3. The Fool on the Hill
Right now, sitting in my mom’s “modern” recliner—a hand-me-down from her housewife-retirement years: cat-scratched & ergonomically comfortable—I’m facing out, albeit absently, beyond the living room’s faux French doors onto my beloved pastures green & pleasant: Retirement at last! I can finally get to work: My rainbow kite, so huge it’s flown only a handful of times, gets regular action now—brought out early each morning, ritually unfurled between my legs in a strangely staggered dance I perform in a couple of seconds, the best way to make a decent circle around a chair & side-desk with 33 feet of silk. This is my magic circle, which I reserve solely for ouija or for lesson writing. Compared to a gushing shaman or sulphur-sniffing oracle, this circle so splayed may seem rather superstitious or silly. Thus, for decades when I was compelled by guilt to work on my Nine Men tasks employing such an aid—that is, to sit & think & write within the kite’s rainbow circle—I often felt, well, so awkward & stupid that I failed to comply—or rather, didn’t bother at all—for, as the cricket most reasonably chirped, This is symbolic, right? A self-help pep-talk prop? Do I really need a comfort blanket? In other words, it’s not real. Even after my teachers at the board commanded me out-of-the-blue to fetch [THE] KITE and literally surround our physical presence in its most beautiful silken fibers; even when they exhorted Scribe & me to employ a magic circle whenever & wherever focus is needed; and even though Scribe throughout his Nine Men training and probably ever-after swore by its affects, effects, & aftereffects, even then: As soon as the season’s sessions concluded & the “boys of summer” had gone their separate coasts & lives, along with all the other ouija paraphernalia, the kite got rolled up & neatly stashed in its closet.[15]
I received the kite as a gift on July 11, 1982, a gift for no reason. It wasn’t my birthday. William, a college friend, & his girlfriend drove from their cool City studio to visit me at my parents’ house, which was, indeed, my house for my entire childhood universe, the living navel of suburbia. But having just returned from Germany—not raving, but a defeated young man nonetheless—home was different. I was paying rent. William, a native Texan, had just gotten a job at the super-posh kite shop on Pier 39. I didn’t dare ask how much the kite cost or how he got hold of it. He also gave me a great two-string acrobatic kite. I knew he came from wealth; now he knew also that I did not. As a child I received the greatest gifts—love, the best education, fantastic travel—but I could not afford such a kite.
For my kite’s maiden voyage we dropped acid and hiked the short block uphill to my dad’s old high school, about the only space open enough for kite-flying, where we had the grounds to ourselves, especially as the pink cinder-block buildings, once bustling with dad’s (“big kid”) adolescents, now stood vacant, slated for fall demolition.[16] Actually, it was the newest school in the district, less than 30 years old, but due to drastic & prolonged declining enrollment, it was the first school to be closed, politically the most expedient. At one point in the ’70s nine foreign languages were offered there for credit, my dad teaching four of them.[17] Within two or three years though, the whole hilltop site would instead crawl with half-million dollar “custom” homes—good value as most came with a view of the Bay. Only the athletic fields would remain, along with their disbanded home-team scoreboards (“Home of the Dons”). And perhaps because I was sent away to boarding school, the place always struck me as foreign soil. Nevertheless, I knew it well in one conspicuous capacity: I’d spent a good chunk of my childhood there flying kites.
The acid came on fast, and it hit me remarkably hard, so much harder than it affected the others, who remained lucid & light. Yes, it was also my first dope in weeks, as I had developed no supply chain at home (and wouldn’t for some time); but that doesn’t account for my reaction. I was knocked flat on my back, losing my balance completely, the ground rolling beneath my legs like ocean waves; and thus I was stuck there, literally grounded, for more than three hours. Fortunately, we had the whole baseball outfield, and the grass felt great (I’m normally allergic). Actually I remember almost no content from this stretch, most of it just crazy shit, streaming chaos—which, to be clear, is always disappointing, as I’m generally well aware that I’ll return from my epic journey empty-handed.
But this was different. Call it dreamweight: As I casually popped in & out of my body, I remained still quite connected to my flesh & friends, who were having good fun and checked in on me regularly. Far beyond language, I recall swooping in just to give them my thumbs up & laugh, so they wouldn’t worry, since I never really left. I was just occupying two spaces at once, both ends of the kite string, enjoying the scene from both vantages. I, too, got to watch William display perfect mastery over my new two-string acrobat, swooping & diving & dancing it just inches off the ground. But I was attached to the other kite, the rainbow giant, and more than by my attention alone, which flew perhaps 80 yards up and was staked by its string to the ground. With my eye I could follow the entire length of the string, right to the end of the rainbow. But back at its source the line split off. While the physical kite-string came down & to my right where it was staked, another line, the profound line of my soul came down right into my solar plexus, where I felt with all the fibers of my being, that I was being unwound. My eyes saw nothing, but I could feel very-real knots within me being tugged & combed & straightened out the full length of the line, all the way up to the kite, where every wink & wiggle of the kite jerked & jiggled fibers connected at my solar core, the nexus of my identity. Thus, the crazy shit was content coming free, my life passing before my eyes, or rather lower thorax—and not all my life, mind you—Germany in particular. The knots & doubts & crippling weight of my failed Icarus flight, still bleeding in my breast, were releasing…
That’s not the whole trip, of course. There was a poem, for instance, the next day after, but directly related since all night long I was still swimming in Gregor Samsa dreams. I woke up, rolled over in bed for my notebook, and promptly was dictated a strangely pre-lingual artifact—which is how I know the date of my acid trip—I date my poems. Let me now, however, highlight my most specific memory from that trip, details I’ll never forget:
The walk to the high school was no more than fifteen minutes, but I was flying well before we arrived. William handed me the new kite to open, and in my early confusion, I still recall, I forgot how to rip open cellophane packaging. I just stood there absently, and William helped. Then, when it was time to roll out the rainbow for the first time, more confusion: As with fine clothes, the packaged silk kite was rolled & held together by a pin, fortunately just one. To unroll the kite meant to pull out the pin, so I did. But what to do with it then? I couldn’t put a pin in my pocket, nor did I dare drop it with our belongings in the grass. Why don’t you put it in the tail? William suggested. Good idea, I thought, and even as I slid the pin along the crease at the very tip of the kite’s tail, where it fit exactly, I knew jigsaw pieces in “other” pregnant puzzles—in other places & dimensions & castles in the sky—were all snapping into place with that single focused act. All the stars came into alignment. Of course, I was on LSD.
—Followed immediately by three hours of earthbound unwinding as described above, an eternity. But eventually, by stages, I came down, and so did the kite. I went right for the tail: No pin!—and I instantly felt shitty about soccer players slide-tackling where it fell—but knots, literal physical knots, a whole bunch near the tip where the pin had been. How? And it was funny, even awkward somehow, that we could not determine whether we should be amazed by this or merely puzzled. That is, were these knots physically “reasonable,” or was this perhaps a miracle? (I still don’t know, but surely the old k-saying applies, “on one knot others gather.”) Physics aside, I was completely mind-blown by the discovery, for I knew instantly where these knots came from: Whether literally or purely by symbolic synchronicity, the tail displayed the very knots within me that had just unwound. As my German knots released, untied by the kite’s motion at the end of the line, the lines extending up from my center retied those selfsame knots onto my kite. This was my exact language at the time, more than six years before ouija. (Did I mention that I’m a mystic?)
It would be a dozen years or more before the kite would fly again. It came out two or three times when my girls were very young and we’d spend Spring Break on San Juan Island, where there is no place more beautiful in the world to fly a kite than American Camp (National Historical Park): windswept rolling grass hills right down to the sea, the necessary wind that sweeps them, mountains, volcanoes, whale spouts.… But soon, before kindergarten, the girls would be hiking American Camp, and from then on most of our favorite outdoor experiences would involve miles of physical motion. Kite flying is way too sedate for me.
Then again, nothing except sleeping in bed is more motionless for me than writing. (And because as a teacher I was almost always on my feet, my new writing career represents a major physical change for me, even a health challenge in retirement.) Right now my magic circle surrounds me in its warm aleph embrace, but as soon as I open its door and step beyond its circumference, I will feel cold, chilled to the bone, for not having moved for hours. My brain needs time, too, to return to time as well, almost as if I’m peeling away from an acid trip. Writing is hard![18]
4. Magic Circles
And so what’s the point? Why take up so much (suddenly desperate) writing space on a strange & anomalous acid trip? Why waste time detailing my dad’s old school, the pink shrine on the hill with me as laughing fool? Uh, Albion hasn’t told me yet. But it’s not because I own a nice kite with a history. In fact, neither the story nor the kite itself has much to do with magic circles per se. To make his own magic circle Scribe, who owns no kite, just knotted a few silk neckties together—although I doubt he ever draped these about his bar stool when he wrote in public. Much of Scribe’s work was composed, in fact, at his favorite bar, where he spent hours each day reading & writing.[19] (Between his first two major books, almost as an aside & uncounted in his Nine Men, Scribe translated all of Virgil’s Georgics there!) In contrast, while I was certainly comfortable & competent in the complete chaos of middle school, I really need total silence to write.
Thus the circle. The magic is real, but only because nothing is actually real. My cricket correctly noted that the act of sitting within the circle is symbolic. But symbolism is precisely what invests it with reality. Recall, what we call “objective reality” is just cave shadows, not real. But since nothing is real, everything we experience is real to the degree that we value it. If we care—if we are fully present in whatever port or dream or physical reality where we find ourselves—then that makes it real. Inversely, if we go through the day thinking about Facebook or Trump’s antics or distracted by emotions & circumstances & hormones, well, clearly we’re not present. Magic—flight, art, creativity, whatever you call it—is always a choice, and the chooser must be present for the choice. You can’t phone in your life.
Now careful, dear Reader. I need you briefly to watch your step here, as I clarify to avoid confusion: The opposite of presence is not absence. Absence, as we define it, is actually a form of presence. It’s a way that a limited mind holds in abeyance what is not needed in the moment. The key is that we still hold & retain the object of our absence, so that it’s not lost or discarded, but available to us for future gatherings, information that’s been filed safely “away.” My acid narrative here, for reasons to be determined still, much like my physical kite, had its careful place in my mental closet, my modest memory-palace. And Albion knew just where to find it. As Jane suggested, since we don’t want our memories to fly away,
ABSENCE - ANOTHER NAME FOR [THE] KITE STRING?
So how does the circle work? It’s actually the easiest thing: Remember, at our auroral essence our primal metaphors are indeed geometric. A circle is an enclosure, separating inside from out. The defined area created by a circle of silk makes a space of absence in our minds for focused work to take place. Once outside, which is conceived as "infinite," is walled out, the "contained" inside may be altered more easily to meet our needs. It doesn't matter that there is no actual physical barrier, or that the abstract "inside" is just as infinite as out. For, to be clear, our minds are actually more real than the silk circle, just as my words are far more real as ideas than the ink on the page that makes them physical. So when trying to do something mentally creative, the mental act is all that counts. But the physical world can help us think. In fact, we can't think without the substance of the world, since (recall from Lesson [4]) to think is a transitive verb.
Now consider for a moment how you might feel sitting within a circle that is missing, let’s say, an arc of 30º, a small bite. That psychic gap—if you know it’s there & visit it & value it by virtue of giving it your attention—is enough to create all sorts of unwanted flux. Scribe has told me of the port of scribes, available to all the Jewel Net's scribes for specifically scribal purposes. One key rule there: No buildings may be constructed with more than three walls. Why would such exposure be necessary? Now feel a full circle, both from the inside & out.
Of course if you pay no attention to circles—because, let’s say, you don’t believe in them—it’s fair to think that they won’t work. And I understood early on that their power was, at least in part, a function of my (dis)belief, where my chirping doubt got in the way (like a cricket in heat!). Yes, but only in part: The fact is, whether you believe in circles or not, a silk circle is a fact. You can touch it; you can bend & shape it; and you can use its shape to shape your mind.
Now notice how my paradigm completely inverts how most people
in the modern world conceive reality: Consider, for example, people who
pray. Most people believe that if they think the right thoughts and aim them
toward a desired end (to heal a child, let’s say), then maybe their directed
abstract thoughts can effect a physical cure. That is, they think their “unreal”
thoughts & hopes might be made physically “real.”[20] But I believe the opposite
is true: We use the unreal physical world & its projected shadows as props
& symbols & metaphors to affect real changes in our minds, which is all
we really are.
And why silk then? Why not a circle of string, or perhaps one of dog shit? I leave that for the reader to ponder briefly, sitting at your classroom desk.
§2/18/18
5. A Different History
[16]Like the kites the acid was a complete surprise, which is never a smart thing to do spontaneously; but hell, I was home. I had a normal dead-end shitty job, plenty of debt, no future,…and it was Saturday. My parents were away, in fact, traveling Europe with my brother.
[17] Spanish, German, Mandarin, & Portuguese. And because my dad was the only teacher of the last three, he doubled-up & tripled-up levels within the same class, so that the serious students could, if inspired, aim for four years credit. He also gave up his planning period for years for no pay. A generation later, as a union leader, I’d point out to my dad how his sacrifice, and that of countless other selfless teachers, merely enabled administrators & politicians to underfund education & perpetuate their neglected duty—indeed, government’s “paramount” duty in the Washington State Constitution. “Yeah, things were different back then…”
No, Dad, they’re still different.
[6] Albion also sends me knowledge directly—perhaps more often than via clairaudience—where such knowledge leaves no trace at all. It’s just there: a fact of knowledge. The total lack of forensics, however, is clear evidence of the source, like a criminal who has his fingerprints chemically erased, and thus is easily identified by police—or perhaps like the archetypal Hound of the Baskervilles, who doesn't bark at the scene of the crime.
[13]My math mind automatically does the arithmetic: 2 of 9 sections complete = 22%, while 10/25 pages = 40%. This incongruence becomes, then, an issue of lesson pacing, where as an engaged classroom teacher I was probably at my best. My written lesson plans (when I had them) I constantly adjusted & reframed on-the-fly—but only within larger constraints. Rarely would I extend a project deadline or postpone a test, just as I could never extend the school year. Some limits need to be flexible, while others are fundamental.
[4] note to self
The Shaman's part in raw form, from a later poem
I think about fifteen minutes were needed to complete these sessions,
and most of that undoubtedly belonged to Scribe’s unchanneled portion, where
he clinically laid out his minimal gatherings like May Day armies on parade.
The Shaman’s fleeting part—a true gift because it came from outside Scribe’s
kite & net entirely—I personally regard as perhaps more magical than our own
ouija sessions, not having witnessed such channeling myself. I think what I
still find most mystifying, though, is that the Shaman—who remembered little
of the content or experience upon completing his transmission—didn’t himself
have much of a reaction to these sessions. He was a smart man who understood
what was going on, along with the huge implications. But as a journalist, he had
a different beat. This was a favor to Scribe, who sprang for the dinner & fine
wine.
To make it all-the-weirder, no sooner did Scribe finish his Pangaea
project—a triumph that also culminated his Nine Men ascent and brought him
to flight—than the Shaman broke up with his girlfriend, found a new one in a
heartbeat, married, and moved away a week or two later forever. Then, an
instant later & by agonizing coincidence, all of Scribe’s remaining close
friends (within 2500 miles) abruptly & independently departed, each without
trace and all within just a few days of each other! Scribe was devastated. He
been alone for years before, and only in recent times had found a new set of
good friends, none of who, though, had yet anchored himself to a long-term
path.[10] All uprooted at once—all by personal choice, wise or otherwise. Did
even one friend say goodbye? Flight brought Scribe to the Forest. Fate made
sure he had nothing holding him back once he got there.
Just look at the photo: Now imagine the mind that can take literally
every directive on that page and arrange each into perfectly fluid poetry of the
most exacting form. By the last few poems, there were more directions than
lines per poem—thus every syllable pulled & squeezed & distilled to its most
essential aleph. Scribe’s mastery is shown by how clean his poems feel. They
are among the weightiest & densest word gatherings that I know, but they read
almost like fables or parables.
D) Wait, can I call a time-out? I must quick-check my own thinking to
re-locate myself on my map: Did I turn wrong already?
Oh yeah, there is no map; and there are no U-turns in this maze either,
just as in life. So I’ve come to a point in my writing where—were I working
in a standard essay form, rather than realtime—I would simply keep writing,
push on as long as necessary to recapture, if possible, the flow & logorrhea of
flight, knowing I could & would delete wholesale later on. But I see the rules
have changed: While I may edit words & paragraphs, improve on how I
verbalize & stylize, the content comes as given, and I cannot take it back.[11]
And since I’m stuck with this gathering—these assembled facts & ideas, a finite
& imperfect set like all gatherings—I better heed John Cleese’s warning: Don’t
get distracted. That is, while eternity may go on forever, existence is always
finite—you are what you think. So consider carefully what enters your limited
mind, what you gather up. Don’t fill up on crap.
That’s how the rule reads in the rulebook, but the implications are
suddenly huge: Because I can’t dismiss Albion’s content—and because I find
myself already on fucking page 9! in what must be a lesson of reasonable
lesson-length—I must be sure of what I say. But how can I be sure when
I don’t know where I’m going, shooting blindly toward a word I don't yet
understand? Recognize, this is just another prime example of the Paradox
of Otherness.
So here, mired for the moment in necessary paradox, anxious to see if or
how I may have strayed, I need to review the key process details so far—
first, to make sure I haven't fucked up completely, but more—to establish the
overt connections among my exhibits to see if any helpful epiphany jumps out
from them (1 paragraph only§). In a gathering paradox & anxiety are inevitable,
because the gathered content before a blind leap cannot contain the pattern of
the emergent flyer. The pieces may suggest possibilities & potential, but flight
is not derivative, not algebraic. It's discontinuous & transformative.
I started with Exhibit A (my epiphany) for obvious context. From
there I was led to Exhibit B (p-dreams), because Albion’s minimal direction
to me reminded me of Scribe’s minimal dreams. That’s the thread between
A and B. However, once I launched into Scribe’s writing process &
personal story—and yes, feeling flight’s strong narrative wings & smooth
sailing—I found myself suddenly immersed midstream in Exhibit C (the
Shaman’s part), whereupon I immediately grew deeply squeamish,
because I found myself further detailing Scribe’s private life. I don’t have
Scribe’s permission, so only necessity could compel me to include such
details, and I could see no justification. Even so, I decided to include the
Shaman’s part anyway. Huh?
And that’s when I called “time out,” only to learn, critically, that there
are no time-outs in this lesson and that there exists, in fact, an upper-limit
constraint on my gathering here: Again, I can’t cut out any given content, but
neither can I ramble endlessly. I don't want to bore or lose my reader
illuminating dead-ends. So here are new limits, arbitrarily decided by me§, the
teacher executive in time, not by Albion[12]: 25 pages max, not including
graphics. No lesson should go longer.[13]
And my justification? What necessity compels me to invade Scribe’s
privacy? Trust: Trust in Albion, trust in flight. This is not a rational
justification. But it’s right. When I finished Exhibit C and called for time,
I recognized flight. I’ve flown enough to know. It’s like putting on a new
pair of glasses after your prescription has changed: Whoa, I can see. And
because I knew I’d flown, I knew Albion was involved. I can’t fly without
him. Thus, I accepted his content, despite my moral qualms, because I trust
Albion to provide his justification later. So let me be clear here, in an executive
teacher pronouncement: I will not regard this Lesson as "successful" without
a proper justification of Exhibit C by the time I finish Lesson [9], the end of
this course. Lesson [8] is Gatherings, not the final exam, so resolution can (and
probably should) be suspended for one lesson. But Albion is put on notice here.§
A final point before I move on, one which segues right into the next
section: I know Albion. It would be shitty for a teacher to penalize a student
before explaining a new rule. Albion would never do that. And yet if the new
rule—requiring me to include all given content—had been spelled out from
the outset (as most rules are & should be), I almost certainly would not have
included the Shaman’s strange part among this gathering, flying prose or no.
So consider this: If Albion does have reasons for including Exhibit C—when
otherwise, in the absence of knowing his reasons, I would be so disinclined—this
convoluted process might have proved his best option. To a non-teacher this
may sound farfetched, even paranoid-conspiratorial, but I regularly considered
such individual & group psychology when developing my own lessons.
So if next week, let’s say, I suddenly were to find my own shaman,
someone who forced me through the same narrow constraints & wordpress—
well yes, that would qualify as “necessary & proper" justification for my
gathering Exhibit C above.[14] Short of that, I’m not sure what might satisfy me,
but Albion knows. In the meantime, I must rely on C as an illumined landmark
among this dark memory labyrinth called Lesson [8]. Above all at this time,
Scribe’s personal example shows me I must now squeeze & condense as
much as possible. I’m running out of space with every word.
[5]It didn’t really dawn on me till now, just finishing Section 2 with the title coming last, that Scribe’s story undoubtedly is a way for me to connect more closely with the higher Scribe at this time. I believe I now stand in my Nine Men at Step 78: Jewel, Scribe—indeed, the closest collaboration, and this tends to confirm that count. (I am encouraged.) That I didn’t realize this all along—that I literally forgot where on the stairway I was, despite the sum of these lessons and more—this also is a clear clue, one of omission. Such “negative” clues, in fact, were often left absent in our ouija conversations for Scribe & me to miss. We were expected to find these omissions and uncover their secrets. Some clues are dropped openly along the path, but some are concealed intentionally for later revealing. And this applies to the very thoughts that cross our minds (since the path is the mind, duh.). Sometimes we get intuitions. Sometimes we are prevented from seeing the obvious. It’s a constant dialogue between self & soul, but only if one pays attention.
§2/8/18
[20] While most believers might profess that a separate, higher power (God) provides the true will & action—rather than the praying person in time—it makes no difference. If you believe in prayer, you probably believe that focused thoughts can change facts. The actor or means of manifestation is irrelevant.
Lesson 8: Gatherings
Images & Attributions (in order of appearance)
1. Banner: Rhiannon C. 2016
a) Jewel Mandala (2): D.C. Albion 1994
b) Albion Glyph: "Glad Day" or "The Dance of Albion," William Blake, c.1794
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/William_Blake_-_Albion_Rose_- _from_A_Large_Book_of_Designs_1793-6.jpg
2. Monty Python's Flying Circus, w/ John Cleese at desk in his signature segue between skits: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Zk-kQSz-Qv0/hqdefault.jpg
3. Monty Python's Flying Circus, w/ John Cleese at piano in the re-enactment of Sam Peckinpah's "Salad Days": http://listography.com/user/7715925213/list/9526015867/attachment/k
4. Photo of a photocopy of Scribe's raw shamanic direction, c. 1999
5. Photo of Albion's living room (in the final days of both the carpet & couch, in prep for wedding, 2018)
6. The knotted kite tail of the rainbow kite. (All these knots came on the maiden flight; none later.) 2018
7. Mickey Mouse as "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," Walt Disney, ©The Disney Company
8. Book Cover to Larry Siedentop's, Inventing theIndividual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Harvard Bellknap Press, 2014: 9780674979888-lg.jpg
9. St. Augustine of Hippo, attribruted to Gerard Seghershttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
commons/c/c2/Gerard_Seghers_%28attr%29_-_The_Four_Doctors_of_the_Western_Church%2C_Saint_Augustine_of_Hippo_%28354%E2%80%93430%29.jpg
10. The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (c. 1486) http://www.uffizi.org/img/artworks/botticelli-birth-venus.jpg
11. "Glad Day" or "The Dance of Albion," William Blake, c.1794 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/thumb/4/47/William_Blake_-_Albion_Rose_- _from_A_Large_Book_of_Designs_1793-6.jpg
12. William Blake's sketch of "The Man who Built the Pyramids". 220px-The_Man_who_Built_the_Pyramids_c1825_Linnell_after_Blake_contrast.jpg
13. Seeing Voices cover, by Oliver Sacks, 1989: https://www.oliversacks.com/os/wp-content/uploads/ 12.2014/01/6_seeing_low_res-1.jpg
[11]I must add here explicitly how I define a "realtime lesson": In Lesson [8] I will publish each of the nine sections separately & in sequence. Once published, I can't go back to edit; only to fix errors, housekeeping. Neither will I begin writing the next section until the one before is published.§
[22]If you think Scribe’s writing process is mind-bending, read up a bit on Srinivasa Ramanujan, who literally dreamed new mathematical theorems in such quantity he didn’t have time to prove them. A nightly miracle!
The Man who Built the Pyramids
Monty Python revisits Peckinpah's Salad Days
Albion's Magic Circle
[23] I also never planned my stories. They were simply illustrations I used at my liberal disposal, fingertip examples. Thus, idential classes offered at different hours would get the same course content, but different numbers & different stories. This often meant, however, that students in one class would then ask me to repeat what I’d told in another (that they’d heard at lunch, say). Usually, however, I could not comply. I’m not a stand-up performer (and not paid to entertain). My stories had to arise from natural context & flow, generally from specific questions of content.
[9]I know, it seems like hubris for me to assert this, but I do. Scribe is that brilliant. Therefore, I ask a technical question for fun only: Is it even possible to have hubris for someone other than oneself? Is there a word?
How I tend to react when assigned a new task:
Whenever former students returned to visit with me (an odd sample of odd kids, to be sure), no matter how many years had passed, the first thing they’d always tell me was how much they loved my “stories.”[21] And for years, primarily as a math teacher, I would (privately) wince at this, because I regarded class time as sacred, and I never would just “tell stories,” especially, God forbid, personal stories. I grew to understand, however, these stories were simply my personal means for presenting information. I tie everything together through narrative. For me, Euclid, Archimedes, Fermat, & Ramanujan (among countless others) were all amazing people who came up with some really cool math, where each has a story worth telling. For history, of course, is replete with examples of entertaining pure & applied math, perfect classroom illustrations—including violence & gossip & even dreams—by people who achieved Olympic status solely by using their superior minds.[22] A feat of athletic strength or conquest, I’d point out, can always be taken from you, especially as you get old. But to understand something eternal, like a Euclidean proof, that’s yours to keep. I always presented, therefore, a shit-ton of information never found on any standardized assessment—nor would it appear later on my own tests. And yet somehow all these extra facts & people & maths & histories made the actual testable material, the core math, easier to understand, or at least, less painful. My uncounted extras provided connections & unity to the material. For if the foundational structures could be grasped, then all the pieces just might fit into place. I never just “told stories.”
When teaching history itself, however, I had few qualms about employing my narrative gifts, for I’ve always viewed history as the ultimate story. So therefore, here upon considering my section title, A Different History—which was given first, before cracking any eggs—I note an incipient irony I feel the need to explore (a knot/clue to start from?):[23]
Normally today, in the modern world, especially in most American middle schools, “stories” have a single protagonist, an individual we tend to cheer for, a girl or boy coming of age. That is, we still live in the age of the Bildungsroman, whether novel, movie, or 3-d video game; and as a teacher following this thread, I often laid out problems by setting a stage: Enter, for example, little Carl Friedrich Gauss, math prodigy & hero (& smarter than his teacher!), or poor little Albert Einstein, who as a child was so dumb at language he could only speak two or three by age four (which, for the Swiss, is really quite slow). (In a different era Einstein probably would have sucked at beach volleyball, too, or chasing down wooly mammoths. Good thing he got born when he did!)
The irony is that the history I intend to tell here—or barely to highlight, as I run out of space—has no single protagonist, for the story spans too much time, the history of our race & more. But it is, in fact, the story of The Individual—no one in particular, but each of us who thinks he is one. I, the writer of these words, am an individual, but I realize also that I am an extreme outlier among humanity, as are most people I know. I was born my father’s son, raised on his carefully carved-out free island in suburbia, on the West Coast of the U.S.A. (indeed a half-hour’s drive from Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s)—one of the strangest, most extreme societies of all-time. Never mind the ticky-tacky custom houses to infinity, the identical residential blocks, block schools, & cut-out lawnscapes. At the core of this moment & movement in human history, The Individual has just emerged. For our very notion of The Individual is new, a modern invention still coming into being, suddenly viral—not something our ancestors considered at all. So I aim to outline the history of The Individual, and with it take on a related subject I’ve also long aspired to, a brief & audacious explanation of history itself.
The reason I never achieved my history of the Individual was that I was missing some vital pieces, indeed, the missing piece, which I pursued in vain. To my protracted surprise & frustration, the body of academic interest & scholarship on the subject proved remarkably absent, almost nonexistent: How & where & when specifically did the modern concept of The Individual arise? Surely Socrates was an individual, Plato too, right? No, not like us exactly; in fact, not like us at all. They were flyers with eternal souls; and thus yes, in that sense, they were individuals. But their attachments to their tribe—which, when gathered over centuries became city-states with common gods & blood & guilt & food & language, weighed inextricably on their own self-conceptions. Their social knots went so deep they could not be cut. Socrates was offered an open opportunity to escape execution, but calmly declined: Exile was not impossible for him, just foolish. To give up Athens would be to lose, nay deny, half of himself. Things are different now, really quite different.
Let me here offer my thesis only, without the full book of supporting facts & analyses. But first—I’m pleased to announce—there now is a book that contains much of what I searched for, my missing link. I finally found it: Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism by Larry Siedentop (2014). It’s so thorough, and Siedentop is such a good writer and knows his material so deeply; it’s a marvel. As soon as I opened it, in fact, I knew I’d found it, and so I read it incredibly slowly, eking out facts from each paragraph & taking 30 pages of notes, a record for me. Indeed, I finished the final paragraph as in a dream, closed the “book-notes” window on my laptop, and began composing an email—the very email, in fact, that I describe in Exhibit A. The true origin of Lesson [8], therefore, came not from my p-epiphany, but from Siedentop’s book.
So no details yet, just the news flash—Let it sink in: The “answer” to my decades-long quest lay (duh) in plain sight all along—how could it be otherwise? The rise of The Individual in modern consciousness—which, I suspect, might be the key to unlocking all of history itself—began in the Middle Ages in, of all places, the Catholic Church, which in the West, of course, was the only Church, and thus wielded great power. But what kind of power? What Siedentop calls “western liberalism,” began with the gradual separation of institutional power between Church & State, now a familiar distinction, but nowhere else visible in the world before. By 1100 A.D., the Church, which controlled little territory & could not fight wars to defend itself, had created a real sovereign power in the world, but not one carved from the existing (zero-sum) feudal order; rather, from an entirely new source, an abstract source of power, beyond time & space, beyond blood & land & law, which existed only because kings, slaves, & other sovereign entities bowed before it—the power over one’s soul.[24]
§2/22/18
The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli (c. 1486)
[Editor’s Note: I’ll return to my realtime 2018 lesson for the final ninth section, but Sections 6-8 as written then are inadequate now. Yes, they’re full of discovery and even a profound, confirming synchronicity which blew my mind. But in the excitement I had yet to digest fully the implications. Thus I rewrite the next three sections post-flight in 2020.]
6. Gatherings
I forget exactly what I was thinking in 2018 realtime when I reached this stretch in my writing, except that I was fully committed to the task: Step 78, Scribe. Consider my alternative, nonexistence. Jane & Don in no way exaggerated when they warned me, way back in ’96, that I stood “on the threshold of sheer darkness”—that for Scribe, Jane, and me specifically it was indeed fly or fall. And yet twenty-two years had elapsed, evaporated. I was retired now, old. What happened?
I recall our final sessions in 2005, visiting Scribe’s hometown with my family, and bringing my girls, ages 12 & 14, into Scribe’s much-lauded haunt, T. Bar & Restaurant, which seemed so funny then, since minors where we’re from are so absolutely forbidden from any such establishment. Now in 2018, after plumbing my soul each morning, day after day, I was spending all afternoon ripping out blackberry from my property, acres to tame, preparing for Deirdre’s summer wedding, ten months of killing labor. Meanwhile, Rhiannon, had been working overseas for years. I do not believe, dear Reader, that all human souls face such binary fates, fly or die. I believe, in fact, that most eternal souls on Earth (however many) are not flyers—also, sadly, that some flyers never find their souls. But since the three of us in Circle Cup were always slated for flight—had indeed chosen the Jewel Net under precisely these “contractual” terms—failing to emerge as a flyer in time would amount to failing my life altogether. So let me get deadly serious here & now: While time, space, biology, history, geology, and geography are indeed “myths” (because there is no ob), nonexistence is no myth.
So I was motivated then, to say the least, but still flying blind, still aiming toward a common noun, “gatherings,” I didn’t understand, hoping Albion would eventually fill me in. And of course the goddam cricket kept up screaming his alarm the whole time. Yes, when wrapped in the shawl of my magic circle warmth, I focused narrowly and intended hard; but an hour later, squatting to pull thick, thorny Himalayan stalks from my good earth—slowly, cumulatively ripping my groin & butt muscles till they gave out completely—all I heard were cricket self-doubts: This is hubris, delusion. You’re making up all this shit. There is no Santa Claus.
I feel the need at this time to mention momentum & stamina. Our Guide told me early on that I lacked such strength. Most people who’ve flown understand that in-the-moment momentum is key—that once you’re lifted by inspiration, you must go with the flow, follow to the finish, and please, don’t let there be an interruption. (Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” provides the nightmare exemplar par excellence.) But longer projects—book-length curricula, for instance—can’t work this way. How do you recapture that flow once you’ve exited? For me, it simply took work, time, & more work, twenty-odd years of impossible practice—along with the conscious, sacred insistence that despite the fact that my own existence languished on the brink, nothing in my life was more important than being a good parent. My daughters’ free & independent souls counted more than my own, the given fact foremost to my soul-contract. Thus, I stuck to my bargain and would do it again, but it almost cost me everything. Does it start to sink in then, dear Reader, why so few Jewel Net members in their limited lifespans dare choose to raise children?
And what was I gathering anyway? Pieces of life, pieces of knowledge, pieces of myself, but only Albion knew what I was assembling. And here’s where things go vague, though I documented my thoughts well enough that I can now present a strange list, one that did eventually frame a big picture, though in my tense 2018 present-tense it just seemed weird & random. The context of my soul-curriculum, of course, made sense to me, as well as my embrace of Western liberalism, the rise of the Individual in history. But the rest just seemed arbitrary, though, to my credit, I followed it nonetheless, turning my cricket doubts aside. I’m a ma’at man, in fact the master in our clan of mastery, which include masters of dreams & music & seeing trees as well. I choose wisely, or at least that’s the claim, though in sixty years of life I often questioned, even agonized over my odd choices. Scribe, for instance, was just born to read the classics, all of them, knowing many subjects as well as his professors did before college. I needed a broader base, to get my arms around the whole world, which is impossible of course, so my choices seemed haphazard, eclectic at best, ill-suited dilettantism in a world of professional specialists. I never considered a PhD, for example—but I was always a parent.
So in 2018 I reached Section 6 of this lesson and laid out my strange cards, much as Advisor did when practicing tarot. In fact, this is how Scribe “discovered” Advisor—in the corner of a Halloween party in 2003, giving readings of remarkable authority. Not until later would Scribe learn that Advisor had taken up the practice only the week before and that this party represented his very first efforts! Here’s my weird list, given to me by Albion as “homework” I’d have to complete before I could resume my lesson writing:
1) Finish reading [St. Augustine’s] Confessions once & for all
2) Reread Oliver Sack’s Seeing Voices (for a quick review of facts)
3) Work through the Lesson [7] homework myself, ready my own answer
4) Fully study again Scribe’s 2002 poem to me, “Possible Islands”
I could trace some of this, of course, and will at this time, for today, amazingly, I find that none of it was arbitrary. My choices, especially the handful of books I read after this lesson, five or six mind-blowers in a row, were all carefully sent to me by Albion, steering me to his target. While I always suspected so, it was not until I finally reached flight, in August 2018, that I perceived Albion’s script for me—indeed my entire life—could be so airtight & apparently necessary to my existence, including my delaying mistakes & awkwardness. And it’s frankly scary how perfectly “it all fits in retrospect.” (And yes, dear Reader, my cricket fully anticipates your skepticism here. We’ll just let the future facts speak for themselves.) Here’s what in 2018 I gathered from my gatherings:
1) Siedentop’s book The Origins of the Individual led me to Augustine,
who apparently is regarded by scholars to be the world’s first true
Individual. Why? Indeed I’d started Confessions three or four times in
my life before, but then always got sidetracked (for reasons outside this
masterwork, which I admired).
2) Oliver Sacks is my hero, but not so much for Seeing Voices, more for
his other books. Why was Albion steering me thither to this? I had no
idea.
3) Working through homework I’d assigned others is obvious: I practice
what I preach. I just never expected this particular assignment to trip
me up so. That is, my answer to “How do you measure your own
progress?” was “No pain, no gain,” but the more I looked at my lifelong
policy & practice, the more I found it outrageous, indefensible. I had no
answer.
4) “Possible Islands” I knew was Scribe’s poem to me, and this
penultimate albionspeak lesson, in which I was fully immersed,
Step 78, marked Scribe’s final collaboration in my Nine Men sequence.
Here’s how I introduced it at the time:
“Possible Islands” is one of Scribe’s postcard poems—in this case consisting
of 18 postcard cantos written & mailed on consecutive days.[25] “Possible Islands”
was written as Scribe’s single most self-revealing poem, the one that answered my
question to him after he’d become a flyer, Who are you now? The problem: I didn’t
understand his answer. I’m not good with poetry, where contemporary verse
especially is over my head most of the time. And my inability to grasp at least half
of Scribe’s work over the years worked a wedge between Scribe & me: I just couldn’t
fully comprehend & share Scribe’s boundless passion & life’s mission. Did I try hard
enough? And thus I never found out who Scribe had become—nor was he going to
explain it for me—since, indeed, he already had. Perhaps I might learn now.
A mess, huh? And this is the “cleaned up” version. But, dear Friend & Reader, this is what precisely a gathering is. As I’ve already stated, flight is not algorithmic, not derivative. Therefore, the gathering that precedes it can’t by itself contain the pattern of its metamorphosis. Among our tarot cards revealed, we might say, it takes a diviner (or Advisor) to interpret the signs, while other cards face-down remain to be turned in time. The sequence matters, time & timing.
Thus Scribe & I, twins in time, cards of the same deal, revealed ourselves a full twenty years apart, which in eternity amounts to nothing, but in time must be so carefully orchestrated. Not having heard from my friend, literally since our sessions’ end in 2005, I google his name to search for his poetry, his books & whereabouts. Is he dead? Is he publishing (as I am) under a pseudonym? I find nothing and cannot explain it. Books & more books of poetry await the sleeping world, which must not be ready for his words yet, a pure mind like his. He once told me—with confidence? in dire hope?—cream always rises to the surface. But I note, it takes a photon created in fusion at the center of the sun more than 100,000 years to reach its surface exit. What happened?
7. Andante
Let me document briefly here—for the Reader’s possible practical benefit—some considered speculation, though first I caution warily: There is much in this curriculum that I did not receive as revelation direct from the ouija board, so I have no “official” confirmation—most notably regarding my soul-vector geometry, which is my “creation” alone (though Descartes gets proper credit). And thus, frankly, my board friends might well admonish me if I’m later proved wrong. Yet every pilgrim climbing to the mountain shrine finds clues in time they leave for themselves, and I’m pretty sure my primal finding was intended by Albion all along, for the shoe fits. Besides, I’ve long found my aleph vectors a profoundly useful metaphor—speaking & working as an albion—and I can’t see any harm in them.
What I present now, however, I believe I do share with Scribe, perhaps with most of my k-tribe in modern times, though Scribe never focused as much on music as I do here. I believe (but can’t recall for sure) that Scribe, too, discovered music late in his own ascent, that he also used a single beautiful selection to guide him through each final step. But by then he’d developed such a baroque, intricate net of poetic influences that music just seemed icing on the cake. For me though, again lacking any conscious presence from my loving friends, acoustics probably matters more. Here’s my discovery:
In late spring of 2017 I was sitting & writing, like every morning, in my mom’s comfy-chair & magic circle, a few days into what would become Lesson 5, when suddenly, out of nowhere, music erupted—quiet at first, though I was jarred by the volume, intimate as I was with the coming crescendo. Immediately I put down my laptop for fear I’d soon drop it, the ascending chords building louder & louder, quickly overwhelming me like a rising tsunami. A score I held sacred had descended unsummoned: The Birth of Venus!—or rather, Ottorino Respighi’s orchestral reflection on Botticelli’s iconic painting—and not for a moment, not just a riff, but the whole amazing masterpiece from start to finish, filling the room, my whole house—except the stereo wasn’t on; no music was playing. My God it was awesome! When it finished, I resumed my writing, amazed & inspired; but that was hardly the end of it. In fact, for the next five or six days each time I returned to my circle, after hitting the bathroom or pouring some coffee, Venus on her half-shell descended and walloped me again. Wow.
For Lesson 7, the next one I wrote, synchronicity tagged my theme-song: I have several hundred music CDs, and often I pick five at a time—literally while closing my eyes—and then play these on a random rotation. I like to be surprised. Thus, when Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings came on at a key moment, I took notice, for it’s another all-time favorite of mine, though quite different from Venus. Of course I melted. Then Barber came on again, twice in a row, which shouldn’t happen on my CD player, but I’d pulled out a special CD I’d compiled & recorded myself, the one for my dad’s 2012 memorial. I’d forgotten where I’d even shelved that unique disc. Then the next song: Barber’s Adagio again, a third time. This was Robert Shaw’s choral arrangement on another CD. And so for the next four or five days & with the stereo silent I heard nothing else (except a measured dose of Shine on You Crazy Diamond).
No surprise then, a few months later when I next reached this lesson, I was ready & wondering, having selected some possible guide-song candidates and awaiting confirmation (twin tracks by Genesis in particular). Even so, at the time the music that most pounded within me was J.S. Bach’s Italian Concerto, the first movement allegro, which I’d been mangling for months for my piano lessons, a piece I’d known from childhood and loved deeply. Would it provide the soundtrack to my next lesson?
When “playing” piano (which exaggerates my ability), I have a policy of not listening to any recordings. I want to work out the motifs & details myself before comparing them to Glenn Gould’s perfect answer key. But in this case, seeking to confirm my suspicions, I jumped the gun and finally put it on. Was it the one? —No, I got it wrong. Hmm… There was—I felt strongly—some connection there, a clue of some kind, but not what I hoped, not the end I sought.
Fortunately my deep disquiet lasted the length of one movement only, for the instant the second movement began, to my surprise & abrupt delight, I found my guide-song. Because the first & third movement finale are such blazing masterpieces, I’d always overlooked this second movement andante. I’d known it my whole life (since my dad was such a huge Bach fan), but I’d always looked past it, seeing it not for itself, but as a conjunction between two strongly related movements. And yet this andante is actually quite long, not something Bach polished off lightly.
So I now love the andante as never before, soon playing it myself with a quantum of competence. I find it contemplative, and in my mind strangely linear, clearly forward moving, a walking meditation, not a point of creation like the birth of a goddess, nor circular, like Barber’s rising spiral chords, although my own music theory is too impoverished to guess why. I still aim to understand, for instance, how, aside from the F-major/D-minor twin key signatures, the second movement connects musically to the other two movements, for surely Bach didn’t just stick any ol’ andante between bread slices. What was Bach thinking? I can, however, say one thing now with some certainty: This second movement andante represents a gathering in musical form: It is Bach’s working/walking inspiration for the third movement fireworks: proper mindful preparation, measured forward progress, step by step by step.
How is this practical, you might ask? Mind you, I try hard not to contrive novel occult rituals, like baseball locker-room superstitions, to aid in my creative process. The magic circle works, as I’ve already stated, because a physical spatial enclosure creates a mental space of focused absence. Music, on the other hand, aids with continuity, especially over long-haul projects, where momentum is routinely interrupted. For years, indeed, I’d spend an hour or more of each writing-morning immersing myself by rereading what I wrote the day before just to recapture the flow & riverness of my prose. Music, though, remembers this momentum through a repeated ritual baptism, so I get flowing much faster. Content also must be considered.
“Oh one thing,” I quote Don’s signature postscript tease: I’ve had musical influences before, more often than not probably, but the vast majority have “presented” (in the medical sense) as background music, mood settings slow or fast. An athlete wearing earbuds might make use of such music to psych up for a game. Very rarely does my music fall like the fucking hammer of creation, as did Respighi’s Venus on her half-shell. I do remember, though, one other clear instance when music & moment & state of mind were utterly inseparable, inescapable, and, of all moments in my life, it comes already gathered in this lesson: The Fool on the Hill by The Beatles. For three hours flying I lived that song.
William Blake
The Table of Contents below is too long to display fully. If you click to the right of these Lessons, you'll see the primary source documents displayed under each. These original sessions are a world treasure.
9. Circumcision
It was not the project of the Catholic Church to invent Individuality, not in any temporal sense. The Individual was a byproduct of a Church with dual missions: 1) to spread the Gospel throughout the world, even unto the uncircumcised, and 2) to survive at all costs through a millennium of violence & anarchy. Here I speak not of the early Christian martyrs, whose crucial role in history is not in question, but to the dark stretch following the fall of the Roman empire in the West, a profound & prolonged period of social disintegration. The Church faced annihilation several times: at the hands of the Huns, Visigoths, and Vandals, as well as Christian armies. Augustine himself died in the Vandal siege of Hippo, his world in ashes. It’s hard to imagine some anonymous priest, then, armed with nothing but a crucifix & God’s written word, walking into an enemy encampment to convert its battle-hardened heathen warlord & make a brother of him. Something doesn’t quite add up here, at least not in my modern mind. What demonstration, what threat or light, could move an illiterate killer-in-his-prime to give up the gods of his brethren & bloodline and bow before a crucified criminal? Many, upon baptism, then turned their armies homeward on the eve of wargasm—for a bribe, of course, a negotiated settlement, but a mere fraction of the total booty. Eventually all tribes were converted. Soon they’d take up Latin & circumcision. These questions cannot be answered through history alone.
So let’s look at a related question: Am I circumcised in Heaven?
And yes (duh), my question is meant to sound absurd, but look—I kid you knot—in eternity, as I’ve already intimated, I do have a body, indeed the naked one that Blake painted in 1794. Consider, “eternity” is just my way of saying “all the ports you can get to,” and many of these would include physical ports & physical bodies, of my choice, of my projection. Unique among living men perhaps, I actually know what my eternal form looks like, and duh again, it looks like me, nearly exactly me in my prime, roughly thirty years ago. (Blake was a proven portrait artist.)[27] While I’m recognizable now, no, I don’t look that way still. My hair is white; things sag; shit, I’m old. But Albion doesn’t get old. He’s got that great eternal body that probably doesn’t need to shit or vomit either. If I chopped off my arm in life, I’d then get to walk around for twenty years without an arm. Albion’s eternal “body,” however, certainly doesn’t lose that arm. That is, because I don’t think of myself as a one-armed man, even if I lost my real arm, my self-image is too deeply ingrained to be reshaped.
So what about my penis? (Seriously, folks.) Like most American males my age (though I was born outside the country) I was circumcised quite young, at around six months, and I have no memory of the event. I do know my dick well, of course, and it has no foreskin—never has, never will—at least, not in my mind. And yes, for the record (wink wink), I have, indeed, taken my magnifying glass to Blake’s Glad Day portrait, but could make no concrete discernments, for indeed (nudge nudge—might it be relevant?) Blake literally saw & conceived of all humanity as eternally naked and was rather famous in his day for his open nudity at home with his wife (receiving visitors, etc.). I must, however, confess my ignorance of circumcision practices in 18th Century London.
So wait, I need to ask myself: Do I really want a foreskin?
Am I joking? Not entirely. Let me provide another example, a jewel I lift shamelessly from Oliver Sacks again, one of my favorites. It comes from Sacks’s immersion into deafness, language, and the brief history of a new unique culture, the world’s gathered deaf communities now on the brink of a global identity. As a neuroscientist, Sacks spends much of his book Seeing Voices (1989) analyzing the critical role that language plays in the development of cognitive thinking. History—indeed, identity itself—began only recently for the deaf, around 1750, when French schools for the deaf began teaching sign language. For countless human millennia before that—and still today in many corners of the world, the horror!—children who were born deaf never developed language and consequently became cognitively disabled, that is, deaf & truly dumb for life. (In contrast, people who lose their hearing after learning a language retain all normal cognitive processes.) Children have a wide window open to language acquisition, but that window closes with puberty—which we know brings breasts & fur & zits—but also vastly “prunes” the growing brain of its unused neural synapses. When language is absent, the genetic preexisting mental structures which avail themselves to language syntaxes & semantics (et al.) permanently get trashed, along with all the cognition language brings.
Consider what tragedy this implies in my paradigm: If you are what you think, imagine what you aren’t without language. To be clear, this is not just about losing Shakespeare or Facebook or “being unable to express yourself” when you have something vital to say, as one often feels in a foreign language. It’s having nothing to say, because no one is there; there is literally no place for a thought to spark. A dead man has more allotted gray matter. In particular, Sacks notes that language-less people (who are otherwise normal) have the greatest difficulty with abstraction, with understanding time (especially the future), and grammatically with interrogatives. What’s a question? is not a question such people can ask.
How does a person born with a disability imagine themself “whole”? I lost my foreskin at six months. Since then, of course, I have seen enough foreskins on other males to imagine them rather easily, but to fit myself in Heaven with a new one strikes me as silly, needless. (I note also Blake’s portrait shows me both clean-shaven & subject to haircuts.) Of course, if I could reattach what I barely know from flesh, why not try on some new & different attachments—a tail perhaps, or maybe wings? Why not sample physical experience within a new sensory modality entirely, like echolocation or compound vision? But if I do want wings, say, do I then have to imagine myself also with an altered skeletal frame & hollow bones? Would I have to invent each new sinew one at a time, along with the full blood chemistry which would allow me to breathe, let’s say, flying over the Himalayas? To what level of detail am I obliged to conceive my self-projection, especially when (as I assert) reality itself is just such a projection and is thus full of real holes & real cracks?
Let’s get now finally to the Lesson [7] homework, where I’ll briefly note, btw, that during my career, as a matter of needed classroom routine, I nearly always corrected & reviewed the previous night’s homework first, as my class opener, for many good & obvious reasons.[28] So throughout the writing of these Lesson [8] sections—over the weeks so far, motionless in my silk circle—I’ve been well aware of the timing, Albion’s deliberate delay, his synecdoche for my life. But it’s not for me to intervene as the writer & self in time, not my purview or prerogative. Just as Scribe, the poet, fully accepted all that the Shaman gathered before him—every scrap of every “Oxyrhyncus word-hoard”—I, the storytelling, game-guy, in turn & time among my own choice memories & metaphors, have likewise turned over Albion’s “playing cards as dealt” and now consider how such a “hand” might play.[29] There’s a joker, for instance, my Fool on the Hill madcap mind-trip, which as a wild card might meld wonderfully with certain Lesson [9] surprises, or it might well prove a high-risk dud, an unplayable card which could cost me this whole “game” if I’m left holding it in the end, for indeed, Albion & I agree there can be no loose ends: All cards gathered must be played.
How do you measure your own progress? When I asked this question of myself last lesson, I had no suspicion it would take me where I am now. My self-measure, as far as I could tell, had long been summed up in the classic American creed, No pain, no gain, where I’ve always seen myself in these terms largely as an athlete. This model says pain is neither good nor bad in itself; it’s an indicator only, information about one’s physical & existential tolerances for the self to heed or ignore. From an athlete’s perspective then, “pain” is something you play through—as opposed to “injury,” which, as an athlete, I also know too well. Note then, the whole premise begins with the unflattering assumption that I’m basically clueless, that I can’t even tell whether I’m making a maximal effort unless I push myself to pain. After all, if you’re not fighting the current, you’re going down.
Now I won’t go into details to refute the absurd “logic” behind No pain, no gain, but let’s get a few things straight: Pain does not measure effort, and effort doesn’t ensure success. But although I can shred the logic of my argument, I can’t pry myself away from it as “policy.” I have no second measure. Surely I measured my students & my own children as human beings foremost by their honest efforts, not by their achievement grades, for example. Thus, I think fondly of many hard-working C students, while many of my smartest talents (like me in my youth) mocked hard work, and slid through shamelessly on a wink & a prayer. I didn’t dislike these inveterate slackers who achieved with ease, especially as I knew many found discipline in other capacities like sports & music. But I really admired my students who worked hard, even, & perhaps especially, through pain. Is there a better measure of person than by how hard he or she tries? I am sure there must be, but I have yet to find it. Consider that neither Jesus nor the Buddha is revered as someone who “tried hard.” In fact, we believe the opposite to be true, because each of us already understands what is deep & good & immediately recognizable: True grace seems effortless.
As a parent & teacher, I consciously put children through lots of pain—daily, scheduled pain in many cases—knowing that their pain would be far worse in the future if I didn’t stay right with them, on top of them if necessary: An American child who enters high school today without adequate fraction skills will likely suffer academic struggles for years to come, missing out on many opportunities, particularly college, and might well cost the tax-payers a fortune down the road (in crime, addiction, poor health, stupid voting, etc.) But this calculation—which I kept at the forefront of my consciousness as I administered my painful lessons—has nothing to do with effort; it’s about attaining a required minimum threshold of knowledge for survival. In 2018 America it doesn’t matter how you acquire fractions, you just have to have them. In a different era, I might have taught stone chipping or arrow fletching. And of course, I can measure your fraction progress.
How do you measure your own progress? depends entirely on one’s identity. What’s harder to understand is identity itself. Who is measuring whom? In Lesson [7] I defined human souls as vectors, ones that leap from point to point directly, while our minds generate metaphors that project continuity. Thus, in this model if I want to measure my progress, I simply compare the coordinates of two points, Here & There, and their difference measures the absence in between. But first I need to establish the context (or place) in which this flight is to be enacted, so I can ascertain which of my many selves (figure) to instill & install there. That is, because there are indeed many different faces I could don at any given starting point, I want to present the me who is best suited to the given task. The writer of these words, for example, is not the same man as the guy who will cook dinner later this evening. Each gathers very different thoughts and thus progresses by different measures—one through his prose, one through food. To be clear, however, while I’m a decent cook, good enough even to fly on occasion, I do not particularly score my life by my culinary prowess, whereas I identify strongly with my writing. I care enough to improve in my chosen craft that my writing becomes a measure of my present life—even though I lack the critical (literary) capacity to judge my own work. (I don’t claim this is reasonable, just that it is.)
My writing is not me, of course; I’m more than my words. But words, I sense, belong to my unique personal future, so I care now, whereas other life measures (parenting, teaching, soccer, etc…), now conceived & consigned as past lessons, are cached as treasured memories. I hold the kite string to recall these memories when needed, and I try to keep these lines well kempt, but meanwhile, in present tense I get to work. My vector, like some probing radar dish, seeks a different target, reorients itself, then accepts its new assignment, one that absently aches to be called the next me & all the mind that that assumes. I expect to be “different” wherever I wind up, like a deaf-mute with an idea of language reaching for expression. Never mind that I can’t conceive what I’m not yet. If I can shine the light of my mind upon the idea of what I seek, mind upon mind, then maybe there can be an awakening in act & fact as well, where mere implication may be wink enough to shoot the gap. For as Wittgenstein noted, [a word] cannot be the name of something private. Once invented, language must be shared.
I will return to Sacks in Lesson [9] because the awakening he describes in Seeing Voices is manifold: Until the teaching of sign—which began roughly contemporaneous with the French & American Revolutions (and Blake)—deaf people couldn’t ask questions or see themselves in the abstract. Perhaps, we might hazard, they could envision themselves with foreskins, concrete & tactile, but how could they conceive of themselves as thinking beings? (Testimonials indicate they could not.) And then a miracle, something unknown to the world before: a new language, sign. Do we call this technology, or is it magic? People who are born deaf today may reach fully into themselves by way of a mind they form by reaching out to others (exactly as hearing people). And here’s the kicker—why Albion has steered me via Sacks to this image now, this particular awakening: Once sign unlocked cognition in human history, bringing fire to the minds of deaf individuals, then merely two centuries later today’s gathered deaf persons, having just attained a critical mass of members & the means to interact, have flowered into their own world culture. As with most identified peoples, the foundation of this culture is language, but unique to the world this new people knows no geographic homeland, no common ethnicity nor religion nor knotted tribal history. While sign is not a universal language, it is primal enough that deaf people from different parts of the world can quickly communicate with each other, much faster than people in spoken languages (days vs. months). And of course in signing they find that their experiences & measures as deaf people, regardless of birth culture, are as strong a bond as any of blood & tribe. I believe this new culture will be Albion’s model in Lesson [9].
Now here’s the homework: Let’s recall Kurt Vonnegut’s earliest description of a karass. (Cat's Cradle, p. 12)
“… in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, “Man created the checkerboard;
God created the karass.’ By that he means that a karass ignores national,
institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.”
Vonnegut, of course, loves to joke. But this image, which he presents in the defining opening paragraphs of his masterpiece, isn’t especially funny. Yes, we get the point: Nation-states & most institutions are circumstantial & artificial and thus represent tribal clumps of souls only, not real. But a checkerboard? What game is Vonnegut playing? For that matter, what kind of game is cat's cradle?
§4/5/18
Hail aliah
"And now for something…"
[14] i.e., my elastic clause
[27] ago = I urge, act…
agito = I consider, pursue…
facio = I do, build, make…
factito = I practice
[28] In all my math classes (as well as most others) I gave homework 179 of 180 school days, a significant amount most nights, but where students who worked hard in class would finish or come close. Ideally, half my class time was spent at the board presenting, half among desks helping kids with questions. Ideally also, I would “hit” every student, check & score every homework on the spot giving & getting real feedback day after day. And in classes of 25 students or less I generally could manage all of this. I routinely had classes over 30, however.
[21] at which point many would insist on telling me “my” stories
[15 ]In the realtime act of writing the paragraph above, I suddenly realize a pretty remarkable statistic: Literally every time I’ve rolled out this kite I’ve expected magic. And it’s certainly the case that I’ve achieved it nearly every time. (Oh God, here comes another narrative…)
[8]To be clear, these p-dreams were sent by the higher Scribe, not Josef, who as dream-master doesn't just "feed us" our dreams. He teaches us how to dream on our own.
[3] “FIND OUT FIND OUT,” was among our Guide’s earliest exhortations to us, also among our earliest puns. (Session 4§)
[29] Most all of what’s left of Sappho’s poetry comes from some meager scraps gathered from a cache at Oxyrhnchus. Thus, “Oxyrhnchus” symbolizes Scribe’s own careful “gathering” in Possible Islands; also known as, his trove of “impressions.” (An impressionist painter, however, would probably would call his gathering his palette.)
[2] At the risk of revealing, I must recall here how tickled I was when I learned from my college’s alumni magazine that my all-time favorite professor, Stephen Erickson, who—strangely sheltered from popular culture to the extent that he knew nothing of Monty Python—was contacted by John Cleese over his academic writings (probably regarding Heidegger & post-modernism). The two hit it off so famously they even teamed up to jointly teach a few philosophy courses! There are few things in life I envy, but I so wish I could have attended these lessons.
[5]see end of section (not sidebar)
[10]Scribe's social circles lie in stark contrast to me, my family, & nearly all my friends—teachers married to teachers.
[1] a lesson in realtime:
[7] Here, to be clear, I must distinguish between design and plan. Scribe & I have been repeatedly advised (even admonished) not to plan. A design, then, I define as formal structure only, regardless of content, while a plan lays out substance. A design could be a formula. A plan fills in the variables with specific data.
albionspeak: a draught of language
Lesson 8: Gatherings [1]
1. Something Different
When I signed off on Lesson [7] last November, I promised something different for Lesson [8]—what, in real time sitting at my computer, I commence here & now, January 22, 2018. Recall, the Nine Men curriculum is difficult precisely because each step reaches for something different & further from anything the apprentice has tried before, or even considered feasible. Thus, every task is foreign & intimidating, even if it’s just another essay or adventure abroad or, in Scribe’s case especially, yet another poem. To be precise, something manifest & specified in the content or formal structure or method of reception must be measurably different. But how different? Different how?
One idea I toyed with was to turn this task into something Monty Pythonesque, with stiff-Brit John Cleese posted at his signature office desk surrounded by an English landscape: “And now for something completely different…” (italics mine) But I resist the temptation. There’s something too crazy & cozy and all-too tribal liberal about such fun (wink wink smug nudge). Besides, as John Cleese can teach you—a trained philosopher in his own right—something that is completely different is something we can’t make sense of, something we can’t use.[2] (Remember my Puddle of Slime dream?) Python is brilliant, yes, but here I must tighten my chariot reigns lest Phaethon’s horses launch me laughing to the sun completely. I steer the laser middle path, ma’at, balancing fun with terror, flight against family & forsaken absence, transformation or nonexistence, where progress, still for a time, is scored in measured driblets. I remain fearful for my own mind and must.
So with a wink of incredulity here’s my new immediate challenge—Albion’s first pitch curve-ball-inside to knock me off balance: Gatherings is not yet a word in my karass vocabulary. I’ve just announced my next lesson, and I have no idea what my title means. I guess I have to “find out.”[3] Can I tease its definition from emanations in the ouija archives, like a scrivening librarian in his labyrinths? Can I derive it from Albion’s Holy Grail paradigm & universal algebra? Or will I have to rip it ripe & heavy from my womb, like a chainsaw C-section I perform on myself à la Sam Peckinpah? Flight for me is a blind leap foremost, preceded by anxiety.
Blind, however, does not mean senseless. It’s an absence that makes room for the other senses to leap in: Listen. Feel, smell, & taste the wind, the world we assume. Which way is down? And beyond our senses we need, of course, our minds to guide us, intelligence, initially just to stabilize ourselves and get used to our dark surroundings. For in any lesson—as in any game of existence on any port or planet—there are rules. Breathe. There should be time to sniff around. What are the rules here? Which way is up? What skill sets & measures are required to succeed? Which face should you don to best apply these skills? A five-year-old Jane-face, for example, is perfect for certain settings, early lessons. Here in Albion’s classroom though, some age & education are probably requisite: You need to think both critically & abstractly and draw upon a modest amalgam of human experience (“eloquence & mercury”), both from your own well, as well as history’s finest flyers—not too much, I hope. Humility might prove helpful,
too…[4]
And perhaps rather quickly we find ourselves already at our first gathering point: a staging area for the d-days to come. As Don told us with respect to tiger-swallowing (i.e., assuming one’s own power): In this life-or-death struggle, while we cannot choose the place where we face our tiger (i.e., the Forest), we may choose the timing. (“That would be half the battle, no?”) Gatherings, then, defines the calm before the leap, a point of contemplation & packing, not quite the countdown. I sense a King among his men on the eve of epoch—in disguise, of course, since he must not only gauge their wills & raise their spirits, he must personally inventory every fucking object in the assembled gathering. (A control freak, he dare not delegate or leave to doubt!) The kitchen sink, therefore, will need to stay behind on this journey, as will, indeed, nearly all of the monumental shrine—alas. Meanwhile, those nifty solar sails, which will soon unfurl to the size of fifty football fields, first must fold into a canister no bigger than my cranium.
Now notice Albion’s brilliance here in the task’s formal design. (I, the live writer, can schizophrenically applaud, for I take no credit): By dropping the title, Gatherings, on me uninformed & unprepared, Albion prods me to pursue this Lesson [8] on-the-fly. Now I blog extemporaneously, in realtime—think & scrape & speculate in the dark, not knowing the syllabus in advance, possessing neither answer key nor text book, and thereby modeling for the student reader a process of a true spiritual path. If my writing illuminates, it will expose both my insights & character flaws. I expect red herring goose chases & dead-end spiral staircases and would not have it otherwise. What makes this path “true” is that I’m truly invested in it. It’s not practice for some future performance, and I will feel pain as real—not like a defeated video avatar, who regenerates a limb or head with a mouse click. I care. Also, I don’t know where this is going. If I knew, it would not be discovery. So it’s a true exercise of free will, and I can fail. But if I am successful in the coming months & pages, both as a thinking seeker & author of intelligible prose—even if I fail myself existentially—highlighting my path might prove invaluable to the reader’s own pursuit. Please, dear Reader, learn from my mistakes; above all, don’t mistake my path for yours. This is not religion. Find your own path.
§1/24/18
2. More Scribal History & Rules [5]
Before I dig too deeply into the meaning of the word “gatherings,” it’s only fair that the reader be treated to all that I know on the subject—at this point in time—which is minimal, various, and disconnected. I offer initially, then, a gathering as defined above, a staging area, where I lay all my gathered cards on the table, shuffle them around a bit, and examine the connections that arise. More important, however, Albion employs this stocktaking moment as a pedagogical device: It’s an open invitation to let the reader start where I start, analyze the clues & connections as I uncover them, and work alongside me through this puzzle toward solution. You might well beat me to the targeted learning-revelation—that is, if my writing is understandable & exhaustive—for I have a habit of missing the obvious, including the objects/clues I’ve left for myself.
Sticking with this vein, let me invoke another old saying in the karass:
START FROM WHERE YOU ARE
AID WILL COME FROM ABOVE [S. 88, 2004]
So let’s start, then, dear Reader, with the relevant history, beginning with Exhibit A, the immediate clue/epiphany that kick-started this essay. Prior to this moment, in fact, I had planned not to begin. Albion, who usually reaches me through clairaudience, in this event was quicker & more disparate in his directive:
A) Sitting at my computer, I had just typed an email catching up with a
friend, in which, among other things, I told her clearly I would not begin
Lesson [8] for many months, possibly not until after the summer’s wedding. I
was in happy research mode, I said, full of catch-up reading & study enthusiasm
following a career’s extended exhaustion & dearth. No plan.
I pressed the send button, logged out, and in a continuous, fluid motion,
opened a new document window, and typed,
“Lesson [8]: Gatherings
“1. Something Different”
I did not hear these words acoustically and didn’t even realize I had
“started writing” until I read what I’d typed and bowed, with a wink & a grin
& a gulp, to Albion’s directive. I did hear, however—repeatedly, ad nauseam—
“And now for something completely different…” and immediately located
John Cleese’s picture in the upper-right corner. I treat this image more as a
warning & a boundary, however, than as a beacon, for as you can see, I am prone
to flights of fancy (lunacy?) knotted with hyperbole. As in dreams, I need to
avoid all lures.
The only other piece of information in this bullet-epiphany came as an
embedded knowledge. As soon as I read what I’d typed, I knew what made
this lesson different was its blind extemporaneous nature, though it took some
time for me to trace how I knew this.[6] The knowledge strangely came
attached to my typing, not to the content of what I’d typed. That is, Albion
has sent me many tasks over the years, including singleton words that have
prompted years of exploration. But the word “gatherings” does not (to my
knowledge) necessitate a realtime blog. However, the way I typed it out, an
action in physical space & time, communicated this process to me both
graphically & kinesthetically. I didn’t just find my topic; I found myself in
motion. I’d already started.
B) Exhibit B follows conceptually from A, or rather the other way around,
for I have at my fingertips plenty of precedents & antecedents to the curious
circumstances I’ve offered so far, far too many to enumerate. The most obvious
one, however, concerns Scribe’s own rigorous & baroque process of writing.
Recall, Scribe’s meteoric Nine Men ascent began the moment he stopped
planning his poems. It still doesn’t seem possible: One day Scribe awoke and
began, without any plan or conscious foreknowledge, a tight world-class poem
of 3456 lines. He started, and he never looked back. No planning, no next-day
editing.
Let me now add a bit more to Scribe’s history, but with a delicate
proviso: I would not include Scribe’s private poetic process in this public
website if I didn’t think it pedagogically necessary. Scribe’s poetry speaks for
itself, and it will inspire generations long after we are all gone. That his cantos
were each connected to, or guided by, well, a dead person, or better, an alien
“demon,” to say the least, might distract some (dim) readers from Scribe’s art.
On the other hand, Scribe himself has benefitted enormously from knowing
the writing habits & inspirations of people like Blake, Keats, Mozart, and
Bertrand Russell, who apparently wrote out whole books of mathematics &
philosophy & beautiful atheism in unblemished longhand, no corrections.
Without James Merrill’s own published ouija work, we might never have
started. So a little more history:
After finishing his first four Men, (4 x 9 = ) 36 canto steps which
equaled a whole book, Scribe spent the next nine steps (Don presiding)
experimenting with new poetic forms & modes of thought. This stretch marked
for Scribe a transitional interlude; for just as I am an albion and Scribe is a
scribe—which name our respective roles in the Jewel Net—Don is our
librarian, whose special gift of branchingness unlocked this broad array of
artistic possibilities. While each poem still followed the same process, they
were not mutually connected (couldn’t be), and a few even, Scribe judged
without disappointment, were ultimately not good enough for publishing.
Others were, of course—his last poem especially, which suggested, in turn, a
formal design for Scribe’s next large project.[7]
Scribe’s last four men, then, starting with the last of his Don-poems,
became a single book of 37 poems (ranging from 2 to 6 cantos each). Same
process still, only deepened & expanded &…well, it can only be told, not
explained. What I describe below, then, presents the sum of what was added
to Scribe’s process, one element at a time, until the final few poems included
all these elements:
As soon as Scribe completed a poem—which for him also completed
another step on his Nine Men pyramid— his hard-won triumph would melt
away immediately, mere hours, as his flying/shooting meteor mind, now
discharged, faded & flatlined in absence. Once again Scribe was prevented
from doing anything creative or poetry-related—nothing even that might be
directed toward a distant future project—nothing. This absence would not
end until Scribe had had the Dream, a certain species of dream he coined
“p-dreams,” for poetry- or project-dreams (as opposed to k-, l-, or o-dreams).[8]
A p-dream is unlike any other, although it’s a bit in the same vein as my little
epiphany above (A): It is utterly minimal—information only, which is strictly
encoded. There’s no narrative, no situation, nothing in the dream except what’s
needed. Lucidity is not required. Scribe’s p-dreams encoded the following,
generally in a single visual image:
1. The indigenous culture, era, & geographic homeland represented
2. The precise poetic form, which was never repeated: strictly
syllabics, neither free nor blank verse, w/ the number of cantos
(2-6) already given from the project format
a. the length & number of stanzas per canto
b. the number of syllables in each line (which differed)
c. the formal symmetrical arrangement of the cantos
3. An animal totem or aura associated with the land & people
4. Something specific to suggest a narrative (or lack of one)
C) Released then, like a spring or a sprinter from his starting blocks,
Scribe would spend the next week or two after his p-dream immersing himself
in the vast C-Floor (“seafloor”) anthropology section of his university library,
learning everything about his newly-assigned human culture, accessing all the
primary source materials & academic papers that pertained. —Which, with
Scribe’s Funes-like brain, actually would make him a bit of an overnight
expert in such a narrow academic field.[9] Scribe’s research, however, was for
gathering only, never planning, not even the general guidelines for a poem,
which by design were left completely outside his control. Once more Scribe
had to wait, this time for the Shaman—not a member of the Jewel Net & not
some p.c. mystic guru—just a guy from 'Jersey, someone Scribe had known for
two or three years, a thinking drinking friend, whose career as a investigative
journalist made him only randomly available.
Never mind how this amazing ritual got started—minimally, at first
by odd accident, then with gradual increases. Here’s how it wound up: At
some point Scribe would contact the Shaman to set up a meeting for around a
week later (more absence). Always over dinner? Same restaurant, same table?
I know the process formally began with good food & the same $30 bottle of
wine, after which Scribe then methodically laid out for the Shaman his recent
p-dream and all that he had learned from it.
Sit back then & wait for it—a rumble, stumbling steps at first, maybe
a clarifying question from the Shaman, pointing to a spot on the poem’s
skeleton-grid before him, devoid of words. Scribe would ready his paper
& pencil. The Shaman, feeling the wine, would then subtly shift his tone,
from one asking questions to one supplying answers: (pointing to an open
stanza) “Here is where your protagonist must meet with an unforeseen
obstacle, not of her making, which will divert her path and cause her pain.
And this is where, fourteen years later, she accepts the obstacle as a gift.”
(I offer my own made-up words here, not thinking of any single poem, but
reconstructed as I recall their spirit.) By the last few poems, it was all Scribe
could do just to keep up with the deluge of content downloaded. The photo
below is one sample artifact. Notice how jamb-packed, how all-over this is.
Now also recall, Scribe by this time was a master ouija transcriber, someone
who could write neatly at lightning speeds without following his hand. This
represents an uncapped gusher of material.
St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
[26]This is not my first literary clue, but such clues, especially from an ancient classic involving Latin conjugating, well, this is so Scribe…
[18]I’m comically alluding here to one of my all-time favorite commercial fuck-ups (pre-Trump & #metoo), the talking Barbie doll who, among other inane social cliches, declared, “Math class is difficult!” (italics clear from Barbie’s helpless nasal whining)—at which point the AAUW stepped forward to make the correction.
[27]Indeed, at parties Blake would sketch people with great quickness, ease, and, accuracy. And then, at those same parties, he’d go on to sketch dead people. Those watching him stated that Blake looked in every manner as if he were drawing someone present who occupied a physical space—in a chair perhaps. That is, his visions were 3-d. Thus, we can now assert, “the man who built the Pyramids” apparently had a very big nose, and Blake’s painting Glad Day hardly seems extraordinary.
[24] The two great exemplars from the period: (German) Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV in 1077 waited in his bare feet for three days in the mountain snow outside Canossa, Italy, until Pope Gregory VII absolved his papal excommunication. (Henry would eventually be excommunicated five times by three different popes.) And later, Henry II of England in 1170 would undergo public flogging to atone for his ambiguous role in the notorious murder of St. Thomas à Becket (who, as a fun personal footnote, was slain by my own blood ancestor, Baron William de Tracy. Why not personalize it?)
[25]Scribe was well aware that his postcards rarely arrived in perfect sequential order. Once mailed, they were out of his physical hands and conceived as form only. In fact, the imperfections of the U.S. Postal Service were included deliberately as a chance factor in this poetic process, and upon which Scribe often reflected & deliberated in realtime. Postcards, of course, inspire dialogue, I & thou. I, too, am a letter-writer, believing deeply my own writing best flows through second-person singular.
- Wish You Were Here
[19]Indeed, while working & without needing to ask, Scribe was silently served his staggered lattes & lagers free of charge in exchange for his beautiful calligraphy on the daily menu boards, many different brews. He did pay for his food.
[12]Notice the division of roles between soul & self. Albion can influence me & affect me in numerous ways. He sends me thoughts & clues & trials. But the self enacts in time. I, the writer in time, identify with my will§.
Innuendo
1.
Here, underneath
know where we are talking
making and settling scores. . .
No, we don’t remember,
but we will
2.
Do you hear us?
Are we together?
Am I mad?
“Why don’t we just admit it?”
“Admit what?”
“You know— the secret.”
(smiling) “What secret?”
the undertow, where we are
talking with all of us
open for a moment to see
playing ambiguous language games
telling the stories of the world
in our lives, all of our lives. . . .
oh there’s a lot of unwrapping
cellophane & string, cellophane & string
but the Gift is worthwhile
3.
You enter my mind like a rape
isn’t that right?
vice-versa
verse visa
4.
Don’t you hear us?
Aren’t we together?
Am I the one who. . . ?
Believing and remembering
Understanding undercurrents
Does all of us know?
5.
Can’t we embrace?
—touch the moment
align?
Can we face the face
utter the unspeakable?
(just smiling)
7/12/82
8. Cogo Ergo Sum
From Confessions, by St. Augustine, Book X, 11 (all)[26]
"From this we can conclude that learning these facts [the sum
of what we’ve learned in life], which do not reach our minds as images
by means of the senses but are recognized by us in our minds, without
images, as they actually are, is simply a process of thought by which
we gather together things, which, although they are muddled and
confused, are already contained in the memory. When we give them
our attention, we see to it that these facts, which have been lying
scattered and unheeded, are placed ready to hand, so that they are
easily forthcoming once we have grown used to them. My memory
holds a great number of facts of this sort, things which I have already
discovered and, as I have said, placed ready to hand. This is what is
meant by saying that we have learnt them and know them. If, for a
short space of time, I cease to give them my attention, they sink back
and recede again into the more remote cells of my memory, so that I
have to think them out again, like a fresh set of acts, if I am to know
them. I have to shepherd them out again from their own lairs, for
there is no other place where they have gone. In other words, once
they have been dispersed, I have to collect them again, and this is the
derivation of the word cogitare, which means to think or to collect
one’s thoughts. For in Latin the word cogo, meaning I assemble or
I collect [also, I gather] is related to cogito, which means I think,
in the same way as ago is related to agito or facio to factito.[27] But
the word cogito is restricted to the function of the mind. It is correctly
used only of what is assembled in the mind, not what is assembled
elsewhere.”
Penguin Classics, translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin, 1961, p. 218
I read these words for the first time ever on March 13, 2018 and consider this discovery one of the bigger confirming “miracles” in my life. Section 8 then, as written at the time, in essence covers what I say here now, but my efforts then to document my mind-blown moment were not matched by my writing. I had finally gathered all the pieces, but I still didn’t have the big picture. Why is this artifact so “big”?
Foremost, Albion’s assigned task for me, dropped on me from nowhere in Section 1, was to discover—in the realtime writing of this lesson—the meaning of the word “gatherings.” And, as I hope you can see, dear Reader, I made a good-faith effort: A gathering gathers the clues & pieces one needs before flight. These pieces, however, always leave the gatherer scratching their head, unsatisfied, wondering what & why & WTF the point was, because the gathered pieces can’t speak for themselves. They can hint at the nature of what follows, just as a monarch caterpillar includes the DNA of the coming butterfly, but no one can imagine the outcome. Flight, a metamorphosis, is by nature a complete mystery.
Now, as an aside here, let me tie up some loose ends: The Nine Men, as well as this albionspeak curriculum, is built around its triads, which, in turn, are each likewise fashioned around the two absences between a triad’s three steps. This pedagogical structure follows human ontology: Human souls are discontinuous, binary beings—simple as that. We can assemble a world, immerse ourselves within it, live, love, and die; but we cannot in a single moment effectively divide our attentions among multiple worlds (as daimones absolutely do). But if we remain within our single world—no matter how incredible it is or how much we can derive from its knowledge—we end. This is Charybdis, a black hole. Those who remain within their engorged world—when viewed from a distant peak outside of it—would see their world shrinking, repeating over & over the same incredible shit, but bit by bit the pieces drop out, and get lost—at first just the particulates of no concern, nonessential details—but in this spiraling “eternal recurrence” the tape loops corrupts and starts skipping bigger & bigger events & moments & pieces. The orbit around Charybdis gets smaller, decays. (Donald Trump is a very small man.) This is a mystical overview, of course, but I’ve witnessed its physical analogue personally in my own parents, as my mom lapsed into Alzheimer’s and my dad with Parkinson’s desperately read in five foreign languages daily, while his own precious English left him word by word and piece by piece in pieces.
So we have to get out, move from one world aleph point to a second point, from Here to There. Fly or die. And we can’t jump just anywhere. We must connect with others, share worlds that are shareable & comprehensible to us, as most worlds simply shatter a human mind, splatter us onto Scylla-Infinity. A gathering of random worlds, if even we could make sense of them, ultimately just turns us & returns us to chaos itself, indistinguishable from the roiling river. It is absolutely good, then, that we must become ourselves. And fortunately, there are others to aid us, billions in each karass who, tied to an eternal center, can help us draw the line from Here to Identity, that distant eternal part of us, our soul, past all visible horizons. But it takes leaps & steps. Flyers are better at this due to natural ability, but we all face the same challenge.
Thus, among the Nine steps the two absences between the triads mark major leaps of faith & flight: The first, I’ve said, can be thought of as a change of place, from Home to School, where new rules are given and we, running the role-play simulation, learn our given lessons. The second leap, from School to Vocation, marks a change of face or figure. The first leap takes us away, as far as we can go; the second changes us personally forever. But within each triad there are little gaps, bunny-hops, and each separate triad, within Home & School & Vocation, is packaged like the rest:
The first step within a triad is arrival. Because a leap always takes energy/effort, when you arrive you need a full stop/step to get your bearings & rest. Once you’ve recovered, however, the second step, is but a small hop away and marks the discovery of your new home base. You’ve come all this way, for what purpose? What are you supposed to learn here? Thus the second step in a triad is one that might take a long time, years. School is no trivial place, and there may be many valuable lessons. But ultimately School, like any port is itself just a point, not the desired end anyway. Vocation lies beyond a bigger gap, the leap of metamorphosis, and it takes a full step just to prepare for this transformational flight. Within any triad, then, the third step is your gathering place, the step where—for God knows what reason—you discover clues & lay out pieces & review your gathered tarot cards. And you can’t know why, although you can ask for advice and learn to follow suit.
Thus you can ask for & expect confirmation. Some flyers, I’m sure—musicians & athletes perhaps—get all the confirmation they need from their results. But others of us, like albions trying to make sense of many worlds at once—as a unity compressed into a single all-encompassing aleph point—must live within our doubts. It is necessary & proper to question our insights, for deluding ourselves is easy. So the cricket does indeed serve a purpose, and we dare not disconnect our smoke alarm completely. (The world is in flames!) Thus Albion, in this particular lesson, sent me on what might have been a wild goose chase, except I demanded, most reasonably, overt confirmation, knowing he’d know how to convince me. My Albion dialogues are based entirely on such give-&-take, as I, the writing self in time, refuse to be taken for a stooge, a simpleton. I am a thinker, and Albion must earn my trust. And recall, in Section 2 of this lesson I set my conditions, just as I did for each dialogue.
So the miracle above, Augustine’s definition of a gathering, marks a huge, magic piece of my confirmation. First recognize, I did not discover this knowledge while looking for it explicitly. I was sent to Augustine to follow up on my studies of the Individual, not at all for “gatherings.” I in no way connected these and was taken completely by surprise. Second, Augustine gives me the goddam etymology of “cogere” = “to gather”—a word I did not know—via “cogitare”= “to think,” which I knew from Descartes and had written about specifically in Lesson 2 (“cogito ergo sum”). Finally, discovering clues by way of close-reading the classics is so much more a Scribe-thing (wink wink). I am no scholar. Scribe’s official studies, by the way, were in French, not Latin per se, but, as I’ve already recounted, he translated Virgil’s book-length Georgics on the side, just for fun. Indeed, Scribe discovered Don himself through his careful readings, while I mostly looked on, asking my questions & laying down the metaphysics. Need I repeat it? This entire Nine Men lesson marked my final collaboration with Scribe.
Thus, finally, an anxious datum: Right now it’s May 1, 2020, still quite early, I expect, in this historic coronavirus pandemic, where I myself almost certainly was among the first to catch & pass the disease. (Months later I still have strange minor symptoms, though I have no way to confirm this through testing.) As I edit & revise my website into book-form & back again, rewriting several sections and, in this lesson, revisiting with Scribe specifically, yet another beloved guide-song blossomed unsummoned, beautiful but ominous—the first two movements of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem. I hope & pray that Scribe at the country’s tragic epicenter outlasts this epic pestilence.