I have been thinking lately on my old friend and frequent, shape-shifting, interlocutor and her project seeking to catalog the influences behind George Lucas’ STAR WARS. Though much less erudite and lacking in comprehensive vision, it might be likened to Robert Graves’ THE WHITE GODDESS, which has generally been reduced and so somewhat misapprehended by the resurgence of Goddess worship in the West.

Graves’ intent was not merely to assert existence of the Goddess’ religion within and behind all religions of Mediterranean Europe, Africa and the Near East, but to recover that religion by its grammar, lying unremembered in the letters and sequence of the Alpha-Bet. So too, my old friend (in the sense of Kirk and Kahn), was seeking the grammar of STAR WARS, though without quite being able to read it. To identify, that is, the Elephant in the Room.

Like, to some extent, the old woman who stole the Manual from Wudang mountain and gained a level of power denied her by the gender-limit of the monastery’s male lineage. Still, not being able to actually read the manual, her power is limited and her heart impure. She becomes, rather than a true teacher, a Poison Dragon. Akin perhaps to the gnostic Sophia who glimpses the Pleroma and so falling in love conceives the material world in imitation, then falling into that world and becoming its victim – the Leviathan Marduk splits to create his Divinely Ordered Cosmic Kingdom.

An interesting project that I have enjoyed. At the same time, I’ve been struck by my old friend’s curious use of the poet Basho’s line:

“Seek not the Old Masters,
but seek what they Sought.”

Curious because, applied as an ethos of the STAR WARS ORIGINS project, it has seemed to me either an exact misunderstanding of what the line means or an admonition that the project of seeking the Old Masters behind STAR WARS must at some point yield to a search for the inner transformation that lies behind the story and to some extent implicit in the act of telling it in a new way. It is the Hermetic Act of creative-expression-of-inner-transformation-through-creative-expression that separates Art from Preaching, Psychopompery from Sophistry. And frankly, I think my old friend has been more preacher than artist – a failing I have deep sympathy toward, even while I reject (and regrettably embody) the unconscious fascism of the failing artist. The artist, that is, who has not yet liberated their own Imagination from the fears of childhood and the need for social approval. The artist who has not yet found the mean between honesty and empathy.

Exactly, you might recall, her critique of me – and it’s an accurate critique, if misdone. It’s not enough for a person to know what surgery must be done; they must also be able to accomplish the operation. But so it is that we live in a world replete with knives and fully stocked with volunteer surgeons, yet lacking in surgical skills. A world filled with pornography yet needing Viagra.

Be that as it may, we are left with the same imperative, the same Human Endeavor, the Seeking of the Old Masters – that being the transformation of awareness such that it is transcendent of the oscillations of Fortune. This is the transformation sought by the King who asked his counselors to fashion for him something to remind him of sadness when he is happy and happiness when he is sad, and at length they returned with a ring inscribed with the words, THIS TOO SHALL PASS. As all states are the mean of two opponent processes, so the Golden State, the state of the Consoled, is a mean between ETERNITY (the unchanging pleromic void) and TEMPORALITY. So, when Plato wrote of Heaven as the Moving Image of Eternity he was talking about the Goddess’ Alpha-Bet, which in its order contained the story of the Sacrificial King – Beloved, Victim and Child of SHE Whom the Egyptians named ISIS.

There is still time, they say, for me to CRY MIGHTILY UNTO THE LORD, though I won’t be making use of the opportunity, ultimately because I would hate to ’spend eternity’ singing the praises of a deranged and tyrannical God. A God who create the infinite expanse of Cosmos merely to terrorize one unfortunate hominid species into ‘loving’ Him – through, if all else has fails, one last threat of five months of global torture.

Fear of God may indeed be the beginning of wisdom, but fear of senseless brutality is the beginning, rather, of servile derangement. Any God whose aim is to cultivate such illness deserves the (so to speak) undying enmity of his creation. While this enmity may prove both mortal and impotent, we might take consolation in knowing that Heaven will be chock full of frightened, superstitious, sycophants. It’s nice to know that however great the disparity of power between God and his creations, not even He can escape reaping what he sows.

Herein, to my mind, lies a lesson of real value: if even God is subject to the limits of cultivation, then certainly so are all of us, high and low.

So I believe in Judgment Day and feel the usual ambivalence of terror and longing at the prospect. The subtle moral arc of the Universe is not a smooth transition but a punctuating disequilibrium. As with any complex, recursively interconnected, system, apparent stability belies an inherent capacity for sudden, catastrophic, change. ‘Injustice’ – which is something other than violation of the letters of law – is exactly that sort of action that accumulates the energy of such change; just as, for example, the patterns of derivative fraud pushed the economic system inevitably toward collapse.

The Lord God shall not be mocked, the Books say; but this has nothing to do with some divine obsession with cultic titles and the socio-sexual mores of a particular people. It’s just a simple fact that we are all – Torturer in Chief included – subject to the laws of genesis. We shall reap as we sow, regardless of who we are or what lies we flatter ourselves with.

So, one way or another, Judgment Day is coming – as indeed it arrives every day in a million different forms. But rather than CRYING MIGHTILY UNTO THE LORD for a berth on his salvational spaceship, I choose to honor the words of the Preacher at Arrakeen, who described the apocalyptic imperative roughly as follows:

The Fremen must return to their original genius at forming human communities.

written in response to this from the letter section in today’s Register Guard:

my response:

Anonymouse asked:

If that had been the case, I’d see what you mean. Thing is, it wasn’t. You’ve repeatedly affirmed the presumption i find unacceptable. I think this was your final statement of it:

This is what i would call the guru presumption (not an elegant name, i know), as it is exactly the function of the guru to engage the disciple at that level and initiate development of this capacity. I’m missing how you’ve explained that the ‘perceived insult’ was the result of a miscommunication. Seems to me you’ve reaffirmed, unambiguously, the presumption i find unacceptable. I’d agree that it’s miscommunication insofar as i don’t think you grasp what it is that you’re presuming. What you call my continuing to berate you was my attempt to communicate to you the depth of that presumption.

Granted, it would have been better to let the point lie and allowed you to restate your position. Granted, it was uncharitable for me to not allow you an exit. You say that I’m looking for a guru to provide me a set of rules to live by. In fact, i’m intensely critical of anyone who presumes to the role.

[continued...]

As I’ve indirectly indicated a number of times, a principle difficulty i experience in communicating with you involves the sense that you employ words in a way that twists meaning, or perhaps better put, creates what seems to me a false impression. Take the question of yours that begins this post. A surface reading of it would i think naturally lead to the idea that you demonstrated the source of misunderstanding, apologized for your part in it and agreed to change the offending behavior. In fact, though, that’s a misleading representation. At no point have you ever stepped back from the presumption i find offensive. You’ve rephrased it to make it less direct, as in:

Really, that’s just window dressing, a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the same titanic presumption. To explain something as a misunderstanding is to show how it is not what it seemed to be. You can’t simultaneously explain something as a misunderstanding and reaffirm the point that was supposedly misunderstood.

To explain my perception as a misunderstanding would have been to deny that you meant what i took you to mean. It would have been, in this case, to say “I’m not saying I know how you are reading Hamlet, or proposing that I’m going to enlarge your capacity to engage the world with your moral compass.” To simply rephrase the same assertion is not to make the inference a misunderstanding of the original.

(And again, I don’t suppose you’re reading my mind, but interpreting my perspective as antithetical to your own, rather than understanding what i’m saying. So, for example, you say ‘Shakespeare intends the tragic outcome of the play as a reification of Hamlet’s intemperance’; i reply, ‘the tragic outcome of the play involves intemperate behavior by most all of the players involved’; and from this you conclude, ‘i hear that you think Shakespeare thought Hamlet was correct in his behavior.’ See how that’s not hearing me, but rather interpreting me as taking up the position antithetical to your own?

I see this pattern of forced antithesis as the source of your belief about how i’m reading the play.)

Next, your apology was for things many years past, not for what’s occurred in this conversation. Further, in the course of apologizing you imply that my response to the present day is primarily an artifact of lessons learned in the past. In this sense it’s not an apology at all, but a means of characterizing my response as too quick.

So the surface reading of your representation – which seems to mean that you retract some assertion as not having been your true intent, apologize for seeming to have made the assertion and agree to change your approach so as to clarify your real meaning – is actually opposite to what’s actually occurred. And it’s up to my charity to overlook this substitution – to take the posture of penitence as the reality.

Obviously that’s a challenge for me. It’s because such a trivial thing *is* a challenge for me that i hesitate to suppose i could have done any better in Hamlet’s situation. Not because i’m Spock, or the embodiment of your own shadow, but because the reality of Hamlet’s fictional circumstance (ha) is so much more grave than a fracking conversation on a blog.

I agree that it is frustrating, because we are close to an aha! moment. In fact, as i see it, it’s already been reached.

Once again I want to point out that you’re not “hearing” me but interpreting me in accord with the needs of your own argument. Frankly, I see this as your primary weakness in reading the text as well. You may hear that my feelings are hurt, but I’m saying that your presumption to instruct is critically misconceived. At issue here is more, and less, than establishing a fundamental parity between us as human beings. I think you’re missing an essential distinction necessary for you to make the point you mean to make.

In a nutshell, that is a distinction between normative and initiative messages. We can see evidence of this distinction in our previous agreement that the samurai would have likely succeeded where Hamlet failed. I have previously alluded to it in saying that a breakdown in tradition is one of the fundamental themes of the play.

On calling Hamlet a starlingly bad means of educating moral awareness I was speaking in general terms. Outside of the proper context, in the absence of proper preparation, the weight of the world (i.e. the initiatic pressure) is too much to bear. The idea of singular responsibility is both a dangerous fiction and an initiatic device. Crisis is our test, as the Rev Mother Mohiam tells young Paul Atriedes – but the young prince is only subjected to this crisis after years of preparation. Without that preparation the gom jobbar would have surely been fatal.

So again, I’m not offended by your notion to help me expand my moral compass so as to include even murder. Rather, I am offended, but not personally. You are making a presumption of guru-hood, exactly. As you seem unaware of the distinction between normative and initiatic information, I think you’re making the presumption innocently, but still. It is a serious error.

In normal, we might say ‘realistic’, terms, the idea of singular responsibility is a dangerous fiction that feeds into authoritarian dynamics. Such mythical responsibility only makes positive sense in an initiatic context. As I see it, Hamlet exists on the turbulent boundary between the mythico-initiatic and realistic worldviews.

That’s a start. More to come on this…

We finished The Great Unknown mix and paid to have the track mastered this afternoon. At the start of next week we’ll enter it into the local weekly’s song competition. When it gets up on their site I’ll post the link here. We also decided on a silly, provisional, band name – a necessity for entering.

The obligatory bio: God’s Machine Gun has all the elements of a great rock band – or at least a great rock band name: provocation, controversy, cultural significance, ultimate power. GMG is composed of drummer Beau “AK48″ Eastlund, singer-songwriter Timothy “Patient” Shaw and hair band veteran, multi-instrumentalist Bobby “Kid” Stevens.

The track, mixed and mastered:

 

 The Great Unknown: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Having recently arrived at a sense of resolution to Hamlet’s dilemma, I have a couple thoughts on this process. First, the resolution:

In our exchange, you repeatedly presented Hamlet’s flaw as wanting to ensure that he send Claudius to Hell, which in my view critically distorts the flow of the text. Hamlet’s hand in Act III Scene III is stayed by the thought that by killing Claudius he will send him inadvertently to Heaven. He goes on to espouse his wish for the opposite outcome, but the thought that gives him pause is not that his revenge will not be extreme enough, but that his act of vengeance will in the larger context provided by the spiritual, and ethical, reality amount to the greatest of blessings – and so not be revenge at all. Again, all reference to Hell comes after the point that his hand is stayed.

Note that the decision is already at this point emphatically made. Talk of Hell comes after. At the moment of choice, the decision is between ‘an eye for an eye’ (sending the villain to judgment in the same state as his father had been sent) and repaying profound harm with the greatest profit.

It is, in my view, only by conceiving of it this way that one actually inhabits the dilemma. I have objected to your presentations of this moment because they have always to my mind distorted the choice being made and so actually missed the extent of the virtue being asked of Hamlet in that moment. He is not faced with settling for ‘mere revenge’ or ’super-duper revenge’; and does not err out of an intemperate satisfaction that demands more than an eye for an eye. He is faced with a choice between eye-for-an-eye revenge (again, sending Claudius to judgment full of his sins) and revenge that on a greater level might prove the greatest beneficence.

As I’ve said before, it seems exceedingly strange to me to suppose that the moral compass – the same moral compass that speaks against revenge in The Tempest – would in Hamlet advocate for revenge. If he’d only listened to his heart he would have murdered his uncle in cold blood. It is a bizarre statement. Conceived in this way, however, i can reconcile the two instances of moral decision. Had Hamlet killed Claudius with the belief (even though mistaken) that he was dispatching the villain in the best possible state relative to judgment he would have embodied the virtue of loving the sinner but hating the sin.

In the original Star Trek episode The Galileo Seven, Bones and the other men care about gut feelings, like the need to bury the dead. Spock cares about more abstract ethical issues, like avoiding unnecessary bloodshed. Kirk is absent, so there’s no mediator.

Spock is confused as to why things are going badly even though his every choice is rational. The men model heart-over-reason behavior to Spock, by risking their lives to rescue him from the cyclops. Shortly thereafter, Spock gambles with their lives, burning the last of their fuel to create a flare. The men approve of his gamble, and Bones calls it “human.” The Enterprise spots the flare, reifying the advantages of Spock broadening his decision-making apparatus to include his heart.

It feels like there’s some resistance to the idea of placing the mind momentarily aside and weighing Hamlet through the eyes of the moral compass. Is it possible that you are in the habit of weighing Hamlet using only the Spock-mind?

What do you make of the way Shakespeare handles the revenge vs. justice theme in The Tempest?

back tomorrow. in the meantime, here’s the nearly done studio version of The Great Unknown. pretty well mixed but still not mastered, so if you do listen, headphones or decent speakers will yield the best results. we’re meeting on Wednesday evening to do the final mix, then hopefully get it mastered on Thursday afternoon and submit it on Friday to the local weekly’s song contest (which is stupidly named and conceived, but provides a chance of playing a show in a really great theater). whatever the result of that, i’m very glad to be able to work with Beau and Bobby in Beau’s studio.

 

 The Great Unknown: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download