Mental Progress, or Clarity no. 2

When I was growing up, I thought that love and sex were mutually exclusive. The impression I got was that sex was basically greedy, animalistic, callous. Love was emotional but sterile. In other words, to love someone basically doomed you to a lifetime of writing them letters from the other side of the room, lest your noble intentions be sullied, blah blah bullshit.

This now strikes me as... well, just completely wrong, and so very damaging. You might as well cut your brain in half with a knife as think along such divisive lines. Again, it's the yin and the yang. They aren't far apart, but constantly touching and flowing into each other. A person can be two things at once, and the body and the soul and the mind aren't enemies, for heaven's sake, they're friends. They can all operate at once, synergize. Christ. It's so obvious. I wish I could've processed this about a dozen years ago or so, but better late than never, I guess.

Postscript provided by Of Montreal:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSZKbvsWNK4

I used to think in black

While at my country seat

Now I'm peaking in so many ways

The gloom is in retreat

Yeah, the dark epoch is over

I found my efeblum

Then passed Ernst's mausoleum

Defended by a rook

Who shot a look so virulent

It pierced me like a hook

The palaver of solipsists

Exploding in my skull...

Yeah and we both despise

All of the academic swine

Who made the author of "Discuss Ulysses" benign

So what if Wednesday finds us

Wearing rabies parachutes?

Foaming like the melody,

A single fairy flute

The atmosphere is viscous,

We're sticking to the brine...

Yeah and we both despise

All of the academic swine

Who made the author of "Discuss Ulysses" benign

When the lanterns fill with finches

So begins the brawl

Their brains are like porcupines

And mine's a paper ball (x2)

I know they don't understand

They don't get us at all

Their moss mangles polyanthus

And mine's a paper ball

Song Time

Inspired by one of John Frusciante's inimitable covers, here's my version of "For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her":

And the man doing it 100x better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCmrKgjRb1c

In Which I Explain My Blog Title

Pro-prologue:

Sometimes the coincidences begin to pile up. Jung wrote about this in his essay on synchronicity.... like one time he had a patient who told him a dream about a rare scarab beetle, whereupon he looked out the window to notice one knocking against the glass. He opened the window, grabbed it, and presented it to his patient, who had a lot of veils dissolved in that moment, or so he tells us.

Prologue:

Where do we keep our best selves, and is there even such a thing? I look inside myself and see a landscape. Not static, but fluxuous. (Yes, I invented that word). Sometimes the sky is an enormous space of clear air, sometimes it's a suffocating atmosphere of total drear. Where do I keep the little glowing cells? I know they're in there, I've felt them. Under the earth, hiding behind blades of grass? Sometimes I feel absolutely angelic, like I could photosynthesize, and then next week I'll feel paltry, craven, weak, cruel, small.

OK Then:

I have a theory that people are basically either energy batteries or energy sinks. You can't stay one for long. You can change from one to the other slowly or quickly, from minute to minute, or even faster. The bright animals are suffused with a surfeit of light energy, which is designed to infiltrate the system and activate the people around them. The dark animals are basically holes in the air. They suck up the energy around them. It's not their fault, necessarily, although some people get awfully good at being energy sinks. Like they base their self-concept as someone who depresses others, and they (erroneously) think this lends them individuality and interest.

This is such a basic duality that I think it holds true across most cultures and times. You move up, you move down. Bright or dark. Levity, or else gravity. You commune with angels, or you commune with demons. (If you want to just regard a Taijitu for a while, it'll explain all this far better than I ever could, just sayin'.)

The Travails of Morrissey, pt. 2

Barbarism begins in the theater... and a crack on the head is, indeed, what you get.

Small Dog Ahoy!

Good dog. Except when she gets into my room and eats my headphones (twice now).

Dammit, everyone, I'm ordering you to listen to this. It's the instrumental track from Otis and Carla's "Tramp", on Stax Records. If those fucking drums don't get you out of your seat, you have no blood in your body and I'm ashamed to know you.

Click Here!

See, this is what I mean when I say it's hard for me to get into contemporary music sometimes, because no one is doing THIS anymore. This is the lost art of sounding like three shots of whiskey and a punch to the gut.

The Men Who Glare at Stoats

This afternoon, I went to go see The Men Who Stare at Goats, the movie about the US government's involvement in paranormal/psychic activity on the parts of their soldiers. I actually really liked it. Basically, it starred Jeff Bridges as a Vietnam soldier who, after a near-death experience on the battlefield, decided that conventional warfare tactics were limiting, constrictive, and inadequate. So he chucked the whole boot-camp paradigm and spent some time among California's more... free-thinking citizens. George Clooney starred as Bridges' star pupil, and it had Ewan McGregor as a reporter tracing their histories.

It was obviously set up to be funny, more so than I had actually been expecting. Because there are themes to the film that I think are... well, pretty fucking important, actually. I mean, the central idea to the movie is that soldiers, of any nation, are not being allowed to live up to their potential. Bridges talks about the need to create a force of "warrior-monks", a cadre of people who employ unconventional battlefield tactics such as a fierce love of peace, generosity of spirit, compassion, empathy, and the finely-honed ability to fall in love with anyone, instantly, given the need.

The antagonist of the movie is the desire on the part of other characters to use this spiritual power for the same old bullshit motives, government contracts and and personal gain. (One of the best parts of the movie came from a crew-cutted Halliburton-like dickhead and his entourage of armed goons, who displayed rampant fear of attack and itchy trigger-fingers-- not from enemy combatants, but from rival American contractor companies. Watching identical mercs in polo shirts, sniping at each other from behind Chevy Tahoes, over who was going to be the first to build a Starbucks in Baghdad, was about as close as the film got to a Joseph Heller-like sense of true venom and bite-- Milo Minderbinder in Iraq.) Kevin Spacey played the main creep, and the man's such a good actor that he could basically show up and fiddle with his watch for a half-hour and be enthralling. (Sadly, the movie doesn't give him a chance to exert himself much past this).

Like I said, it's funny. But it also sort of twinges something inside you, or at least it did me. Watching George Clooney wander around, sure of himself on some strange level, while simultaneously stumbling into blockheaded moves and acting irrationally, seemed to draw some parallel to all the people I've ever run into who had something to teach me. Or even myself, at my most open. I mean, have you ever felt like you were a singular entity, shaped of some potent material, ready to channel a cosmic necessity, and then you locked your keys inside your car? But it didn't really matter, because that shit just happens and you have to be bigger than that. And the movie drew a pretty fine line between Clooney just being full of hot air, and showing flashes of something that indeed make him a little more than ordinary. There's one scene where he and Ewan McGregor are sitting besides a busted car, waiting for help. Ewan McGregor's flipping a coin out of boredom, and Clooney's calling heads or tails, three or four times in a row, right each time.

"What's your record for this?" McGregor asks.

"Two hundred and forty-six. Tails," responds Clooney, who is of course right again.

It's a small moment, and there are several like it, but it's pretty significant in its impact. For all of Clooney's foibles, he's right just often enough for you to wonder. If you'll forgive me a pretty big stretch, it's a lot like religion. From what I've seen (and lived), most of it is puff and blow, a lot of entrenched cultural hokum. But there's also little kernels of truth in it, the underlying kind of thinking that can get our collective heads out of our collective asses. So yeah, it's funny to watch Jeff Bridges telling a hand-picked group of military recruits that their first official assignment is to dance to Billy Idol. There's a lot in the movie that's worth a good hoot and snicker. But when I stop to consider the idea of teachers, of governments invested in training people to emit light... I mean, Christ, couldn't we use more of that?

In other news, I need a decompression chamber of a kind that hasn't been invented yet. I often think that if I ever have to truly detox from a chemical substance, I'll have had some good practice beforehand. It's a paradox: abstention is a kind of immersion.