Nov. aa6 (01)
Happy New Year, folks!
One nice thing about using a Wiccan calendar
is that for us, it's not last year anymore. All that craziness that
happened then can be put in the past: it was last year, and this is this
year. A fresh new time, unlike any time before. It's Morning
in America and all things are possible. Yep. Bush is President,
and he's enjoying overwhelming support to continue the bombing. He claims
it's a "New War Order" or some such. It could only be This Year:
1991.
That was meant to be funny.
I'm not sure what I'm seeing in the world, terrorist hysteria or a coup d'etat? Hey, I was kidding when I said after the last election that perhaps 96 would go into history books as the year of the last free election in the USA. Really. It was just a joke.
Life imitates satire.
The first time I climbed the mountain, in
the second year of the comet, ('97, I think.) I was looking for divine
inspiration about the human condition and my role in it. So, like ancestors
before me, I climbed a mountain, and took other standard steps to alter
my brain chemistry.
Then I fell asleep, exhausted from the
climb. Waking some time later, the wind was up, and I could hear
things in the wind, individual whirl-winds, islands of spontaneous order
in a storm of chaos, and I could see that the top of the mountain was also
the bottom of a river, a river of air. And the river of air was alive with
spirits whose projection into this world came in the form of whirlwinds
and storms, and I could hear wind serpents snapping their tails of fractal
chaos, flying by.
After
a while, the wind calmed down, and I calmed
down, and I remembered my quest for divine inspiration, and I resolved
to come out of my cold cave with my warm dogs and go up on the rock and
have a look around.
What I saw
was just stunning. As I recall, the
comet was low in the west, or north west. It was so beautiful, I
cannot even say, shimmering and with a tail, (not the ominous fuzzy eyeball
of the first comet, 'Hayakoke', or whatever it was.) This was right
after a bunch of people had killed themselves thinking that they were gonna
be picked up by something connected with that comet. It really freaked
everybody out, because these people were not idiots. They were more
like cranked-up new agers and computer programmers. I looked at the
comet and thought of that, and yes, I did, perhaps, perceive something
there, not _in_ the comet, but hiding _behind_ it. I didn't then,
and don't now rule out the possibility that these people had "ascended"
in exactly the way they claimed. Why not? Death, I reckon,
is a lot like acid: strongly influenced by what you expect to happen and
where your head is when it happens to you. But no, whatever it was
wasn't there for me... unless I wanted it to be, and I did not.
I think the wind kicked back up at this
time,
and I decided that the things I could hear
going by seemed like air dragons.
I centered some, and sought the divine voice.
Next day was Easter, a holiday that has always meant a lot to me, even
in a Xian context, and was the anniversary of my first somewhat mature
sexual experience.
And
the Voice said that the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit were Moe, Larry and Curly. And that Earth's chief export to
the rest of the galaxy was comedy. Comedy was the product, the nectar squeezed
from our species, needed somewhere else. Everything else about human
existence, at least from the standpoint of intergalactic trade, was "husk."
I saw a glimpse of millions of flying saucers, parked in the space between
the spaces in the sky, watching us, packed tightly, so if they were in
_our_ space they would block out the sun over every place humans inhabit.
And they were watching us, some of them eating pop corn, being Very Very
Quiet because, if they made a noise, we might stop being so funny.
And
What is so funny about humans? We
are to them what the Three Stooges are to us: we entertain them with
the pointless pain we inflict on one another, and the endless variation
and creativity we show in inflicting it. We are semi-enlightened
creatures stuck in primitive pack behaviors that make no sense to us, even
as we do them, and the look on our faces sometimes is just priceless.
Wars are funniest of all. We really bust it out and move fast when we have a war. And we get so turned on. War is just too sexy for words. That's why there's always a big surge in mating right after wars, not to mention during wars, all those young people away from home, with death looming in the next land mine, and so forth.
Later that night
I remembered again the quest for divine
instructions. I needed to ground and center and focus intent, and
get all the little guys in the back of the room of my head to shut up and
pay attention... "OK ye Old Ones of the mountain, what now?"
And they said, "Anything you want... and think you can pull off.
Whatever."
And I said, "What I want to do is
do the right thing, to act in harmony with your divine will... or at least
to know what it is, and then decide."
They said "Pick a [Major Arcana] Card,
and become that. Pick any one you want. Doesn't matter, because
you'll have to be them all before it's done."
11/14/01
So I'm looking at
these articles about the age of surveillance, mo' better cameras, "reality"
tv, and so forth. And I think back to Andy Warhol. I became
a Warhol fan when I saw a graffiti on the outside of the National Portrait
Gallery (or maybe one of the other art museums) in D.C. which said "'Art
is anything you can get away with' Andy Warhol." I took a picture
of it, in BW, and I think that pic went into my college yearbook.
I wish I still had the negative.
I felt I was getting
away with something. If that's what "art" feels like, then it totally
works for me.
Warhol said a lot
of things. He said that "In the Future, you could just point at something,
and that would be art." Or something to that effect. Well,
in the age of point-and-shoot cameras, it's true. Just about anyone
can preserve a particular view of a particular scene at a particular time,
and set it next to other "art" and let it stand or fall on its own merits.
There's no real "skill" anymore. It's all "eye."
Well, Good.
But the Warhol idea that I'm really thinking about is when he said "In the Future, everyone will be famous, for fifteen minutes." Well, it certainly seems he was right. Seems just about everyone gets a turn at being a talking head on the evening news, if they want it. On the darker side, there is the age of surveillance, in which we are all on camera, and maybe tracked by cell phone, GPS satellite, or face-recognition cameras, pretty much all the time when we are not at home, and maybe even then.
On the one hand, one
could get paranoid. But all the paranoia isn't going to help.
After all, it was paranoia that put us in this internal/external security
straight jacket in the first place.
More paranoia is
not the solution.
As Negativeland says,
"We need more Dada."
So what's the Dada
response to this?
What's the Yippie
Surrealist response?
Well, what's their
response to everything?
"It's
SHOWTIME!"
That's right.
We are ALL ON TV! All the time! We have a captive audience of very
bored people. This is our chance to be stars of the seven inch
screen! We should behave at all times as if we were performing before
an audience, because we are. In every city and town, musicians should
set up and play in front of security cams as if it were their MTV audition.
We should take off on caravan road trips which, when plotted on a map,
spell out dirty words or trace arcane symbols. Everything we do is being
examined. Let's give them something to think about!
Life has always been
performance art, but now, for the first time, we have an audience.