Wednesday, June 30, 2010

ALL OF MY BEST POEMS

All of my best poems
are by Leonard Cohen
Except for the one
by William Blake

They wrote them down
because they have poet's fingers
And so that I can get on with the important business
of trying to forget everything I know

A tricky business
this takes up most of my time
My mother is my teacher
I.. I... what was I saying?

All of my best poems
are by Leonard Cohen
He wrote them down
because he has a poet's fingers

Sadly, for the poet,
he forgot to give them back


Monday, June 28, 2010

ANCIENT OF DAYS - IS GOD EVIL?

Its always good to see people returning to Blake's work  - it was, after all, his intention to 'speak to future generations' via a 'perfected allegory', of which he did not regard himself to be the author, but only 'the secretary' [note: this post was originally a response to this excellent article: Ancient of Days]

Above: William Blake's 'Ancient of Days'

That the bearded figure depicted in 'Ancient of Days' is indeed 'Urizen' is well documented and without doubt true.

I confess - I have studied Blake, not his critics. But I can find no evidence that scholars of Blake have understood that Urizen's resemblance to depictions of the OT God Yahweh is far from coincidental.

Blake is quite explicit that Urizen IS Yahweh. Take this line, from "America: A Prophesy" -

     "The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands"

Whether or not Yahweh/Urizen is 'the creator God' is not relevant to the study of Blake, for Blake maintains -

     "God only ACTS and IS in existing beings of men"

What is relevant is that the author of the Ten Commandments is categorically stated by Blake to be Urizen - as, in Exodus, when Moses asks ..

     "If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?"

God responds thus ..

     "I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you'. . . this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations."

'I AM' means 'YHWH' - this is undisputed, and central to both Judaism and Christianity. This is explained here, in the Catholic Catechism:

     In revealing his mysterious name, YHWH ("I AM HE WHO IS", "I AM WHO AM" or "I AM WHO I AM"), God says who he is and by what name he is to be called.

Above: Illus. from William Blake's 'Milton'

In Blake's "Milton: Book the Second" there is a diagram which explains much - mankind is depicted as an egg, a being in the process of being created by the four Zoas, here represented as four interlocking circles, with the egg of man incubated at the centre (we know that the egg represents man from Blake's 'Gates of Paradise', where man is alternately represented as an egg and a chrysalis).

That part of man which emerges from the Zoa 'Urthona' is named as 'Adam', that part which emerges from Urizen is named as 'Satan', the word 'Satan' consumed in flames. Given that Urizen IS Yahweh - does Blake regard the God of the Abrahamic faiths as 'evil'?

Yes, he does. But there is no 'evil' as we understand it in Blake's cosmology -

"Good is the passive that obeys reason... Evil is the active springing from energy" (Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)

Thus the flames that spring from the word 'Satan' in the aforementioned diagram are intended to be understood not as a fire consuming the lower portion of man, but as the very force that drives man's self-creation through the process of history.

*      *      *

Those seeking further reading on this subject might like to read this post, where I conclude that Blake's "perfected allegory" of The Four Zoas has found its most popular expression in the work of Tolkien -

The Jester Speaks - Keys to A Full Understanding of Blake

Friday, June 25, 2010

DR WHO SPOILER ??

This is the sequel to my previous post, 'Dr Who Confidential' - I called it 'Dr Who Spoiler' because I think my argument about the true identity of River Song is so strong as to constitute a spoiler. I could probably find out from some geeky fan-site with a leak, but the veracity of such information is questionable - besides, if a plot-line was leaked it would not be expensive or time-consuming for the BBC to propagate an alternative incorrect suggestion. So I'll not waste my time reading such rubbish, I'll write it instead!

When I wrote part one I hadn't seen any episodes from the current series of Dr Who, apart from the ones I wrote about - so I didn't know the story that ran through the episodes concerned Dr Who being accused of causing cracks in time that were going to bring about the end of everything - being someone who harps on about the end-of-time a lot I couldn't have chosen a riper vine for analysis! Haven't quite caught up, but I saw the last five minutes of the episode where they put him in the Pandorica.

Its the Time-Traveller's-Wife rip-off series. In both stories the romantic leads meet each other when he is an adult and she a child, tho' in The Time Traveller's wife he has already met her as an adult - fu*king awkward situ. The Doc hasn't met her before, but later the fact that five minutes ago she was about 5 doesn't put this usually chaste character off going for it when she's grown up.

Yet she isn't quite grown-up - makes me feel a bit awkward fancying her, my ability to age young women has gone skew-wiff, but its always downward, they get younger all the time. I swear Amy is 15, tops. But its alright to fancy her, 'cause the Doctor does (besides, shes actually 23).

The shape of the whole show has seen the Dr becoming increasingly more arrogant and cavalier over recent series. Accentuating the audience's existing suspicion that it might be a bit odd for 900-year-olds to exclusively hang out with abducted teenagers is another clever way of making this the first Doctor you're not supposed to necessarily like. Well, you're allowed to like him, but you suspect he has gone off the rails a bit, or you think, 'at last he's having some fun, poor old Dr'. He's certainly less of a black and white character, preparing us for the cliff-hanger when it is revealed that ALL his arch-enemies are conspiring against him, because he is inadvertently destroying the universe - he was the bad guy all along!

I’m The Fixer, baby, I’m the doctor, an’ I come to heal this affliction called time dat has done you wrong so long, ‘cause I’m the doctor who fixes time. I’m Al Khidr!
So long, so long, you all bin doin’ time, you don’ remember nuffin’ else. But the sentence is nearly over - its gonna be a whole new paragraph! The gaol-birds a’goin’ turn arounds inside and reach their goal!
I know what you’re thinking: “he’s really full of himself!”.
WELL,I’MNOTEXACTLYGOINGTOBEFILLED
WITHSTRAWBERRYJAM,AMI,SAMIAM?
The Jester, 2008 

William Blake's Urizen, Tolkien's Melkor, Lucas's Darth Vader - all these characters are different takes on the same archetypal character - empire builders, who seek order, but over-impose their own technological/ideological order on that of the Creation, and in doing so homogenise it. Thus the Daleks and Cybermen (and The Borg in Star Trek) are also takes on this same evil archetype. In a way they are closest to the sophistication of Blake's version, as while Urizen, Melkor and Vader are all anthropomorphised only Blake is clear that he is talking about a contagious tendency IN man, rather than an actual individual. But in failing to fully adopt the mode of fantasy his work lacks the simplicity and general appeal of the true allegory. Though he does not need to adopt this mode to tell what he describes as 'a perfected allegory' - Tolkien does this for him - who can argue that it was indeed 'a perfected allegory' when nearly two hundred years later versions of it top the box office year on year?

It is worth noting that while Blake's Urizen is the archetype of pure evil, that Blake says of good & evil:
"Good is the passive that obeys reason.. Evil is the active, springing from energy"
All this goes hand-in-hand with one's deepening sense of The Docs increasing deification by the script-writers. If he is indeed responsible for 'the end of time' that would make him 'the being at the end of time'.
'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty'. Revelations
The Catholic Church established the date of Jesus's birth as the beginning of a new calendar, institutionalising him as the being at the beginning of time. Alpha and Omega, Christ & Anti-christ - the suggestion in Revelations is that they are one, that every ending is also a new beginning. Thus it would be a fitting ending to the series if, in tomorrow's season finale, Dr Who does turn out to be responsible for the ending of time- but that this ending is necessary for time's regeneration - time and again the Doctor himself dies in order to be reborn (Christlike) - would it not make sense that the Creation over which he fusses so would mirror this behaviour? People like myself, Krishnamurthi & Jakob Boehme (co-authors of 'The Ending of Time' dialogues) and Jose Arguelles (founder of 'The Foundation for the Law of Time') do not regard 'the end of time' to be a bad thing - it would be convenient for supporters of this idea if Dr Who's script-writers bore out the promise of explaining this difficult idea through the power and elegance of the allegorical form.

It would be particularly satisfying for me if the series concluded, as I wrote a great deal about this archetypal character back in 2008:

He's a servant of God: but he's also a riddler and a joker.  He exists outside of time and he appears to help people and civilisations when they come to a crossroads in their path, corresponding to the legends of Al Khidr ('The Green One', who has close archetypal narrative resonances with 'The Green Man') and Papa Legba. The legend of this archetype's 'fixing time' and of being both playful and wise, both young and old, and having many faces, and of dying and being reborn, means his contemporary equivalent is the popular science fiction character 'The Doctor' (notice also that a doctor fixes things and that The Master is his nemesis, exactly corresponding to the relationship between these archetypes as represented in ‘The Master and Maguerita’: except that The Master has not yet been revealed as being The Who's other half - yet.
Papa Legba and The Doctor are both eccentric, both have dogs, both frequently wear hats and both stand at portals between dimensions. Is The Master The Doctor's father like Darth and Luke in Star Wars? When he drops his ego will he see The Master’s higher purpose, will he forgive his father now that he can see that they were yin and yang, black and white, both part of a greater cosmic purpose, now he knows that Darth did what he had to do - will Luke and The Dr stop their restless quest to put everything right and – MOTHER MARY! - just let it be? Does he kill his father? Or just remove the graven image of his father’s shadow that he wears upon his own face as a mask, and it is this face that he is seeing when he flees, his nemesis is semen, Isis, raise the perfect mirror before you realise, sister, that your will and that of The Absolute’s are ONE!
This is The Secret Poetry: myths and legends are the most fundamental of all the particles. This is The Cosmic Joke: That if you dial 999 in a phone box both the police and the doctor turn up, but if you dial 666 the devil turns up in a police phone-box! Phone both at once and the timeless battle between good and evil resumes: the one that always, in the final round, turns out to be the battle against oneself. Only when the protagonist abandons his ego can he see that, all along, what he saw was this: his own reflection in the perfect mirror-like beauty of the nothingness, into which he stared at the beginning when he saw that he was good. At the end of the final round the two big fish do not swim off in opposite directions - they realise their unity. Perfect balance, Yin and Yang, 666+999=696969, the Buddha’s middle way, the Daoist’s harmony, containing both dark and light but identifying with neither, the reconciling of opposites, a truce, realising the one you were running from was also the one you were running for, the eye of the storm, remember your SELF in ‘the quiet space between breaths’, ‘be still and know that I am God’, ‘be here now’, I am ONE!
Whether or not this allegory was consciously or unconsciously formulated: The Who’s scriptwriters have succeeded in subverting the traditional negatively loaded terminology used in Christian descriptions of this archetype and offered a positive secular vision, allowing this archetypal character to take back his place in the collective unconscious's secular canon.

THEDOCTORANDTHEMASTER:BECOMEONE!
The Jester, 2008 
I was fairly satisfied with the conclusion of the last series, when the Master adopted the strategem of the Daleks/Cybermen/Borg, making everything like himself, and threatening to do this to the Doctor - and while The Doctor looks out into the creation and sees that it is good? The Master can only perceive an unbearable drumming.

Ultimately The Master and The Doctor are an allegorical anthropomorphic take on Crowley's great conundrum, the dichotomy between Love & Will. The Doctor heals time, because he loves it, the Master controls it, exercising his Will upon it. In the Book of the Law Crowley says ..
Love is the law, love under will.
But in the Book of Lies he says things like -
What do I love? There is no from, no being, to which I do not give myself wholly up. Take me, who will!
In my 2008 book 'Immanessence' I posit that the solution to this conundrum is that there is ultimately no difference between higher Love and higher Will -

Do what you Love is the Law of the Whole, for Love IS the Will of the All.
The Jester, 2008 

Which is why I also said:-

THEDOCTORANDTHEMASTER:BECOMEONE!
The Jester, 2008 

Perhaps one day the Doctor & Master will be revealed to be the same being in some cunning way, making a greater truth of the constant insistence that the Doc is 'last of the Timelords' when the Master always returns - perhaps the Master is the Elderly Doctor, who regenerated as a child (his incarnations have got generally younger) and was forced to forget his former identity? Like the Buddhist sage who wishes to escape the chain or death and rebirth, perceiving reality as suffering and illusion. Conversely the Doctor could be a later regeneration of the Master - the Master (having successfully escaped the tormentuous cycle of death and rebirth) returns as the Doctor, a bodhisattva, to heal time. If any Dr Who script-writers are reading this go ahead and use it, I'll be pissed off if you don't mention me and give me a cheque, but I'd get over it.

The time-scale of The Time Traveller's Wife is the character's lifetimes - Dr Who can't do this, throughout most episodes the threat is so imminent that sleep would be fatal, so its imperative they save the world in 24 hours or so- otherwise they'd start looking a bit worse for wear. But this difference in time-scale means that except for this first meeting he can't meet her throughout her life in the wrong order, which is what the bulk of the Time Traveller's Wife is about - unless Amy Pond IS the character River Song, who the Doctor continues to meet thoughout the series, in the wrong order, just like the book (and original screenplay based on the book etc). River Song seems like his 'wife' - is this a further reference?

There really is no better reveal, it this doesn't happen it really should. While this would be the most satisfying twist, the least satisfying would be if a character is summoned out of the blue. My bets are on River being a mature Amy, though thinking about it this will not necessarily be revealed tomorrow - it would be the best strategy not to reveal this until the character was about to leave the series. Other remoter possibilities include Amy being a regeneration of The Master (she is a prisoner, imprisoned for killing someone likely to be the Doctor) or less likely a minor character, such as the Doctor's cloned daughter from the last series. If it is Amy that turns out to be River who kills the Doctor - this would be a possible explanation for Amy's implied cosmic significance.

Another [utterly unlikely] explanation for Amy's implied cosmic significance is that she is the incarnation of the demon 'Amy', another analog for the Urizen archtype, listed in the seventeeth century occult classic 'The Lesser Key of Solomon':-
Amy is a great president, and appeareth in a flame of fier, but having taken mans shape, he maketh one marvelous in astrologie, and in all the liberall sciences, he procureth excellent familiars, he bewraieth treasures preserved by spirits, he hath the governement of thirtie six legions, he is partlie of the order of angels, partlie of potestats, he hopeth after a thousand two hundreth yeares to returne to the seventh throne: which is not credible.
But that won't happen.

Lastly: my spoiler for the actually-very-last-ever series: The Dr is a patient on a psychiatric ward & the sci-fi element is intertwined with a plot that involves him dribbling in a dingy common room, babbling about aliens & being visited less-and-less by relatives, which suits the nurses fine, as they had to restrain him and give him a sedative that time he called his Mother a Dalek & attacked her with a screwdriver - the Singing Detective rip-off series.

J
X

IF YOU WANT TO SUCCEED?

if you want to succeed?

There's a river of sex, like a crack in the city,
There's a river of sex, like a crack in time,
There's a river of sex, like crack in the city
& my cock is the crack-pipe & my seed is the rock

And when the current's strong, the river shall arise:
A great blue dragon, the waves- the thorns upon it spine

The sight of Beelzebub himself leading the charge
As he rides the Dragon from a bedsit in Leytonstone
Into the Queen's quarters at Buckingham palace
Will cause everyone to forget what they know
& live happily ever after


There's a river of sex, like a crack in the city,
There's a river of sex, like a crack in time,
There's a river of sex, like crack in the city
& my cock is the crack-pipe & my seed is the rock

Saturday, June 5, 2010