two fish

 
 
depression
may be defined as
an experience of ‘loss of significance’
that there is no there there
- rather different than
     say
meaninglessness

in that meaninglessness impends with significance
depression seems a difficult state or zone precisely for
its psychological sense (or landscape)
of no landscape.
there is no there there means
there is nothing to work with - the psyche
works with and through images - not necessarily
visual, but made of substances
here there are none.

                   

a word for depression might be anomie
taking a process approach
in looking at depression -
as depression is
at times extreme suffering,
most extreme pain -
it’s worth working towards an answer - from within
the landscape of depression (a non-landscape)

    – even in a black hole, there remains
the imprint of the falling, and it’s this falling
that may have set the gravity well
in motion

                   

following this logic, one of the psychological
approaches to depression works with the question
of triggers. To try to think or find the beginning of the feeling
of being depressed, and look to what was happening
or happened just around the time before that
– it may have
been incidental thoughts, may have been
a day of suck-off work a day
of freedom

the important thing is not to judge but just
to jot – so, a diary or journal is useful,
because it’s not nearly so useful to interpret later
(a slippery business) as to look back and see
the thing happening in writing,
and to write the transits out.
In the above,
what may or may not be found
is that there are
absolutely real and important concerns
that are triggers;
if these are known precisely these can be addressed.
these concerns do not cause depression, but, as mentioned
are triggers – this is one notion.

                   

if the cause of depression
remains mysterious, still one can usually find
triggers, if observing carefully, in a workable manner
without aggression.

Another mode of psychological thought concerning depression
is related to emotional process
there is an aspect of frustration and anger which is healthy
in that, separated from blame, anger for instance is often
     smart –
the sense of knowing in your bones that something
(situation or theme) is wrong , that
     you won’t put up with it,
     whatever that may be –

                   

not ascribing blame means, psychologically, it’s not
that it is wrong, so much as
staying with the self which feels

     – however, say, politically speaking,
     the thing may be wrong.
– But often we can’t change the thing,
reasonably or quickly,
looking at how to work with anger is important here.

the point is that anger (even frustration alone) left to brew
and stew, may turn later
to resignation.
one cannot
get out of the situation
change
the thing
or
change oneself
in relation to it
and so
there is defeat

                   

this sense of defeat i’m talking about happens beneath the awake mind
even beneath the subliminal
it is unstoppable
it may happen in both extremely minor, or major ways;
- working in this mode: to consciously
recall and list truthfully those things
that are really pissing you off
this would not be any ‘approved’ list of
what should rightly be pissing you off,
but an idiosyncratic list.

      it may be
Egg McMuffins and the size of one’s living room
     the color of a carpet:
the list must be honest, or it’s a useless exercise
in other words, depression must be taken seriously
as all really true and complete things are
which is a way of ‘attending upon . . .’

                   

     (all psychological means have to do with
proper attendance, to attend upon psyche,
a key to the nature of how healing happens)

   a ‘not’ or a ‘non’ -
beyond the issue of friend or enemy;
i mean, one can rail against depression
or try and befriend it, but neither works.
actually, coping doesn’t work well either

one issue about depression,
a mild or minor episode of depression may seem manageable
but this is a false impression of depression, based on
a seeming transience or brevity, a
‘lighter’ level of psychological suffering.
     When depression becomes chronic (incl. episodically chronic)
when this cosmos of depression becomes
   a powerful sense, a real element of life
it cannot be ‘managed;’ some seek
amelioration via drugs or vacations or changes of
scene – at times to a certain effect,
though these treatments
often prove to be disturbingly temporary – and as such
may be interpreted as failures, thus reinforcing the depression,
because one of the truisms of depression, as every depressed person
absolutely realizes, is that
nothing works

                   

another mode of working with depression is cognitive
     – based on an RET approach (rational-emotive therapy)
represented in the book, “Feeling Good,” by Burns. it
is a skillful approach, presenting an
‘applied contemplative-philosophical lens’ to daily life,
     and
deals with what we are saying to ourselves, moment-to-moment -
As we honestly look at these moments:
     i was surprised
very
     surprised
–
in this way of working,
by teasing out momentary
thought,
we may find
depression is
a cascade effect, with
beginnings
that don’t feel
at all like
depression
–
it’s not
so much
about anger or frustration
as seemingly ‘rational’
messages
to ourselves,
which might include
a thought
somewhere
already down
the cascade
like:

‘I can’t do anything.’ or
‘I’m a failure.’
This is the sort of
globalized,
black-and-white thinking
that marks depression.

                   

the point isn’t to change that thinking – which doesn’t work –
so much as to track it: back, on the one hand, and, to redirect, on the
other. for instance, when a thought occurs like, “I can’t do anything,”
you think of something you can do – cook an omelet perhaps.
and it helps to actually cook one.
so
then,
maybe
you
can’t
do
anything,
but
you
can
cook
an
omelet,
and
you’ve
proved
it
– this may seem
a bit innane, but it’s not,
it’s
quite serious

                   

RET or cognitive psychology (done right)
is quite effective in that it’s a
powerfully direct awareness practice.
the point is that depression is
a cascade-effect of certain kinds of thoughts, and each minutae of
thought

triggers an emotion, and that emotion encourages a further thought(s)
which triggers a further emotional environment(s), and so it goes
through the cascade – until the landscape is more solid
than a planet.
Burns’ book articulates depression
diagnostically, presents a means to self-examine, and outlines
a series of processes by which a person can basically work with
and often cure their depression. a self-help book in the
real sense.

there is another aspect to depression, which is archetypal,
something that western psychology and certainly medicine
do not touch on or really agree with. This involves the necessity
of depression.

In other words, depression may not be at all
like a bad cold you get rid of or wait to get out of.
When the universe pulls apart falls apart,
when you have no energy, when all of life is drained
from life. When even despair is an energy which seems
impossibly lively

                   

we can ask, but cannot know, wish to leave but be completely
stuck, or sunk in a quicksand, a morass. Something is
binding us, and we cannot rise, we cannot return to
easy ideals, cannot move on, go to the next step,
    so
we lose all that is cavalier. In the pain of no significance.
this itself, unbearable, is a destroyer of everything that is
cheap and american, so to say, every bullshit romantic
movie, every cheery, false newscaster on TV; every smile
hurts as does every grief

depression also eliminates death-metal gothic-fantasy overlays -
this is because depression cannot be willfully sublimated
into images and story – if it can, it’s not really depression but
something else.

So, galling limitation, as the I Ching says. such galling limitation
may be complex, composed of outer, inner and relational
(inter- and intra-psychic) realities;

the point is,
we can always work with
our mind
with depression –

                   

     an aggressive attitude doesn’t seem to work:
the ‘let’s get rid of this’ attitude – the fighting against, the
battle to ‘remove’ depression.
actually, depression is unworkable
this is why it’s called depression, what the word means
and not something else,
so we don’t work on depression per se,
but on how we think or feel, and what’s happening in our life
situation – depression feels totally solid, but the moment, like
the conscious mind, persona, isn’t at all solid, there’s space;

     the situational factor is likewise important
as are the social-cultural factors
and we can track, and in gathering certain valuable nuggets of
thought, information, process, a certain psychological horizon
may appear (no guarantees, but generally speaking)
often, related to depression is a deep and profound despair, grief,
pain. These we can know. find and know and attend.
But depression itself cannot really be found and known in the
same way.

It may turn out that real changes are necessary
but these needs may be quite small, nearly infinitesimal
it may be that a subtle pattern of thought can be reframed

                   

                   or

                   /

                   and
other changes may be necessary
– something inimical to
depression –
a plan – a later stage of work
may be formed and implemented
over months or even years of time.
Sometimes
the honest formulation
of a reasonable plan
is an antidote
(though usually not the antidote, alone)

The I Ching says,
“Galling Limitation should not be persevered in.”

                   

     Halfway squared equals twice back to zero. Primordial rhythms surge against the neonate. Blue hall, blue wall, blue crystal ball. I don’t know yet what I am. Always returning, resurging, resurgence. Gathering documents from an internal realm. Ali Akbar Khan showed his tabla player how to become more powerful, how to pulse with a new beat in the midst of metaphysical ecstacy. Damaged hands re-enact helplessness.

Past life):

     I sit there with my fallen self, heiroglyphic belt trapped outside. Dark tall cell, golden wall, window-slit of light above. The room is a three-dimensional trapezoid. A woman dances in red on a stone-covered courtyard. Children with golden halos, around their small heads. Was it a priest, lost them

         –  remainders .

I believe philosophy

is only

as liberating

as is its ability to free

our imaginations.

Fishes of Iraq: Aspius Vorax

It’s been a long time since posting here. 2fish hasn’t been on vacation, just a temporary haitus in blog activities. We’ve received a few kind comments on the blog, not very much active communication. 2fish isn’t all that personal, chatty, political, rebarbative, musical, pop-cultural, technological, or relevant in any direct, applied sense, your response is perfectly understandable. People have various reasons for blogging – CNN just did a report, BBC News made a statement, and there’s more on the issue: Freedom and democracy. 2fish exists merely because it can.

No, American soldiers in Iraq don’t spend all of their time bird watching. They also fish. That’s SPC Mauro above. He’s holding what is essentially a great big minnow.

New Forums, Freer Communities?
A problem faced by bloggers in non-democratic societies like Iran and China is that these governments not only block web content they find threatening, but authors of politically critical content can and do go to jail. The Global Voices movement is committed to helping citizens in such countries achieve greater freedom of speech on the net – or at very least, helping them get around government filtering and evade arrest for speaking their minds in cyberspace. Chinese bloggers like Isaac Mao hope members of the Global Voices movement will help him and his compatriots develop more sophisticated blogging tools in order to make speech “safer.” One possible idea is to combine blog-publishing with online social networking, so that more controversial blog posts are published only to groups of trusted peers. “Today’s blogging is not a very mature format,” says Mao.

Despite the challenges, China now has over half a million bloggers, blogging in Chinese on Chinese servers and ISP’s, using local-language blog tools including one that Mao developed. In order to stay out of trouble, Chinese blog hosts censor their users and users censor themselves. Even if censorship were loosened or if it became easier to circumvent it, Mao does not believe that freer speech in Chinese cyberspace will spark a democratic revolution. But at a time when the Chinese government has been cracking down on more reformist viewpoints in newspapers and books, the blogosphere does offer a new alternative forum for idea-sharing, personal expression and community building.

Then there are the challenges of the digital divide in places like Africa. Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh doesn’t expect Africa to be transformed by blogging any time soon. Bridging the digital divide is perhaps the least of Africa’s many problems. Nonetheless, she thinks blogging is important – if not transformative – for the small number of Africans who do blog. “For young people, we have not been heard, we don’t have a space in Africa within politics or in other arenas to express ourselves.

2fish is looking for heroes and stories relating the heroic. If you have a compelling story to relate, please send it to twofish[at]iyume[dot]com, we hope to disseminate.

A friend recently asked the question,

“What’s the least expensive reasonable espresso machine
and grinder that I can buy for the home, to make
a decent espresso?”

I’ve tried to provide some answers, and
also wanted to research the field, with a thought
to what I would like to own, at each given price point –
and more definitively, what I hope to purchase myself.

In researching the list below I’ve included a full range of recommended equipment, from least expensive to the “ultimate,” reading the many reviews, comments and tutorials available online. I apologize in advance for omissions; I’ve tried to keep only highly recommended machines with several reviews. At the high end there are many great machines, usually of interest to aficionados who do their own extensive research, so I have included only a sampling of very popular machines, offering good price/performance. My orientation is the North American market.

The more challenging area is in the lower end, where there exist questions of quality, reliability and trade-offs. I’ve tried to provide several options.

One of the most important things to know is that without a good espresso grinder, you should best have your espresso at the café, no matter what level of espresso machine you buy. I found a recommended grinder for $100., and as my friend is a college student, it seems an okay start, but spending around $180.-$200. at a minimun is advisable (see the recommendations). Last, please write to corrent any errors, and offer any alternative recommended set-ups.

Here is the list.

I’d like to thank all the sites (and reviews) I linked to in the above page for providing such excellent information!
Much of the information was gathered from these four sites (alphabetically),
 
Coffee Geek
Whole Latte Love
Chris Coffee
Coffee Kid

Personal experience & caveats:
I haven’t had experience with the machines I reviewed, except the Rocky grinder. My coffee background:
I was a roaster, cupper and espresso trainer for a medium-sized specialty coffee outfit in Colorado for two years, roasting 250,000 lbs/month at the time. Previously, had barista experience, managed a café, travelled Europe tasting, etc. My sojourns in the coffee world as a professional ended about 8 years ago. However my love for coffee culture and ritual remains! My experience with equipment is limited to commerical espresso machines, mostly Rancilio, and commercial or industrial coffee grinders. I am not associated with the coffee business in any way.

I hope the research proves helpful to anyone looking into the marvelous possibilities of espresso, and the bountiful bean.

Seen in Poetry (Magazine) January 2005:

Sunday Morning Percodan
By Austin Hummell

There are days when a big wind kills her son
calling long distance from Uz, Oregon
and even the sunny throne of coffee won’t do
for a mood.
. . .
What is faith
if not this, this opiate reaching its
tiny hands into the lobes of euphoria,
this hymn that dips or psalm that lifts
her eyes, this heart like the swollen
heart of Christ astride a donkey,
with lazy palms of Sunday waving hey.

Austin Hummell is poetry editor of Passages North.
This is his first appearance in Poetry (Magazine, p.286).

The world comes round again, wondering how things are born. One way or another a sense of story is unavoidable, as much as language embodies or is haunted by its own failure. “Now I am ready to tell

how bodies are changed
Into different bodies.

I summon the supernatural beings
Who first contrived
The transmogrifications
In the stuff of life.
You did it for your own amusement.
Descend again, be pleased to reanimate
This revival of those marvels.
Reveal now, exactly
How they were performed
From the beginning
Up to this moment.

Before sea or land, before even sky
Which contains all,
Nature wore only one mask —
Since called Chaos.
A huge agglomeration of upset.
A bolus of everything—but
As if aborted.
And the total arsenal of entropy
Already at war within it.”

writes Ovid, through the genius of Ted Hughes, filtering who in the stuff from the beginning Which contains all. To imagine chaos, not as disorder, not as order’s opposite, not as abstract category but as upset, a fulfillment of abortion: its universe: entropy at war — a grevious roar, unutterable pain. “No sun showed one

thing to another,
No moon
Played her phases in heaven,
no earth
Spun in empty air on her own magnet,
No ocean
Basked or roamed on the long beaches.”

It was a quiet night, unutterable. Unutterability. So, could there be potential. Who can bear this primordial universe which cannot come to be except as the abortion of its own paradox. What strange brood we, to arise from horrid impossibility, taste of ultimate acid beneath the tongue, razor blades on skin, no vaulting dream, a horror so real that “land, sea, air were

all there
But not to be trodden, or swum in.
Air was simply darkness.
Everything fluid or vapour, form formless.”

worse, “each thing hostile

to every other thing: at every point
hot fought cold, moist dry, soft hard, and the weightless

resisted weight.” Imagine this endless war, existing in utter lack of revolution. Entropy warring with itself. If A = A, A wars with A. Self against self nature. Weightlessness resisting weight. If there is a hell, part of its horror would be such a stasis, in which psychic energy flows always against itself, not erasing but rather aborting its own life in self mutilation. Ovid declares, following the ancient Greek tales that our universe arises from this hell. It took some Other, a divine being to begin to sort out endless, static confusion. “Some such artist [as God or as a god] began to sort it out. In this way

the heap of all disorder
Earth
Was altered.
It was adorned with the Godlike novelty
of man.

“Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist… Art is a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process. That is why great works of art make us feel good” (Ted Hughes, 1930-1998).

Bloody hell, microcosmic urgencies, the insurrections of man: metamorphoses.

A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror. . .
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love.

(Ovid, Narcissus, trans. Ted Hughes, 1997)

Hoshinaga Fumio is an acclaimed Japanese gendai (modern, stylistically contemporary) haiku poet, whose career has spanned five decades. His sense of soul and brilliance extends far beyond the literary world of haiku style and composition. Th following articles appeared in the autumn issue of Modern Haiku, and are now posted on this haiku research page. I to invite you to read this interview, The Miraculous Power of Language: A Conversation with the Poet Hoshinaga Fumio [PDF], which took place in Kumamoto, Japan. Aa second article, Hoshinaga Fumio: Selected Haiku from Kumaso-Ha [PDF], contains 22 new poems with commentary. This is Hoshinaga’s first substantial appearance in English. A poetic sample from the second article:

The playfully dark, ironic metaphor of “becoming Hitler” is disjunctive, allowing a sense of depth to enter the haiku, a depth partly created through allusion. Due to itchy feet (a summer kigo; season word), the author cannot smartly click his heels or march in goose-step. The poem presents a disturbing psychosocial complex indicating the will to power or assumption of dictatorial authority which often remains hidden in persons or society.

A rhythmically outstanding haiku, which breaks up time into fragments of immanence. In reading this haiku aloud, it was suggested that the last ku, which is the verb, be preceded by a long pause; a dramatic semantic and rhythmic break. The final verb seems more a force of space than time, a wave of sorrow or grief in intimate quiet.

 
 

you are welcome to email
twofish at iyume dot com
anytime.

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our pleasure!

Reading Naomi Klein’s exposé of the attempted selling off of Iraq, wonder what Marx would make of it. That, and G W’s popularity.

Reading Marx, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx’s statement seems overtly theatrical, and a form of ideological double-speak. Postmodern Marxist camps declaim, “they (we, Bush voters, everyone?) are oppressed (without knowing it).” That’s ideology for you. Hell, don’t you feel oppressed? I do. So, I’m oppressed and I know it. The economic game as it’s played is anti-human in some respects (never mind the environmental costs). Options? BBC panels of experts never seem to come up with a sensible alternative to Liberal Democracy, as we have it. Socialism is a dirty word on both sides of the pond. It seems professionals are afraid to rationally discuss more equitable economies between rich and poor, as a concept of sensible economic theory. In a recent debate, a presenter bemoaned “a failure of imagination” regarding alternative sustainable future economics. Maybe Brazil has a better idea, someone on the panel quipped.

I’m happy and lucky, to have a personal economy with which to live without daily economic anxiety. This pleasant experience began three years ago. It’s a pretty refreshing situation – though work is hard at times and I’m oppressed by it. I’d rather be by the beach, near a big research library, writing a book: Right now. Santa Monica would be okay, though I’d prefer Vancouver. Yeah, Vancouver would be great. Vancouver is my mantra. But I’m so oppressed I’ve had a sort of failure of inspiration or imagination. It’s just all I can do to keep this all up, keep it going. How could I possibly leave my work? And if I did, I certainly couldn’t afford to live in Vancouver for a year or two or three and write a book. Perhaps there are grants. My school doesn’t provide any. Well it’s always been hard to write a book, it’s not any easier now. Whether riding a liter bike via ferry to Amamioshima to snorkel and camp out and spend time alone with the elements eating raw fish will help heal the heat of oppression, I can’t say – it’s only a few hundred kilometers away and a few hundred bucks. But having the right bike seems important. A 1000cc twin. A sportbike, but “soft” enough for occasional light touring. Something used, not in demand, something that’s had its day. A bit of history, touch of gray, old man with a story, carburetion and poor mileage rather than fuel injection. Something lithe. Something you get into, not on top of. Something that reaches into your soul, kickstarts your heart, causes the world to disappear.

Everything depends on that new world and how you relate to it. Also, why you sought it in the first place. What is true citizenship, when your soul calls out for self-erasure, and the senses seek immolation in transformation in order to emerge connected again with unknowns.

In that religion comes from religio, meaning, a linking back to the origin, this defines a religious person, even one who denies God/Gods. In this sense Marx performed a manner of religio (Harry Watson and Joseph Schumpeter argued that Marxism is a religion).

Vehicles of transformation, transmutation. We are: for each other. Love is. Sickness is an initiatory requirement in many shamanic cultures. Violence, masochism and death play important roles in psychological transformation. “Like a sickness and its cure together . . . Like rain and sun, like cold and heat” (Shakespeare in Love ). Linking back. How can you renew the soul without death? Even in love, the height of love, the happiness of golden light, bliss of presence in which one becomes with another; unites without thought. What has died, was, might seem unimportant – and often is. It doesn’t hurt to let that old self go after you’ve crossed the threshold, it’s insignificant that old self. It was. Nevertheless, something has died. Death (psychologically) needn’t be composed merely of suffering and pain, that’s the point. But we do become conscious of what we lose when it’s painful to us, and when we desire what presently can’t be attained. As a result the concept that death, that absence, is essentially pain is easily acquired. Though pain may not always be painful – it may become something else; anger, drive, moods, art, an entryway into new worlds – “from pain to ecstasy, including the wounding in which one is ‘delivered’ from the flat ennui of numbing conformity to cultural expectations.” Pain isn’t singular; is mysterious.

Pain wounds, kills, yet also impells a journey through darker lands. Hades enriches with darkness, intoxication, waters of forgetting & remembrance, risk. Pain is no opium, that is, suffering is no opium. Unless the pain becomes subliminal, with the painful state presenting itself as reality, as the table of social interaction. Rules of propriety. Parochialism, codified parochiality. Virtue and pain may become as intimately related as lovers, unconscious Gods. Then, isn’t it a clue, to seek the erasure of all ideologies? In that ideology, in virtu, is a form of parochialism, and parochialism treats pain in a certain way, a limited and one-sided way. If the deepest nature of pain and pleasure both are sought, a sense of poetry arises: “Pleasure is the pleasure of the powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation” (Wallace Stevens). Nature is profoundly paradoxical. This poetic sense alone, it seems to me, is capable of defeating parochialism, at its root. Nonetheless we live in serious times and have no truck with vapid imaginings. It is precisely for this reason I desire to become one with a particular machine and risk death.

Dear Readers,

I’ve recently returned to Japan, and hope to be posting again soon. Here’s a shot of Mt. Robson, from the spot where our raft put in on the Fraser River:

Located in the Fraser River Valley east of the Robson River; 4 km south of Berg Lake. Mount Robson is not only the highest mountain in the Canadian Rocky Mountains but one of the great mountains of the world, and deserving of inclusion in any select list on account of many striking characteristics and a form, beauty, and grandeur transcending any other of the greater peaks of the Rockies… The mountain is unique, and its massive precipices, seamed with different-coloured rock strata, enhance it in both beauty and stature.” These words were written by Frank Smythe, an English mountaineer who wrote dozens of books about the mountains of the world during the first half of the twentieth century and was widely regarded as an authority on the subject.

A class 3 to 3+ white water run. With a class 4+ to 5 waterfall partway through. Starts off with some easy class 2, then picks up with Goldpan Alley, a straight shot 3. The river calms down and then there comes a BIG hole, followed by a left turn and then two more bends. This is Vuarnet Ledges, class 3 to 3+. After this rapid the river runs straight for about 500 meters, before turning right. This is Rearguard falls, usually a class 5. There is an easy and well-used portage trail on the right.

My friend Jeff organized the trip, a 1500 mile drive (in 3 Aerostar vans) through Western Canada with outdoor activities, for 17 university students from Kumamoto, Japan. We got as far north as Jasper, as far west as Vancouver island, spending a day in Victoria and bungee jumping into a canyon outside of Nanaimo. As for me, I was impressed with the used bookstores in Victoria and would have happily planted myself in Vancouver for a few years . . .

A Tour of the Calculus by David Berlinski, a book I picked up in Banff, contains some amazing writing.

Another beautiful book found is The Encyclopedia of the Motorcycle, by Peter Henshaw. A large well-written book with superb photographs.

Generally speaking, the hardest aspect of living as an expat in southern Japan is the inability to browse English-language bookstores. I’m ready to open up a cafe-bookstore in the right place. Investors, feel free to drop me a line twofish at iyume dot com.

Hello readers. Creating this blog has been a worthwhile endevor for me. I’d like to continue with it, but wonder what readers like, don’t like, and would like to see more of – please leave feedback or any sort of comment in the next two weeks, by clicking on the comment link just below this post. I’m requesting you take a moment.

twofish heads to Western Canada for two weeks,
the next post should appear September 4.
- - - - -

Yesterday I wrote a rant to a good friend, I’ll post part of it here. The background to the rant has to do with a book. Occasionally a book comes along that affirms ideas and values you didn’t know needed affirming, and the information acts like a chariot enabling further confidence and strength to explore new territory. The slim volume, Egalitarian Typologies versus the Perception of the Unique, by James Hillman, is such a book. The versus in the title codifies a key consideration. Systems, particularly systems that organize persons into “types” (Jungian typology, the Eenneagram, astrological typing, the Buddha familes in Vajrayana Buddhism, the manual of mental disorders, etc.) while useful, worthwhile and therapeutically valuable, also by consequence minimize or ontologically devalue the perception of the unique. There is a polarity betweeen typologic systemization – and the perception of the unique.

The perception of the unique typically becomes subordinated to critical analytical systems of all sorts (categorizations are a means of typing), in order to extract meaning and data from the unique.

T,

if you were to read my haiku writings (i’m not recommending this, as they are focused on a research specialty), you’d find that my strongest “message” is AGAINST REDUCTION. I am interested in approaches which do not reduce the complexity and unknowingness of real experience, but rest in embodiments, flow with it.

Civilization is systems. Language is a system of signs (symbolic representations). So, systems define what we think of as human consciousness. It’s not a matter of getting rid of them, and it’s an impossible task in any case. But we need to have awareness of how exactly, precisely, systemic thinking and perspectives shrink/contain reality. From a Freudian perspective, you could say, we need to investigate how systems are used to defend against the overwhelming unknowingness we swim in.

The most difficult sort of awareness for a fish, is I think, the awareness of water. Water is an unconscious element for a fish, but arguably the most important element or the most primary element. If you were a fish, and you were begining to become aware of water, how would that awareness arise, how would the hints of water enter your senses? I’ll speculate (anthropomorphically): For a fish, water can never be perceived directly, it’s too close to fishness, to what root-fishness is. Hints of water come as unique, idiosyncratically arising psychic landscapes, as dreams, mystical visions, inspirations – in other words, fishness and waterness are “other” to each other – clearly separate, yet paradoxically, one does not exist without the other. You can’t have fishness without water, and you can’t have waterness without fish (because waterNESS, the NESSNESS of water is something only a fish can sense, in its fishlike way).

In a similar sense, as Jung thought, human consciousness is human because uniquely, humans have the capacity to reflection upon perception (some other animals have also a limited capacity in this regard). But the reflector itself, the existential (or ontological) reality of what reflects is hidden, is outside of perception; it’s not in time/space (as reflection occurs in any combination of prior to, during, following perception, is unconscious or an absence). Reflectivity is the water consciousness swims in.

So, notions of reflectivity arise as quasi-forms, perceptions, feelings, straynesses, meanderings, imaginations. That we reflect, that we swim in reflection (and by reflection I don’t mean thinking about life per se, but rather that we know for instance abstractions like “apple” or “time") brings up a useful point about wildness and reality:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. ‘Wild’ as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read ‘language’) a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? (Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, 1995, pp. 163-172).

Ecology and wildness and “the grain of things” and complexity and “information” and “the imposition of order on chaotic nature:” these are the active elements of my current aspiration, seeking. I think what we lack in our culture is a healthy relationship with wildness, a valued means for evolving a sense of “the grain of things” (which involves both an art and craft of life). We need to let wildness in, respect this mind, without containing it. Finding the wild always humbles one.

Controlling and containing the life of wildness (i.e. egalitarian typologies, systems), can help with sorting out incomprehensible situations, confusions, reducing suffering, and can also provide tools for knowledge – science, technology, psychology. Certain “new” psycho-spiritual systems (like Ken Wilber’s integral theory of consciousness) use systems thinking and reality modeling extensively. But increasingly, I see the dangers. First and foremost is arrogance. Second is the separation and minimization of the energy and power of the wild and wildness and a lessening of respect for the universe at every level, by consequence.

So, I’m interested particularly in poetic in systems that deconstruct themselves, and that are paradoxical (like haiku, the work of Ammons, Stevens, etc). I think probably Zen philosophy comes closest, in terms of an experiential philosophy (though not institutionalized Zen Buddhism); Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Plotinus, even Plato use paradox and deconstructive techniques: meanings posed are self-erased, potentially leading one back experientially, kinesthetically, to the perception of the unique – I think this is crucially important to incorporate at every level of analysis in the art and science of systems which attempt to describe the psyche of individuals and/or society.

How’s that for a rant?

 

early morning coffee drinkers

dawn clouds pose against

 

neon

erotic environments

 

dissipate                                          

             

                                           biting into toast

how the known                                     the pool of the other

encompasses

 

twofish

 

Here is an impression made of fragments from Book One, the Mandelbaum Translation.

two fish

Nicholas Lezard, someone who knows something about Ovid, in a review of a new translation (by David Raeburn) writes in the Guardian (excerpts):

. . . while it seems as though the Metamorphoses has never really gone away – Ovid’s line at the end about his own poetic immortality is still borne out – people don’t necessarily feel any urgent need to read it.

This is not exactly the case around my neck of the sacred woods. I have been doing some work for the last few years that has involved steeping myself in, among other things, a good deal of Graeco-Roman mythology. One unforeseen side-effect of this is that I have come closer to accepting this mythic corpus as a convincing explanation of human motives than any other philosophical system. I may not have a shrine to Jupiter in the back garden, but it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

The now-redundant prose translation was perfectly serviceable but it was, after all, in prose. And ever since I read Allen Mandelbaum’s amazing translation of The Divine Comedy (published by Everyman), the game has changed: you can actually translate from an ancient tongue and retain not only fidelity but poetry.

As it happens, Mandelbaum has translated the Metamorphoses (and his prosody is so good it’s actually distracting) – but you won’t find it for sale here unless you’re very lucky.

It is easier to read this for pure pleasure than just about any other ancient text apart, perhaps, from the Odyssey (with Apuleius’s Golden Ass coming in a close third). It is also (and for some reason I’d forgotten this) even gorier than the Iliad.

Ovid is modern in other ways: you will recognise his attentiveness towards the very mechanics of metamorphosis. Here is Actaeon, punished by Diana for accidentally seeing her in the nude: “The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag; / the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips; / she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender / forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin; / last, she injected panic …” What is that but, two millennia avant la lettre, a computer-generated animation in words?

Reading that, you may think the poetry of the translation isn’t that wonderful. This is what I thought at first, finding it hard to even recognise it as poetry rather than carefully sliced prose. Not really Raeburn’s fault: he isn’t a professional poet, and after all this is, as Dryden put it in his own translation of the work, a “vile degenerate age". But while Raeburn isn’t afraid of, shall we say, highly familiar imagery ("white as a sheet", and so on), the lines keep up a good six-stress pulse and sound much better if you imagine them being spoken aloud.

“So, if any of my discoveries are important, the hole is. By hole I mean going outside the limitations of a picture frame and being free in one’s conception of art. . . . I did not make holes in order to wreck the picture. On the contrary, I made holes in order to find something else. They were never understood” (Lucio Fontana, 1968).
 
                              TV Time
 

flowers float above the moon blankets and tiger skin tawny orange her face moired in bla ck wildebeest herds edging a cross the plains before chang ing to channel 761 music and other available channels in 4″ rows
	bread bakes underwater the vi olent smell of bread is power li ttle money left now only paradi se or kerosene will end the col d season five yards away her hips south of the refrigerator d esperate for wheat I run down a dark wet street pulling out a gun past 3 sake shops red lant erns swaying in sleet falling fr esh from the bath
ten stories down laying on the floor our tired backs the night endless now that murder is co mmitted and the bakery theft i n the air surrounding her trea sure edging across the plains to flowers.

 
                             
 
twofish

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(About this web log. Note concerning web presence: you can find my bio here, here are some writings on haiku; a recent music project is here, composed with Jeff Cairns. )

This web log is loosely concerned with the theme of wildness and the wild; its loss, invalidation and voiding, whether this arrives from the personal microcosmically stray dream-image, political, social, scientific perspective (e.g. genomic, cybernetic), literary perspective, cultural noodling, work-stress realm, psychology, etc. So, critique is one purview. On the flip side, the question of what the wild is, how wildness might be touched, moved towards, sensed – what its value might be – these represent arcs of question and aspiration. Rather than answers, I believe relationship is a focus. James Hillman discusses the classical Greek meaning of the word therapy as “therapeia,” “to attend upon.” The meaning of psychology (a logos of psyche: to give psyche an adequate account of itself) then is “to attend upon psyche.” In this sense, the psychology of the wild becomes relevant as an active movement: how to attend upon, give attendance to wilds; to wildness. To attend and enter.

An example of attending to the psyche of something primordial, elemental is Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire. Thoreau found wildness as a highest value, articulating a non-dual awareness of wildness. Wildness as not merely an outer environmental issue nor interior state disconnected from relative extensive reality. This brings up the old question of subjectivity vs. objectivity (with subjectivity, as fancy, often getting short shrift). One response to the subjective-objective conundrum regarding nature comes from modern haiku. The Japanese poet Hoshinaga Fumio comments,

I write about or touch upon human heart and feeling, by creating human mental images. The human mental image does not have a typical form, such as a cake cut into four quarters – a mental picture is not like that; it has no form. . . . Disharmonies lead to harmonies . . . the Japanese sense of nature is in harmony, that is, the harmony of: person (human being) and nature; no separation – in its widest sense. Without the sense of harmony with nature, Japanese literature would become very weak (personal communication).

Hoshinaga’s creation of “human mental images” is directly related to his 40-year oeuvre of acclaimed haiku. How we find harmony, in the sense Hoshinaga describes, seems relevant. At this precise point in human history various writers have sensed we are on the brink of losing the wild, except perhaps as fairytale or entertainment fantasy; this process is happening on a number of levels, imaginative, social, technological, etc. I’d like to present a few phrases from Emerson and Thoreau. Here is the opening sentence from Thoreau’s essay, Walking:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement…

Thoreau includes “person” in his sense of nature, through advancing the idea of a person leaving the three estates of church, government and society, in order to seek direct contact with the wild, not by goal-oriented behavior, but rather by meandering or wandering in or through wild places, spaces, with the sense of never returning.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk.

Seeking a sacred earth, sacred sense of being. To do this one must become “a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.” A bit later, a statement which resonates strongly 150 years later:

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Thoreau is often misquoted, with “wilderness” replacing “wildness.” While the two are related, one is external, extensive, while the other is a move towards an aesthetic in which experiences are sought: varieties of contact.

In Nature Emerson wrote, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” A short way down the page he added, “But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical.” Valuing the wild implies sensing, contemplating universals, which tend to be discredited or devalued, in comparison to realistic, pragmatic ideas or goals. It can be argued that strong thinking itself is now held in social question. These lines from Yeats’ Second Coming seem to match the current media climate:

. . . everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
. . .

Gary Snyder writes that mind is fundamentally wild:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. “Wild” as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read “language") a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? Observation, reflection, and practice show artistic process to be the latter (A Place in Space, pp. 163-172).

These are some of the ideas that hover, in terms of this web log. I feel that we have reached a time when the perseverance of the wild is at issue.

One of the challenges of cultural existential bias is acknowledging that we possess it. Without looking toward the obscure shadows cast, we may end up destroying or eroding what is of universal value: human identity and meaning, in one instance. I think this is one of Bill McKibben’s points when he writes that,

[Human gene manipulation and DNA improvement is] “Going for perfection,” [as] Watson calls it. But in fact such genetic tampering threatens to destroy the very things that give meaning to human life. From a certain vantage point, meaning has been in decline for a very long time, almost since the beginning of civilization. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors inhabited a very different world from ours, a meaning-saturated world where every plant and animal was an actor the way people are actors, where even rocks and canyons and rivers could speak. We look at that same world and see either silent landscape or pile of resources; either it has gone mute or our hearing is nowhere near as sharp. . . . the context of our lives began to shrink much more quickly in the last five hundred years. As science offered first new explanations and then new technologies, we have traded in the old contexts that informed human lives, bargaining them away in return for freedom, for Liberation (Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age).

As we advance we may wish to turn anew toward the forgotten or abandoned. I would like to extend my brief encapsulation but this post is becoming long. Ursula Le Guin’s A Very Warm Mountain, discusses the personification of the natural world in a way that has provoked my introspection: must we personalize the non-human, incorporate it into society in order to preserve its value, living in an age between myths? James Hillman comments in Beauty Without Nature; Refounding the City that “nature” should not necessarily be equated only with wilderness or non-human zones, that (to reduce a complex story) the crucial experience of aesthetic arrest may be found in the city, in art, as well as within wilderness – aesthetic perception of the wild is qualitative and not mutually exclusive (one zone cannot be sacrificed for another). One of Hillman’s points is that it may be possible to design a sense of the wild into the city – in such a city, it would become less necessary to mass exodus to the beach or “managed” nature on the weekends, in order to seek after the longed-for distance, in Weil’s sense, distance which is the soul of beauty.

The wild and anarchy are dissimilar templates. Gary Snyder points out that sensing the wild involves “the grain of things . . . measured chaos,” ideas also found in Classical Greece. Chaos (lack of pattern) was equated with aesthetic ugliness. So, the cosmos as cosmetic, cosmos as craft.

The above are loosely related speculations. I believe it is possible to go beyond a dualistic psychology that polarizes nature and culture. At the same time, whatever polemic or dialectic might be hashed out, I’m working from an internal poetic course, an unformed and unframed discontinuity, from disharmonies that may lead to harmonies – saunters on occasion, seeming to be a verb.

 

I saw then in the ocean everything of life among the reef,

Rainbow parrot-fish, Bluefin Trevally, Pyramid Butterflyfish,

Potter’s Angelfish, octopii, Hawaiian Cleaner Wrasse, Whitemouth Moray,

Whale Shark, Peacock grouper, Rockmover, Bluespine Unicornfish,

Glasseye, Lei Trigger-fish. Swimming under banded light

at a weightless depth

above land below sky in the blank wide bed of breath or restful dreaming

among the concave sands between corals.

 

Tending to instruments of time pressure in the tank

holding the console up to the mask seconds pass along

the precise boundary-lines of the dive event, underside of the boat

far above in the vertical horizon held from drifting current,

scuds to invisibility far from shore on a warm merciless sea.

Fins gently rudder in an effortless slow gymnastic spiral flip

arcing this quiescent traveler consciousness closer to the reef:

heartbeats mingle with silvered exhaust bubbles the

inhale-exhale of the regulator valve breathing

through the ocean’s fluid element, limitless space,

elements become the body in an age before eyelids.

Thinking down here is incomplete where light

as it moves along the bottom patterns

ripples like eels.

 

The softest caresses cause waves to wash through, the politics of love:

thoughts pass along in their entirety, as unburdened senses

become fragile to the hardened glance, acuity in breathing

disappearing cruise ships reaching your sovereign mouth,

sovereign arms, tongue that tastes of pelagic cuisine,

Ahi tuna, Sturgeon, Puffer or Jake.

 

The relationship between poetry and violence: ideas that spring from Octavio Paz, in his book The Bow and the Lyre. Looking at dreamlife, myth interpreted as psychologic process (path), fairytales – violence as act and environment seems of neccessity. Maybe you imagine a mellow dude. Someone as psychically equanimious as they are laid back in-person: would you consider that person non-violent? Or, new-ager warmth and compassion – doesn’t this sort of approach to peace or harmony become cloying, boring? What about the edge – and why do we need – sharp edges, cuts into speech and context? Why do realities need irruption? Wouldn’t we prefer edges that are non-violent? It seems discrimination between psychic and literal worlds is necessary – we would not harm literal beings as we certainly do words, those multiferous symbols. Yet it seems strange, even shocking the idea that,

Poetic creation begins as violence to language.

What is the angst that urges us, impells to remake, reform, bring the new? Mustn’t there be something, terribly, horribly or irritatingly wrong with what is, in order for creative urgencies to – urge themselves onto us, onto things-as-themselves? To create what is not, to make more beautiful, whole, to purify, to reclaim, reawaken, recover, own, fight erasures, abandon to them, to make visible, to give sight, orient to what shines, to follow “the morality of right sensation” (Stevens). Language is reality, and has life, fairly said, is mind. Why then, violence? Paz writes:

The first act in this operation is the uprooting of words. The poet wrests them from their habitual connections and occupations: separated from the formless world of speech, words become unique, as if they had just been born. The second act is the return of the word: the poem becomes an object of participation. Two opposing forces inhabit the poem: one of elevation or uprooting, which pulls the word from the language; the other of gravity, which makes it return. The poem is an original and unique creation, but it is also reading and recitation: participation. The poet creates it; the people, by recitation, re-create it. Poet and reader are two moments of a single reality. Alternating in a manner that may aptly be called cyclical, their rotation engenders the spark: poetry (p. 28-9).

Uprooting, wresting from habitual connections and occupations, separation. Rending and return (gravity). These are the processes which lead to participation in the poem. Participation rooted in intriguing disjunctions:

Man is never identical to himself. His mode of being, the thing that distinguished him from other living beings, is change. Or as Ortega y Gasset says: man is an insubstantial being: he lacks substance. And precisely what characterizes the religious experience is the abrupt leap, the fulminating change of nature. Therefore it is not true that our feelings are the same before the real tiger and the tiger-god. . . A description of the experience of the divine as something outside us would also be inadequate. [This] experience includes us, and its description will be our own description (p. 105).

Death is involved. Language is harmed, and this harm involves psychic sentience – without sacred violence, the lifeblood of poets, there could be no purification. Perhaps we arrive in a new land, whose realities have so altered the habitual meanings of words that “violence” and “harm” become unfamiliar, more non-dual, as conceptual terms. Nonetheless, they are the most accurate words we have to provide the concepts. The poet must exit language and culture; to do this is dangerous and also violent. You don’t just fall out in new-age softness, or in the manner of a trek through managed wilderness. It’s a tough business. Birth is violent, death: nature is violent. There may be no exact solution. Paradoxical elements, superposed, provide one synthesis in partial answer to the question of creative need and violence:

Words become unique, as if they had just been born.

Man is never identical to himself.

Participation.

Here’s a song I wrote last week
(with thanks to Kate).
Feel free to do something with it,
as licensed under this
Creative Commons Artist License.

North of Hollywood

tomorrow
lights up in the city garage
cindy sings a refrain
her slicker caught in rain
to find a life in orange
by the carousel of music
found against another star
sequins of las vegas
heartthrob songs
cruisin as a demimonde
among the carnage

CHORUS:
who’s that lady
it’s an LA bar
the chandelier sways
against the guitars
uncertain limits
from a man with a rose
bourbon on the rocks
tastes better cold
. . .

only
a vandal dreams forever
with a crease and a gun
3 am in the morning blood
drains against the sun
it don’t take much
to memorize the lines
tickets are easy
posing silhouettes breezy
drinks down Chandler novels
dressing an Egyptian idol
got her own brains
writing on dirty trains
this day and age

CHORUS

fifteen
sixteen hours a day
working up and back the highway
a knife and a match and a quarter moon
deep blue sky at a quarter past noon
with the tv playing old cartoons
black stagedoor lighting the dunes
spilling quarters on the floor
diamonds from a penny jar
in a montage

CHORUS

bones
crossing sunset and avenue E
sightlines painted against the sea
flames the bomber doesn’t see
fallen in a single victory
torn mulholland missives
the book of love and kisses
slicker caught in rain
fingerprints on windowframes
among the footage

TAG
end

Today I woke up with the answers to two important questions: Who am I? and, What is reality?

Which was pleasant. Part of the pleasure was that the questions seemed about the size of simple footgear. At the time, I was in a wood-paneled room off a side-street in, probably, Boulder, Colorado, on the third floor (numbers have significance, right?) eating pink and purple jellybeans by sucking them through a long transparent glass straw, held horizontally at mouth-level by a workshop coordinator, the while thinking “this is some weird bullshit – these definitely aren’t magic jellybeans and they taste like bad chemistry.” Suddenly, a master footmassager was prodding at the center of my right foot, and pushed deeply, penetrating layers of reality to touch part of my sleeping brain as if to say “ah there now, you’ll probably remember.”

You’re thinking, he’ll give up those answers now. But the answers are a let down compared with the story. When have you had a really satisfying answer anyway? Fact is in my case searching for answers has taken up most of my time and energy. It’s a cliché to say the search is it. But such isn’t always true; it’s desirable to get things running. Anyway, the answer to #1 is, “I don’t know,” and the answer to #2 is “I don’t know.” These answers slipstream with force, integument of dimension entering like a Twilight Zone solar wind that doesn’t blow you over, just blows right through – but for some reason your hair knows. To know things as themselves.