Self Portrait Number 2

Here are the rules I am drawing by:

1) the end goal is 52 self-portraits by 1/31/2015
2) If I do three in a week, Great!
3) If  I don't do any in a week, maybe I was busy.
4) This is not a challenge
5) Nothing is perfect, if I don't like an attempt, too bad for me, it still counts toward the 52.

I think that's it.  Here's the self-portrait for the second week of January, 2015:

This one is take from a picture when Patti and I were on vacation last March. The photo is from March 12, 2014 and we are staying in a condo at Sanibel Island in Florida.

I am not as happy with this one as I am with the first one but, hey, it's only the second one. Maybe I try too hard. I have trouble capturing the mouth and the ear and the nose.

I started today by practicing shading, just trying to make a sphere out of s circle and even though I wasn't too happy with my shading, I was eager to jump in and try again.

Then I remember it is only the second week and prior to three days ago I never tried to draw a self portrait ever, so I am good with it.

The One Self Portrait Per Week Show

I have always been a frustrated artist, as I am sure are many of us. And like many of us, I want to be good a drawing but I know that I am not so I never practice!

What!?

No wonder I am a frustrated artist! It is like writing: If you are not writing you are not practicing!

So, yesterday, which in the the nominal time was known as January 6, 2015, I was listening to a new favorite podcast of mine, Your Chillpak Hollywood Hour hosted by TV's One-Third of the Lone Gunmen (among other things), Dean Haglund and filmmaker and actor Phil Leirness.

On this occasion, they were doing a show on their New Years Intentions/Resolutions (Ego is Skeleton), which is a show they do every year but this is my first year of listening and Dean mentions an artist who is doing a self-portrait per day and that one of his goals for the year was to do something along those lines, maybe not quite as frequently.

This resonates with me in a way that I cannot explain. It suddenly hits me that I can draw a self-portrait, at least one-per-week and then I will be able to measure any improvement in my drawing by the end of the year!

So here is my first attempt which I just drew tonight:

Which is based on this photograph I took yesterday morning (see above for nominal time date) which I took only because I love how the towel did my hair!

I had the most trouble with the nose but for a first attempt; I am off to the races!

Thank you Dean Haglund and Phil Leirness for your Ego is Skeleton and for your inspiring show!

Do You Have a Passion For Suffering?

A cruel trick has been played on us, a trick of language that goes so far back that my exposing it to you now, dear reader, may result only in rejection, anger, and dismay. And yet I must write about it, in order to suss out what has been done to me. To understand, and perhaps undo, the witchcraft of language.

And I encourage you, persistent reader, you lover of words, to do the same.

Do you have a passion for suffering? If you follow the advice of Tony Robbins and other gurus of self-help when they admonish you to “live your life with passion” then you most certainly do.

You see, for years now I have been warring, mostly in my own mind, with the ideal of compassion. Whenever some manipulative person or politician should come along and tell me something was the “compassionate” thing to do, and that “compassion” for one's fellow man is what made life worth living I would always wonder what, exactly, they were talking about.

For you see, in these same people I never saw this so-called compassion, nor did I ever see any actual, genuine happiness or fulfillment that resulted from their alleged compassion. This caused me to try to figure out both what “compassion” meant and what these lost souls thought it meant.

Literally, “compassion” means nothing more than “co-suffering” or “your suffering causes my suffering” and in this definition is no clue as to how this is a good thing. Now from the idealist's point of view or the point of view of the cynical politician, compassion is a very good thing because they can use the word to manipulate the population into accepting higher taxes and giving away more of their power to the idealists and politicians while really receiving no material or spiritual benefit from the transaction. They may suffer for their ignorance and yet, there is no compassion for them.

You see, the language tricks us. We are ignorant of what words mean because we allow other people to define them for us and hence, we become mere extensions of their thoughts and our actions align in accordance with their will but not our own.

And how is it that my entering a state of suffering when I witness someone who is truly suffering helps that person?

It doesn't. All you have now is two people suffering where once there was only one and as the two vibrate at the level of suffering they draw more and more in, like a discordant note struck in a piano store.

This brings us to the root of the word “compassion” which is “passion.”

I was raised Catholic and every year during the Lenten season the church offers a special service leading up to the Resurrection of Christ at Easter called The Twelve Stations of the Cross or The Passion Play.

When I heard “passion” being used in this way, being an ignorant, yet highly intelligent child, I figured out in my own mind that it must mean, “Jesus had such a passion for us lost sinners he was willing to endure all the pains and humiliations heaped upon him.”

Later I was reading a work of comparative mythology by, I don't remember who, and I apologize for this, dear reader, for not remembering the source I do not remember the source's source who was some ancient “Greek” who, while studying in Egypt had a chance to witness one of the Passion Plays of Osiris, who, as you may know, was betrayed by his Uncle Ra and brother Set and his body was then torn into 42 different parts and spread over the Earth. The ancient “Greek” witnessing this Passion Play is reminded of the ritual of the Dionysus cult in which the members work themselves up into such a frenzy they tear apart anything in their path, livestock, trees, people in a kind of reversal ritual of the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans.

When I read this so many years ago, I just put it down to there being some link between Christianity and some ancient mystery religions, I did not look into the meaning of the usage of the word Passion beyond that.

Then, while walking to the bus stop one day in this last week, I was listening to a recording loop of some affirmations for health I had written a while back, I had just read a book that gave some tips for writing more effective affirmations so I had some idea in my mind to pay attention to how I had written these affirmations even thought I was mostly not listening.

When I got to the affirmation “I am filled with passion and energy!” for the fith or tenth time, I suddenly had a series of thoughts flash in my mind as if I were flipping through an index file of very detailed and brightly illustrated index cards and I saw the Passion of Osiris and the Passion of the Christ and to some lessor extent, the Passion of Dionysus and it hit me that my affirmation was saying, “I am filled with suffering and energy!”

What. The. Hell?

Then I thought back to the very first Tony Robbins program I ever bought from Nightingale-Conant and at the very end of that program, as his parting words, Tony encouraged me, as one of his many listeners to “Live with passion!” as I left his virtual seminar.

So for more than half my life, I have been carrying this error within me, to live with passion. To live with suffering. How is it that we do not realize what we are telling ourselves? How is it that the very fabric of our reality, the words, the language that we use, is used deceptively?

While I do not know either the answer to my question or the solution to the manipulation for other people, I know for myself I am going to stop living with suffering. Nor am I going to be cowed by those who themselves have been deceived by the agents of altruism into feeling guilty for rejecting something as monstrous as compassion.

In the words of Boston’s Angel from William Blake's America, “No more I follow. No more obedience pay.”

While right now I have the shattered remains of my reality to shift through, I know I will no longer “live with passion” but, for the present, I will choose to live with as much integrity as possible.

Perhaps rejecting the passion and claiming any sort of inner integrity is how Osiris is put back together? I don't know. There is a feeling within me now as if a quarter of the world has vanished and while I feel a bit of vertigo as I write this, I am also glad. I am happy to leave passion and compassion behind forever and until I know what is the right move to make left, I will live with integrity and as much kindness as possible.

And so, if you, dear reader, are as shaken as I am at this point, thiss my act of kindness to you.

On Love, Charity, Gifts, Poison, and Death

We hear so much about love since at least the 1960s, well me in particular having been born mid-decade, that one begins to wonder what the word actually means.

In Corinthians, Paul tells us to abide in faith, hope, and charity and charity is the greatest of these. We are also told that charity is love.

Aleister Crowley also valued love. “Do as thou wilt shal be the whole of the law.” and “Love is the law. Love under will.”

So then in the 1960s we have a bunch of Crowleyites, like the Beatles, singing about love.

“Love love love” repeated over and over “All you need is love.”

But what are they really talking about?

And when you love somebody, what do you do? You give them a gift. But in German, “gift” means "poison." So what is going on here?

In David Lynch's seminal independent thriller, Blue Velvet we are told that “love letters” are bullets as Denis Hopper's character threatens to send these love letters right to the heart of Kyle McLaughlin's character.

Here's where it gets crazy: We have Charity equaling love and in Stephen King's epic Dark Tower we are told that Char, in the high speech only has one meaning, and that is "death."

We know that English was an invented language with many of the words added by Francis Bacon as he translated the Bible into English and we know that Bacon was a very intelligent occultist. So Char-ity = death and gift = poison and words don't mean what we think they mean.

How can we know love is good if we don't really understand what the occultists who gave us our language mean by it?

Destiny of the Time Machine

I was destined to build a time machine

I am destined to build a time machine

I built a time machine

But where has it gone?

Where have I gone?

Where am I now?

Magnets and geometry

Converging lines of force

All of these I used, I knew, I understood

But where has it gone?

Where has knowledge gone?

I wrote this poem the other day when dreams I had when I was very young of building a working time machine started flooding my memory. I was maybe five or six when I had the first dream I recall.

I had build something like a wheel, something that might resemble a Captain's wheel on an old time ship wherein the lines of force converged on a central hub.

In these dreams, though it seems like it was only one but I have differing memories, sometimes I am both in the central hub and on the outside rotating the wheel in a certain directing. Then a whole opens up in the hub and I go back to a time of dinosaurs. Sometimes it is my brother who is rotating the hub.

The time of the dinosaurs appears much like the the “Dawn of Man” chapter of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey even though I would not see that movie or even know about it until after Star Wars came out.

Later, after seeing George Pal's version of The Time Machine, I had the idea to make a working model of my time machine using an empty tin of mixed nuts and magnets, unfortunately, I did not have enough magnets and although I could see other parts, mechanical springs and the like, I had no idea how to acquire them and work them into the tin.

So then, this last week when so many old influences started to converge in my life once more, the idea that I was destined to create a time machine came to me and I wrote this poem. The idea being that if it is destiny then it has to happen and if we are dealing with the very collapse of time itself, then it has already happened. And the knowledge of this is like an empty hole in my memory. The only evidence, the wind that rustles the leaves of trees.

The Lost Man

This writing exercise was suggested to me by a friend who found this video compelling. Watch the video, come to your own point of view, and then, if you are curious, read my interpretation below which is based only on one viewing.

The Lost Man

A man is lost in the English countryside. He points out, "you would think it would be impossible to get lost in this day and age," this reveals he is a product of our tech-possessed time.

As he wanders, he comes across a snail. Snail medicine is protective, as evidenced by the shell. The snail has a hard exterior protecting an animal that is soft and has no other sort of protection. The snail shell resembles the cochlea canal of the inner ear which symbolizes hearing and the man can communicate with the snail.

The snail tells the man he can guide him home. The snail gets the man out of the green fields of the English country side into a dark wood. Suddenly a wounded fox appears on the road, beaten and bloody. The fox growls at the man. The man is afraid.

Fox medicine represent the power of invisibility but I do not see that as apt in this case. Here I think technological man has lost himself and the fox represents the ego. The ego is much maligned in our day but its true function is that of trauma response. The ego only comes into being when we become traumatized. Its job is to protect us.

But technological man is so far removed from himself that his, has spent so much time beating up his own ego, that, when he confronts it, he fears it.

The man finally sleeps under a tree. The snail stays for a while but has to leave, I had one theory that the snail was like the Christian Holy Spirit, but once you get the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit stays with you, even following you into prison and other dark places. So, in this case, it appears the snail helped all it could and at the same time, used the man to get a lift.

The fox dies and while the man sleeps, it purifies and decays and goes back to the earth. This represents in some way the split that caused the ego is healing and so the man wakes up but he is so used to the spit in his psyche, healing feels like loneliness instead of completeness, which it actually is.

No doubt the man will follow the snails advice. He has already found his way home but simply doesn’t recognize it because he had different expectations of what “home” was.

Dream from this morning February 16, 2014

Dream 20140216 A Great Flood

Last night I had a very vivid dream. I am working at my job only it is at the top of a mountain or on a very high plateau. I am still working with the weather in some way. The place I work is a very strong looking log cabin with two stories.

Me and my co-workers are working outside under a large awning. We have our computers and desks outside. I notice that at noon each day three posts have these shadows that align. There doesn't appear to be any other kind of time piece in this dream.

One of my co-workers suddenly asks about a prophecy of destruction set for this day that is supposed to happen right at noon. He is saying, “I guess there isn't going to be any sort of destruction today.”

I point out that it isn't noon yet and look at the alignment of the post shadows and estimate it is about 15 minutes before noon.

We all stop work and start looking at the horizon. What had been a sunny day becomes dark. Suddenly there is a thunderous sound and we see a great flood taking place off in the distance. I look at my boss, “Should we go inside and get to the second floor?” I ask in a panic. But nobody says anything and we just watch because there isn't much higher ground to seek.

I resign myself to watching with my co-workers. I wonder about my mother and family and friends. Were they in the flood? Are they still alive?

As we are watching the disaster, other people who I think of as a religious cult start to appear to my left. Some are holding placards, I notice one woman who's placard seems to be a speech she is now giving but I cannot hear her. The wind kicks up, the water stops but the wind carries a few drops that hit my nose and face. I give out a cry as I wake up.

When I wake up, I realize I am parched and realize it may be a way of my body asking for water. I drink a half-liter of bottled water before I go to bed and feel somewhat better. But still, the dream was so vivid and seemed very much like imminent death when I dreamed it. That I am working at a very high point seems more luck than planning.

I find presence of the end-times cultists very disturbing both in the dream but especially when I wake up. I cannot help but to think of the cannibal cult that springs up in Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer after a portion of a comet strikes the earth.