[Why I love] Yeats and the Enigmatic Science of Gnosis

If you have some free minutes, and don't mind being enchanted by Yeats proto-mythpunk style, read Rosa Alchemica, one of his best (that I've read) short stories.

Ahh, this is such classic Yeats! Rosa Alchemica is a fictionalized narrative of one man's initiation (such as it is) into an occult alchemical order. The plot is very simple, merely providing a frame for a string of detailed descriptions of deep dreamlike and visionary states--the meat of the story. A wealthy and educated man who lives a life of solitude is visited by an old friend. The old comrade, somewhat of a trickster/mage figure, triggers the protagonist to experience a mystical revelation and subsequently coaxes him to come to the headquarters of a certain Order where he shall participate in initiatory rites. The pinnacle of the story describes an ecstatic group dance, which takes place in a round room with a domed ceiling, all surfaces covered with elaborate mosaics depicting a syncretistic amalgam of deities. There are many aesthetic parallels to Greco-Roman art, myth and architecture, and also literary allusions to ancient mystery cults (Eleusis in particular). Yeats masterfully conveys a full-throttle psychedelic experience that arcs through the entire story, and is neither good nor bad, but depicts forces both demonic and divine in unrelenting, psycho-somatic interplay.

"When we came in the grey light to the great half-empty terminus, it seemed to me I was so changed that I was no more, as man is, a moment shuddering at eternity,
but eternity weeping and laughing over a moment"

***

"A couple of hours after Sunset Michael Robartes returned and told me
that I would have to learn the steps of an exceedingly antique dance,
because before my initiation could be perfected I had to join three
times in a magical dance, for rhythm was the wheel of Eternity, on
which alone the transient and accidental could be broken, and the spirit set free."

***

Yeats is one of my most beloved mystics, and possessed that transgressive identity that straddled both artist and scholar (to paraphrase Herman Hesse's definition). You cannot quite call him contemporary, beause he lived at such an amazing junction in history - the Gilded age through to right before World War Two. A pregnant era, but also a time when the mythic realities of the past still lapped at one's feet -- or as Yeats puts it "the Sidhe still pass in every wind".

The ultimate concern of the mystic consists of the myriad and multiform paths to human gnosis. That is, esoteric knowledge that flows, like a river, through the ages, its form changed by the lenses and vessels of culture, but its true content always the same. Moreover, they are concerned with the phenomenology of gnosis, such that you could call them "scientists of God". Many are known to history books as poets, because poems are the field-notes of such a study, and so naturally the dedicated mystic produces volumes. Such people are either cursed or blessed to never leave alone the symbol of "God" on the proverbial shelf of the mind; the condensation of divinity into one word both excites and agitates them to no end. So they continually return to it and unpack it, I dare say even disembowel it in the frenzied search so characteristic of the "insane" or "hysterical" or "ascetic" mystic. (The ascetic is frenzied too, at times, but the wildness occurs deep within the boundaries of skin, and so others do not see it) Indeed, sometimes I think that hysteria and ascesis are one in the same when the object of worship is The Divine. The cults who engage in the trance-dance--both ancient and modern--know this riddle well. The trance dance somehow contains all forms of worship and mysticism folded within itself, and the actual ritual, trapped in time, is some sort of alchemical machine that transforms all moods, emotions and desires into motion, thus into kinetic energy that is absorbed by the earth. Dancing furiously for hours on end, like Yeats describes or Hesse in Steppenwolf, is a kind of ascesis (=discipline, not deprivation), and it is not fundamentally, and in a magical sense (regarding the affective yields, or what is produced), that different from fasting and sitting completely still. They are both spiritual heuristics and they both trigger the body to procure energy from long-untapped sources, deep deep within. In mining for this energy, this light...jewels and gemstones are unearthed. These are the divine entities that people call by many names. And they are thus set free to roam for a liminal time among us.

Deconstructing Gender Politics in Dance Music (NPR)

Heard this interview with Terre Thaemlitz (a.k.a DJ Sprinkles) last night on All Things Considered on my slow, snowy drive home.

“Most of my music is made in a kind of anti-climactic way, and very much involves boredom, and a kind of non-performativity… and if there are improvisational elements, it’s kind of parodying the idea of gesture as a kind of rock format, and critiquing that from a transgender and…feminist side.”

- Terre Thaemlitz

“…in the original house tracks, when they talk about “escape”, it’s not escaping the work-a-day grind of your work scene… it’s about escaping very serious political structures that are pressing you, and very serious gender strictures that are opressing you… and doing it with a sense of humor, a sense of glamor…”

- Jesse Doris, producer

A lot of the cultural criticism stuff is also relevant to the underground psy-trance scene, I think, although not so much from a queer perspective, but from a transhuman one. That is to say, for me a queer perspective has always been implicit in the politics of psytrance, since the movement definitely supports a refusal to “essentialize” one’s identity —a la queer theory—and seems to accept postmodern/post-binary notions of gender and sexuality. I think a big difference is that the messages and aesthetics in house music are nods to a collective memory and experience of social/political oppression, whereas the similar messages in the psytrance scene come from a Spiritual or Religious experience of paradigm-shifting away from Western materialism/scientific imperialism, which also yields messages of peace/acceptance and unity of the human family.

Dear readers... meet my goats!

Why haven’t I posted a pic of mah herd on here yet? I don’t know, but here they are (all 3 of them). :P

They are Nigerian Dwarves. They were actually first imported to the U.S. to be fed to zoo animals, big cats and such. Eventually they began to gain some recognition as livestock for very small-scale animal husbandry… particularly micro-dairy because their milk is high in butterfat and relative to their size they produce more milk than many other breeds of goat. Muddy’s the big one with the horns—he’s a wether (a castrated male). Tank is the one on the well-head and Clove is the brown one on the right-hand side. They’re does—around 8 months, I think. Hard to believe, but those little squirts are technically old enough to be bred. We however won’t breed them until they are at least a year old.

I have a profound love for cloven-hoofed creatures that has taken many forms, but in the last five years of my life led me to a series of apprenticeships on small goat and sheep dairies—many of them also artisan creameries. Now, with grad school and “nesting” with my partner on the horizon, I want to maintain a link to the land ethic and lifestyle that a bond with these creatures enables. These three are helping me do that… moreover, if my partner and I end up moving away from Vermont for school for a couple of years, my mom is on board for shepherding-duties… and the benefits, of course (milk!)

Anyhow, they help me keep things primal, mythic and just plain mischevious. XD So I wanted to introduce them to y’all.

Science concedes: Being Here Now is the way to be

Just read this article in the paper today. Cool that science is finding a way to articulate how much being in the moment/having your focus consumed by a single task can be deeply satisfying. I've long understood that humans aren't one-job animals, but I think we're likewise one-job-at-a-time animals. It's not that multi-tasking is bad—but rather the option of multiple tasks is what can wear at your ability to focus on one thing that you really love, for long enough a period of time as to allow you to feel like you've truly connected with/become that thing. Nicholas Carr talks about the cognitive clusterfuck precipitated by the ways some of us interact with cyberculture in his recent book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

A lot of my own experience with craft/skill/geekdom has corroborated this; it's all about the flow.

Article: When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays (New York Times)

Addendum:

Just so no one thinks I'm implying that daydreaming/mind-wandering is bad: There have also been recent studies about how "letting your mind wander" while at work, say, is beneficial, and that it stimulates creativity— basically it's good for your brain, just like dreaming while you're asleep is! But that stuff isn't actually antithetical to this—I think they're two sides of the same coin. Of course you've got to let your mind wander at work & give yourself "mind breaks"; we haven't evolved to sit at a desk 8 hours a day (thank God!)

The Commons: Not an inevitable tragedy!

Great study reported at ScienceDaily. People have been using the "tragedy of the commons" to further their political agendas long enough...it's time for some alternative perspectives.

Overcoming the "Tragedy of the Commons": Conditional Cooperation Helps in Forest Preservation

ScienceDaily (Nov. 13, 2010) — Many imminent problems facing the world today, such as deforestation, overfishing, or climate change, can be described as 'commons problems.' The solution to these problems requires cooperation from hundreds and thousands of people. Such large scale cooperation, however, is plagued by the infamous cooperation dilemma. According to the standard prediction, in which each individual follows only his own interests, large-scale cooperation is impossible because free-riders enjoy common benefits without bearing the cost of their provision. Yet, extensive field evidence indicates that many communities are able to manage their commons, albeit with varying degrees of success.

Full article

Post-theism and non-theism: Refreshing alternatives

The excerpt from Wikipedia below is a succinct summation of why I refuse to identify as an atheist even though lots of my peers with whom I share worldviews do identify that way—or at least seem to.

This has been partially inspired because I've recently joined a certain social network with the explicit goal of connecting with other queer and transgendered folks. Many of them are sharp-witted kids who can wax some sweet poetics on gender studies, queer theory, and postmodernism in general. You'd think they'd be accepting of other people's beliefs, right? But actually, lately I've seen a lot of really hurtful, anti-Christian stuff posted. And some of it is even kind of triggering. I guess I've been feeling disappointed - and distanced from a group that I have found such deep, personal solidarity with. I guess it's my problem for assuming queers are socially liberal. Eh.. you live, you learn. I digress.

Anyhow, I disagree that the logical conclusion of the juxtaposition of "our" liberal, pro-queer culture with conservative, religious fundamentalist culture is that liberals should choose to "be atheist". To do so, IMO is to use "atheism" as an aegis for political (and also interpersonal/emotional) motives. The atheist-theist binary sucks, and that's an understatement. (It's non-binary identities all the way down, folks!) Modern “explicit atheism” —stoked by showcasing "neo-atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet in pop-culture science mags— is steadily sucking young, intelligent people into its ranks. Dawkins, Dennet, Pinker et al. are scientists, and reductionist ones at that. I actually really like Dawkins and appreciate his work in the realm of evolutionary biology. But they're not scholars of religious studies or theologians (and FYI, theologians can be agnostic or non-theist!) —and the fact that most of the neo-atheists think that the field of religious studies is "dead in the water" is a pretty good indicator to me that I'm going to have to ignore the stuff they say about religion.

Post-theism is a variant of nontheism that proposes to have not so much rejected theism as rendered it obsolete, that God belongs to a stage of human development now past. Within nontheism, post-theism can be contrasted with antitheism. The term appears in Christian liberal theology and Postchristianity.

Frank Hugh Foster in a 1918 lecture announced that modern culture had arrived at a "post-theistic stage" in which humanity has taken possession of the powers of agency and creativity that had formerly been projected upon God.^[1] Post-theism thus recognizes the point made by criticism of atheism that atheism may lead to moral defect, but at the same time asserts that the only reason for theism is the prevention of such defects, and that once nontheistic morality has reached maturity, theism has fulfilled its function and may be discarded.

Denys Turner argues that Karl Marx did not choose atheism over theism, but rejected the binary "Feuerbachian" choice altogether, a position which by being post-theistic is at the same time necessarily post-atheistic.^[2]

Related ideas include Friedrich Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead", and less pessimistically, the transtheism of Paul Tillich or Pema Chödrön.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-theism

The Occult Legacy of Nature-Gnosis

The Rosicrucians (an occult Christian brotherhood - not much is known of historical members) call the people who abide by the secrets yielded by natural wisdom "the Followers of the Spherical Art". The following passage from one of the anonymously published 17th century Rosicrucian manifestos (The Fama Fraternitatis) succinctly sums it up. I found this paragraph to be a mind-blowing summation of the results of high-order contemplation of the natural world (which includes one's body). Mental contemplation and ascecis—techniques of bodily discipline—are in fact two aspects of the same endeavor. All is yoga.

"King Solomon testifies of himself, that he upon earnest prayer and
desire did get and obtain such Wisdom of God, that thereby he knew how
the World was created, thereby he understood
the Nature of the Elements, also the time, beginning, middle and end, the increase and decrease, the change of times through the whole Year,
the Revolution of the Year, and Ordinance of the Stars;
he understood also the properties of tame and wilde
Beasts, the cause of the raigning of the Winds, and minds and intents of
men, all sorts and natures of Plants, vertues of Roots, and others, was not
unknown to him. Now I do not think that there can be found any one
who would not wish and desire with all his heart to be a Partaker of this
noble Treasure..."