Apologia, Animal Spirits

"You never know, I said, the ones you give some semblence of burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness."  Barry Lopez

For Barry Lopez the wolverine enlivens the force of natural wilderness as the bear does for Momaday. We know we are less human by the loss of the wilderness contrast. One of four mammals will become extinct. Forests of the north, coyote and elk in storm, dead fall fires in yarrow meadows, armed men, dogs, tent, truck, prevent the hunger of the bear. But this is small stuff to the scapegoated  puritan fear of the spirit. It has a name in Leviticus that Barry Lopez does not mention because the names of the gods depend on who uses them. Once above the outbuildings of a flour mill near ASU was the proud declaration "Ashtaroth" written high above. This was not a misspelling of Ashcroft. The ambiguity of the world of spirits to a people who have no gods is that power and money mix up an argument about consequence and cause and make a literature out of it. They are all gone out of the way, there is none that does good. There is a dominant group of new pietists, newscasters and reporters who proclaim this morality of disconnect from the comfort of their desks. They have the compassion of a war reporter living off amputees while pretending to be a conscience, an English puritan living off smallpox, el exterminador and amonetizer of home mortgages living off public consumption. When these fail they express the greatest compassion for the failed, but it is for themselves. Surely no one expects to end this discussion with a conclusion.

Animal Spirits

Poets wrote of the coming biological extinction, prophetic celebrations of the natural before the industrial revolution. We find ourselves determining extinction’s cause.  Beasts first go extinct. The pain of the bestiaries is they compare the animal to the human to the detriment of both. Humans adopt some negative animal trait. Yale professor Robert Shiller says Animal Spirits are a forecasting tool, that the business world has discovered irrationality as a means to wealth. But he did not learn that animal spirits involve the reality of hunger and laying low, to love the sun and love night. When Bunyan says "poor silly Mole, that thou shouldst love to be, / Where thou, nor Sun, nor Moon, nor Stars can see," Bunyan can't see.

Physiologus heaps all occult myth and fancy on animals. Science heaps our health hazards.The asps founded fast food. Prester is the asp that  anybody who gets “struck by this animal swells to a prodigious size and is destroyed by corpulence” (T. H.White. The Book of Beasts. 175). Media heaps on our loss of identity and confusion of soul. The sirens founded media, television  (Conversation IV), “entice poor chaps by a wonderful sweetness of rhythm, and put them to sleep…pounce upon them and tear them to bits” (White, 134). In this Coercion of the Senses Odysseus is tied to the mast, tie open the eyes gates to violence as in Clockwork Orange. If they will not see they will not sleep.

If Mr. Blake were the first to celebrate the toll of industrialization in his chimney sweep, and if he were the prophet of the week, we’d resort to him to explain the man's fear of animals, fear of the tree, fear of the woman which sums the fear of himself.  Blake's portrayal of animals is like the bestiaries, a picture of the negative states as an gnostic creation, a heresy compared with Psalms and Job. Don't be like the tiger. Do be like the ant (Proverbs). Each species becomes a morality play, not a thing in itself of wonder, which attitude translates to science. What use is the thing, what experiments can be run, will it make a good paper, improve human lot? This morality play will be running when polar ice extincts. Thus in the cliched pattern of English folklore songbirds are good, hawks are bad.

In this divided state  every threat perceived in the outer world from animals, which includes all nature, is a human fear caused by division and mirrored back. That is, the savagery of the tiger, or cruelty in any exterior form is a human internal state, a spiritual despondency.  In Mysterium Magnum Boehme calls the primal "Image" corrupted, which became "a Beast of all Beasts" manifesting outwardly the inward negative properties of the man. Thus medieval bestiaries were moralities of man, you name them: "Fox, Wolf, Ear, Lion, Dog, Bull, Cat." Go around the zodiac and to every cave art to see the divided image projected upon the animal. It's not the outward form the man assumes, but the inward projected by him upon the beast. A supposed ravening, or sloth in the seven deadly sins at least is that "the Man must bear such a Beast in the Body."  This is the motive of reabsorbing these projected fears.

Reabsorb

A theory of correspondence says the inside is the out: "for as the Essence is in the Body, so the Spirit figures and forms itself internally”  (Boehme),  but if the beasts are a picture of the human their removal does not redeem him. He is redeemed by the reabsorption of projected fears. Imagine a winch of the spirit where first lust and greed, then fear and hate are pulled back! That all external nature reflects the in cast out, bestiaries unmasked.

It sounds like  fantasy to hold that all forms of life were originally part of the human, then projected out, like Plato says the woman was taken from the man. In Jerusalem, Blake says "You have a tradition, that Man anciently contained in his mighty limbs all things in Heaven & Earth" (To the Jews). In the Four Zoas he says:

"So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal body"

... where ever a grass grows
Or a leaf buds The Eternal Man is seen is heard is felt
And all his Sorrows till he reassumes his ancient bliss"(Four Zoas, 110)

"As man falls from vision, he objectifies into separate existence more and more aspects of himself. He stands in awe and horror, wondering where a beast like the tiger comes from, for he does not see in it a portion of his own fallen, divided self" (The Scattered Portions, Baine, 7).

This rehumanization of all that was separated out back into the man becomes beatific. The tygers and lions "sing they seize the instruments of harmony" (FZ 124.17). As the animals shed their skins of the human projection, "they enter upon a new life; as all forms of life rejoin Albion they reject the Selfhood which has separated man from man and man from nature"  (Baine, 8).

Firefly

THE FIREFLY

CONCENTRATING

All its resources in light

Is never better able to see

Than when near itself.

March 2011

            Gazuntite 3-11-1                                                                                        Swan  3-11-2

           



             Hermes 3-11-3                                                                                      Ballet 3-11-4

Blues 3-11-5

Indian in the Cosmos

Hermes / Messenger Final Firing

16x11x6

Red Tailed Hawk / Black Crowned Heron

Question: What makes a red tail hawk a star?Answer: Who has not watched the hawks on an afternoon in Texas skimming tree tops begin to circle higher and higher, spiral up while you are squinting as they disappear just like stars in the day?  Hawks are a kind of day star. Next Question: What makes a marigold a sun?
Three closeups of hawk at Blake's Wilderness.
Also, a ceramic at Eagle in Birdbath.

Rex

Messenger

Final firing here

Tsunami

Last of Winter Revised

Raven

I found this bird while glazing, have wanted a raven for a long time. Cobalt oxide.

Storm! Man Overboard!

Fall of the Egyptian Zodiac

Horn blown against serpent

Serpent

 

MONSTER OUROBOROS SLAIN!

NATIONS IN TURMOIL. 

WHAT WILL THEY DO WITHOUT THE WORM?

As the constellations of this zodiac  progress, the promise of the horn  blown against the serpent Ouroboros is fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer. What this promise is we know when the top of the vessel is removed, a romantic adventure preceded by suffering and death, like matriculation at a university of epic size where you don’t know anyone and the registrar tells you you have 39 hours of class and people are shouting in Egyptian about the politics of the past. Denial even in death.

This zodiac no longer exists. That is not say it is outdated or prehistoric, which it at first looks. It no longer exists because it blew up, top and bottom, and the sides were left pitted and smoked. It was put to biscuit with another piece, the figure Foresight, which however survived, probably because it had neither top nor bottom. The irony of this happening during the heavily touted  Egyptian revolution suggests a moral decline of democracy.Initially the photos of Zodiac were posted with this statement:

"This zodiac presents constellations in the promise of a horn blown against the serpent [tyrannt] Ouroboros , fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer. Now Remove the top!

Dialogue: Nman:   You'se can't kill space and time!
Warrior:   Oh yeah? Prove it!"

Making Democracy

 on Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 12:48pm

 

The top blew off.  The overthrow of false authority sets itself up as a right. Later,  it got removed. Put to biscuit kindle an hour, inadvertently l the controls were left on high from the previous fire. The manager did not return for an hour. Turning on the fan to clear the smell (and smoke), which probably made more thermal shock, in another hour there was a  crack. Zodiac exploded all over the kiln. That was the end of democracy.

Upraised arms

It also exploded the bottom, but the walls stood. The metaphor appeals. Sides standing, top and bottom gone, the moisture trapped by the lid  blew out both ends. The other piece in there, Foresight, was open in its center and withstood the blast, but its porcelain face smoked terribly and pitted from the shrapnel. Is that an allegory to see things coming?  Another lesson, blow off the top and the bottom goes with it, but the walIs, history stands? Is carbon bisc the same as making democracy? It has interesting discolorations, here and there a fine powdery dust over all its surface. 

Shall we say that Foresight before the explosion was inexperienced? Foresight needs to get out of the way? Sometimes the situation is too hot to handle. Self doubt is the last thing it needs. When all the crowds are going another way it is easy to doubt. Prophets who come to mind seem sure enough, but we do not see inside. For the ordinary, go back to how to protect a family. For this, foresight is required, but there is a requirement to act on foresight, that is what the life of a father is about, acting on foresight, which you may say of the elders of Egypt, even if their faces get singed. If the top is exploded the bottom may go. That of course leaves us worse off than when we started. That the walls are still standing is something but the vessel will not hold anything. And who knows how long they stand? Do not turn up the fire too high. Paradoxically, the constellations on these walls yet exist. If the constellations are space and time, and the worm eating itself  a figure of continuity, the tyranny of life, death and creation continue. Do you count the loss of top and bottom to this universe further creation?

Foresight and Zodiac

End note: After, Foresight was rebisqued properly. All the imperfections of the explosion fell away. No pits, no marks, pristine porcelain surface! There is a fire that purifies like Ophir, "when he has tried me I shall come forth as fine gold." 

Democracy on Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 12:48pm at the Fall of the Egypt. Its Zodiac II

Foresight

. Horn blown against serpent

Serpent Ouroboros

The Egyptian Revolution 2011 has a huge background but in the kiln it is a Zodiac destroyed.

 All in fun, I said, when this Zodiac was raw clay, that it prefigured the "MONSTER OUROBOROS SLAIN!  NATIONS IN TURMOIL, because the figures around its circumference, thinking of Egypt, portrayed "constellations in the promise of a horn blown against the serpent Ouroboros fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer.

Upraised arms

This promise we know. "Remove the top!"  I said, then added, dialogue:

"Nman:   Youse can't kill space and time, Warrior.
The reply:  Oh yeah? Prove it!"

I got this "proof" when Zodiac went to biscuit three days later.  The top blew off. Ha, ha.  I had the controls on high from the previous fire and didn't reset for the kindle. Just before the end I realized and turned it off, then turned the fan on to clear the smell and smoke, probably increasing thermal shock. Another hour and from the kiln and crack came a distinct pomp! Lifting the lid I saw  the top of Zodiac exploded all over the kiln. It also exploded the bottom, but the walls stood.

The metaphor appeals. Sides standing, but the top and bottom gone?  The moisture trapped by the lid  blew out both ends. The other piece in there, Foresight, was open in its center and withstood the blast, but it's porcelain face was smoked terribly and pitted from the shrapnel. Suppose that this is an allegory to see these things coming?  If you blow out the top (government) then the bottom goes (people). But the walls, historical controls, stands. Don't know if this carbon biscuit is the same as making democracy. It has interesting discolorations though. There is a fine powdery dust over all its surface. Last year other experiments with raw oxides had made me get a biscuit kiln in the first place, since nobody would bisc them. That time too much cobalt oxide ran off a leg in the second fire and fused the kiln shelf.

Lessons

This was Foresight before the explosion. he was Inexperienced shall we say?

Foresight needs experience to get out of its own way. 

Sometimes the situation is too hot to handle.

Sometimes it won't be believed? 

Self doubt is the last thing it needs. When all the crowds are going the other way it is easy to doubt. The prophets seem sure enough, but we do not see inside.

For the ordinary person these things go back to how to protect a family. Foresight is required, but there is a requirement to act on foresight. That is what the life of a father is about, acting on foresight. The elders of Egypt, even if their faces get singed, must act on foresight. It is an interesting speculation that if the top is exploded the bottom may go. That leaves us worse off than when we started if the king or head of state is the top and the people are the grassroots at the bottom. Both are lost to the force of explosion. The walls are still standing but the vessel won't hold anything. And who knows how long they stand? Do not turn up the fire too high. Paradoxically, the constellations on the walls of this vessel still exist.I'm going to put on a new top and a new bottom! [This effort failed.] Perhaps the walls are history. If the constellations on those walls are space and time where the worm Ouroboros is eating itself, a figure of continuity, and the forces opposed to  justice, tyrannies of life, death and creation yet continue, then the loss of top and bottom  make further creation, but of the same kind.

End note: After all this Foresight was rebisqued properly, but not Zodiac. As if by fire, all its imperfections of the explosion fell away. Burn Us Up! No pits, no marks, only pristine porcelain surfaces! We may conclude from this that there is a fire that purifies, like Ophir, "when he has tried me I shall come forth as fine gold, the gold of Ophir." Let this fire fall on Egypt too.

Fall of the Egyptian Zodiac

Foresight and Zodiac Before

MONSTER OUROBOROS SLAIN!

NATIONS IN TURMOIL. 

WHAT WILL THEY DO WITHOUT THE WORM?

As the constellations of this zodiac  progress, the promise of the horn  blown against the serpent Ouroboros is fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer. What this promise is we know when the top of the vessel is removed, a romantic adventure preceded by suffering and death, like matriculation at a university of epic size where you don’t know anyone and the registrar tells you you have 39 hours of class and people are shouting in Egyptian about the politics of the past. Denial even in death.

This zodiac no longer exists. That is not say it is outdated or prehistoric, which it at first looks. It no longer exists because it blew up, top and bottom, and the sides were left pitted and smoked. It was put to biscuit with another piece, the figure Foresight, which however survived, probably because it had neither top nor bottom. The irony of this happening during the heavily touted  Egyptian revolution suggests a moral decline of democracy.Initially the photos of Zodiac were posted with this statement:

"This zodiac presents constellations in the promise of a horn blown against the serpent [tyrannt] Ouroboros , fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer. Now Remove the top!

Dialogue: Nman:   You'se can't kill space and time!
Warrior:   Oh yeah? Prove it!"

The top blew off.  The overthrow of false authority sets itself up as a right. Later,  it got removed. Put to biscuit kindle an hour, inadvertently l the controls were left on high from the previous fire. The manager did not return for an hour. Turning on the fan to clear the smell (and smoke), which probably made more thermal shock, in another hour there was a  crack. Zodiac exploded all over the kiln. That was the end of democracy.

Making Democracy

 on Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 12:48pm

 If the constellations are space and time, and the worm eating itself  a figure of continuity, the tyranny of life, death and creation continue. Do you count the loss of top and bottom to this universe further creation?

Icon

Footprints

Tree

Jar

Cups

Badger Burrow

There is much to say of badger in a vortex diminishing into Concord of the opposing vortex, the apex of each in the middle of the other's [b]ase, which is Yeats' Vision, but Joyce says it is, one world burrowing on another  (Boldereff, 75). To me Kafka's Burrow is not ambiguous at all and it attains all that feels sentient, far beyond the glyphs of Butler-Jouyece. If you read these beings you no longer need follow convention, so just let your solecisms ride. Not speaking of the underworld is the chief pursuit of all writing. Beings attracted to rock piles  collect them in memory, smoother than basketballs, river rock with berms of silt, gold traces. Sometimes badger browses below rosemary in the hill, but dreams to build up trail with cliff sheep, faint but real. Not hawk, dog, cat - badger builds entrances, exits at Texas Canyon, Enchanted Rock, Old Sarum, caer Cromlech. Berm burrows fort all  kinds of sleep. Badger day labors the night burrow. Mouse, Rat, day, night, sleep confine the other. Dream a burrow, no matter bairn, occupant meditation runs deep. Still Waters! Not that hawks brood tree lines to prevent cat sleep. Sleep is a trail below trees in the rock veined cairns. Yale prof Robert Shiller says Animal Spirits are a forecasting tool, that irrationality leads to wealth. Yellow Rattler, rich in irreason, what are your irreasons? Animal spirits know 1) the reality of hunger 2) laying low.  Love the sun, love night! Sleep! So Bunyan says "poor silly Mole, that thou should'st love to be, / Where thou, nor Sun, nor Moon, nor Stars can see." Pobrecito. Bunyan's tortoises are dug when raptors come down on wires and trees. He takes a white wicker chair out under the garden oak where women bathe in the afternoon red bud and almond blooms. Smoother than basketballs, berm beings collect in memory. Badger drowses below the hill: "I want to be a groundhog or rat, maybe a wolverine, badger or fox, feel the earth house like walls of flesh. In comfort to meditate, store nuts, build a house with exists, sharpen faculties, feel  bairn, build berms out of dirt and stone,  love a wheel barrow. Porcupines are naive as they can be. It is a form of meditation in the Dogen's Extensive Record discovered when I first searched the phrase  "the bright extensive will," which says "one who has gone beyond learning and is free from effort" gains "the opportunity of human form"..."emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash."  Those cannot be understood by discriminative thinking or the practice of supernatural power who seek  the dignified conduct beyond seeing and hearing" (Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen). To this add nothing and everything believe according to the truth. Take, receive, impart, do and reflect on doing and speaking as the sound of the gong we raise compassion over all beings in distress.

This all has to do with the meaning of sleep. The badger works hard all day. Sleep is not confined to one or the other. Dreams come together in the work.

Lily I, II

A piece of string for Lily: We sent to the Kurds of Iraq to dig water wells, to Haiti, to Afganistan that very cold winter for tents and flew Jews to Israel from Russia. Aunt libby used to bless us this way. So while these things weigh in the balance you know it is to bless so this is sent with that and no other string attached. With love, D

Two Views

 "Jews are generally buried in a very simple way, however. We are buried in a plain wood casket/coffin with no metal fittings; our bodies are not embalmed, so that they may return swiftly to the earth.
When a Jewish person dies, a group of people within the Jewish community called the chevre kadisha (which simply means "holy society") prepares the body for burial. The persons who do the preparation are the same gender as the deceased. The body is undressed, covered with a sheet to maintain the person's modesty even in death, and washed. After washing, the body is dressed in simple white garments - loose top and drawstring pants of cotton; alternatively, a shroud may be used. The body is then placed in the casket/coffin. The head and face are also covered. If the deceased owned a prayer shawl, it is rendered no longer kosher by cutting off one corner with its fringes, and is placed in the coffin with the deceased. Any items that the family might wish to include are also placed in the coffin, and it is closed. The coffin always has holes drilled in it, so that the body may come in contact with the earth; some Jews choose to dispense with the coffin entirely.

In the time between the death and burial, the body is NEVER left alone. The body is ritually guarded by shomerim - guards or "keepers." The shomerim are not allowed to eat, drink, or perform any commandment in the presence of the deceased; it is considered to be mocking the dead, as a dead person no longer has the privilege of doing these things.

Jewish funerals are always "closed-casket." We do not believe in remembering the person as a dead body, but rather in remembering them as the living person that they were. Funerals are held within 24 hours of death if at all possible, unless that would place the funeral on the sabbath; in that case, they are held as soon after the sabbath as is practical.

We do not use flowers at our funerals; we believe that flowers are for joyous occasions, and when we lose someone dear to us, we are not joyful.

There used to be occasions when a Jew was not buried in a Jewish cemetery because they had committed suicide; this was before suicide was understood as a mental imbalance, and I haven't heard of it actually occurring in a LONG time. Jews are buried face-up, like anyone else, no matter where they are buried." http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080110051127AAN8E8M

Tortoise Carrying Pot

 

Tortoise Carrying Pot

The idea of Ko, "as the Shwo Wan explains it," is "of now walking, now halting, as the tortoise, traveling at ease in the untroubled mind," the essence of Kwang- tzu Tao, where "the largest and smallest creatures do not pass judgment on one another but equally find their happiness."(Legge, Chuang Tzu, Dover I, 128)

In the original Tortoise Carrying Pot of raw clay there are blues of cobalt carbonate and oxide, rutile, a green, nickel carbonate and yellow iron oxide. None of them will fire as such. The pink and blacks will be blue. When I brought it home I couldn't touch it when unveiled that morning. What use is the potter? I had rolled out B mix, laminated with Jamaica and the last found clays of that bag, took it down to 1/4 inch, laid it on a board, sifted on the oxides, pounded in the acanthus woodcut, pressed a cedar shim in ledges, rolled it up round a plastic tube, picked it up, set it on end and let it dry a little. Too soon I took off the tube to pack newspaper inside. The whole thing collapsed in a sheet. Using my chest, hands (I had rolled the papers up in a big ball) I stuffed the newspapers inside, picked it up and bounced it on the board, because otherwise it wouldn't sit up (La Primavera, the first of this series, fell in the firing). When I saw the tortoise I got a chill. 

Tortoise Carrying Pot

Comments: "I heard that in Ch'u there is a sacred tortoise which has been dead now some three thousand years and that the prince keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of his ancestral temple." Chuang Tzu

I have given my tortoise an honored grave. Tracy, got her name from Hank, the Indian agent neighbor across the street who died and it was left to me to adopt Tracy and her mate Oscar or they'd be lost. Hank named her, wrote her name on her shell with his phone number, as he did for Oscar, the half as big male he got from the side of the road outside Nogales about 1950. They are centenarians. Tracy is not a member of the family in the sense that she comes in with the dogs, but every time we see her is an occasion for rejoicing, the way she stands, sits, walks, lifts a leg, her head. She has carved out a permanent domicile under some big logs that border a cement slab, dug way down under. The logs are bermed up on the other side, also there are sand bags and the whole is elevated so the flood cannot intrude. The life story of Tracy and Oscar is retold each August when he mounts her in the garden, very fierce little guy, and independent, he has many homes and comes out later in the season than she. We have had their offspring for a decade. The babies are hard to spot. Sometimes there are a dozen. When our Blessing chow was young she would pick them up and bring them to me gently in the yard. So I'm saying that to celebrate the tortoise is something longed for.

"But the Cherubim represent animal creation as well as man; therefore the animal creation will also be redeemed with man (G. H. Pember, Animals, 32): "It is not therefore strange that, in describing the great redemption scene at the close of this age, John should say, "and every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea and all that are in them, heard them saying, "Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto Him that sits upon the Throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever" 36.

Perhaps this is like the jeweled tortoise of the Emperor. I did eight of these because I could melt glass on the shell,  advertised that the Shemer wanted them for their gardens, 50 of them! but not. I did trade one to another vendor for a rusted  metal pig he was selling. I gave him the tortoise and he insisted I take the pig in exchange. A daughter traded for that pig  to hang on her front porch where it still hangs, the tortoise that became a pig.