to trap
with its fine, friendly, very soft, elegant fingers the sailing white wisp of an aerial seed
and protect it and lend it by gentle interior light and the most tender warmth all it needs
to be quickened and flourish.  The magical pattern the natural growth of the roots the seed sends
branching over the palm of that hand--this should be the sole representation of worlds without end
that my friend has to carry, a very light marking and one he can cherish.  But nay; it has come
that a grievous ordeal has been superimposed, but original silence is not stricken dumb;
in an eloquent gesture, my friend fans his fingers and shows me his hand.  In his palm, the burnt skin
is beginning to heal.  The dry outermost layer is sloughing away.  He is singing within;
I can hear him the moment he touches my hand, where renewal is also commencing.  My voice
is still weak; so is his; but I sense we are joining in secret and soon will reveal that a choice
has been made and effected between us, and singing the deep secret knowledge we’ve gathered by rite
of a long aching passage of darkness shall serve us in turn who have learned that the source of the light
that allows us to read the live map we have carried forever through seemingly-endless ordeals
has its root deep inside us.  No marking--no stain and no scar--can obscure it.  Love serves as our seal:
It is joyful, the roots of oneself, bearing leaves to be read in the dark when the Night Ocean roars
and the Moon bleaches out any other inscription.  I turn to you then.  It is Love's seal, and yours.
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