September is Monsoon Season

The weatherman reports 3 inches of rain fell today in Tulsa. So far.

I hope the labyrinth dries out a bit before our Equinox fire ceremony.

Today is 12.19.16.12.13 13 Ben 11 Ch’en

1187 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Carl Jung’s Liber Novus aka the Red Book

Spike, the man I refer to as the other half of my brain, gets a big hat tip–make that a sweeping flourish of my black velvet sombrero, and a deep bow–for sending me a link to this article: The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, in the New York Times Magazine. It’s a long article in latter-day Innertube terms–ten pages, but I found it worth the reading. The subject is the secret ur-text of the sect of Jungian Psychoanalysis.

As he entered middle age Carl Jung began keeping a record of, well, his inner Jungian process. He transcribed his musings in Germanic calligraphy in an oversize journal bound in red leather, and illustrated them with elaborate paintings. Jung’s paintings fairly jump off the page, vivid and strange. The text is equally strange, according to the article.

The Red Book resembles nothing so much as a rare incunabulum from the early days of printing, so neat is the script, except the paintings are as colorful and intricate as the illustrations in a medieval Book of Hours painted in a monastery scriptorium.

Jung filled over 200 large pages with handwritten script and paintings before he locked it in a cupboard. After spending a 100 years or so first in that cupboard and later in a safety deposit box in a bank vault in Zurich, Jung’s descendants have been persuaded to reveal the Red Book to the world, to have the text translated into English, and to publish that translation with a high quality facsimile of the book itself.

I can’t wait to see that.

More linkage: The Astrology of Carl Jung and his Red Book, Carl Jung’s Secret Book

Today is 12.19.16.12.10 10 Ok 8 Ch’en

119o shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

A Momentile a day keeps the Doctor in play.

Patches of  grass have grown very high this summer off the bike trail along the Arkansas River–higher than my head–higher than my hat in places, which is to say six feet tall or more.  Annie Beagle and I followed a dirt footpath through the tall grass down to the riverside just to see where it lead–it lead to the camp of a couple homeless guys–and I caught sight of the mortal remains of an oppossum, not playing, curled up a few feet off the path under a young hackberry tree.

Today is 12.19.16.12.8 8 Lamat 6 Ch’en

1192 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

I cut a five course medieval labyrinth in the backyard with the lawnmower.

I walk it every morning and every evening, rain or shine.

This evening the September monsoon rain continued to fall in Tulsa. Bumbershoot weather.

Have you ever walked a labyrinth? Not a maze, a labyrinth. A maze has false turnings and dead ends; the way in and the way out are hidden by walls or hedges. A maze is a puzzle or a trap; a sort of crossword for the feet. The purpose of a maze is to get lost. A labyrinth does not need concealment; it has curves and turnings that in the end bring the walker to the center of the pattern. The way out is the same as the way in. Turn about and follow the same meanders coiled on themselves. Step over threshold and exit where you entered. Like all forms of meditation or prayer the only change is the self of the one walks the path. The purpose of the labryrinth is to be found.

I walk my labyrinth with head inclined, because the lanes are 20 inches–the swath of the lawnmower blade–wide, and I need to watch where I put my feet. I stop to look up and take in the view at whim at points along the way. When I reach the end of the turning path, the center circle of the labyrinth, I take a breath, let it out, walk the inside of the circle counter-clockwise, then clockwise, take a breath, let it out, step out of the center circle and wind my way back to the threshold, take a breath, let it out, and step off into the higher grass of the rest of the lawn. There’s no particular reason why I do it this way. It’s just the way I do it. I recommend stopping to breath and take in the view.

I first walked a labyrinth one evening by candlelight, with my wife and several hundred other people, at a war protest, way back when it was still an invasion and not an occupation, a mission that could be accomplished, according to the man who set it all in motion. It was a temporary labyrinth staked out on the lawn in front of the local United Church of Christ (The “Don’t put a period where God put a comma,” people). Walking that labyrinth was like being wrapped in a prayer; we all committed magic without a license as cars whizzed by on Harvard Blvd.

The experience of that labyrinth moved me, and moved with me. I wanted to do it again. I laid out my first labyrinth–a classical seven course labyrinth, a pattern that comes down from prehistory–in the backyard of our previous house, using scavenged bricks and pieces of brick, tiles, glass insulators from old telephone poles, and chunks of native sandstone and limestone, the goaf left over from my hobby of  fossil fossicking.  The homely junkyard-visionary aesthetic of my original labyrinth did not please Mrs. Dr. Omed. She does not share my fondness for the rocks and heterogenous junk I collect whilst going to and fro on the earth, and walking up and down in it.

I had to take up that labyrinth and leave its materials behind when we left the old homestead and moved to our present abode. I still wanted a labyrinth. Took me a year to get around to it. Now I mow my own–A simple, elegant solution for which I cannot take credit. I saw one cut into the lawn of a local Episcopal Church, and I stole the idea. Mrs. Dr. Omed likes the way the new labyrinth lends form to an otherwise undistinguished rectangle of suburban greensward. She’s been walking it herself.  The simple act of walking within bounds of a ritual path cut in grass does her good,  she’s found. Now if I could just talk her into adding a couple of menhirs…

Today is 12.19.16.10.7 6 Manik’ 5 Yaxk’in

1233 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Today I am a Kenyan.

Want proof that you too were born in Kenya? Go to the Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator, fill in the blanks and click “Deliver this baby!”  Download the .jpg that shows you were born in Kenya, and post it to your favorite freshly lubed up social tool. Send it to a Birther near you. Send it to Lou Dobbs. Add your mite to the mighty might of Little Sister, and do your bit as a true blue online American to cleanse the innertubes of the blithering blight of Birtherism.

Birtherism is about one thing and one thing only: The Birthers cling to the delusion that Barack Obama is not a native-born American because they cannot accept that a black man is President of the United States of America. It is racism–Racism so pure and desperate it partakes of madness.

These teabagging numbnutziks have enlisted with corporate and political forces of darkness to astroturf the public square. Time to lace up the spikes and dance on their heads.

 

Today is 12.19.16.10.2 1 Ik’ 0 Yaxk’in

1238 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Today is also Lammas.

Lammas aka Loaf Mass aka Lughnasadh is a feast celebrated on the cross-quarter day halfway between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox, by convenience of tradition,  August 1st or 2nd. It is called the feast of first fruits–the fruits of the year’s harvest. The first fruits are honored by baking bread made from flour milled from the new crop of wheat.

By tradition, the first reaping from the field is winnowed, milled, mixed, baked, and consumed all on the day or days (sometimes Lammas is two day affair) of the festival. These days I recommend the freshest bag of Bob’s Red Mill or King Arthur bread flour you can find on the shelf at the local grocery store.  In Tulsa, such can be found at Whole Foods or Reeser’s.

I’m a retired journeyman baker, and I bake bread at home on a semi-regular basis, so this is an easy thing for me to do. If you can’t bear the thought of firing up the oven on the first of August, or baking anything at all is too daunting to face–no worries–the spirit of thing is to honor and give attention to the “daily bread,” the food you put in your mouth on this day, preferably a food handmade from basic, unadulterated ingredients.

Food close to its roots, so to speak, that has some savor of the ground it grew in or place it came from, that’s best, though hunger can make a Twinkie, or potato chips, or a baloney sandwich on Wonder Bread with Miracle Whip, holy. You want to be hungry when you eat the food you’ve consecrated for Loaf Mass. Bringing your hunger to the table is part of what makes the food a holy offering and the table a consecrated altar to whatever god or gods you’ve asked to dinner.

Even if you have no gods (as I don’t), don’t forget to set out an extra plate for an unexpected guest. Place on it a stone. The guest will tell the stone to become bread. When the stone becomes bread, the guest has arrived.

Today is 12.19.16.9.9 1 Muluk 7 Xul

1251 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

Preliminary image showing a black mark in Jupiters South Polar Region (SPR) which is almost certainly the result of a large impact – either an asteroid or comet – similar to the Shoemaker-Levy impacts in 1994.

Dark impact mark first noted at approximately 1330UTC on 19th July 2009 from my home observatory just outside Murrumbateman NSW Australia.

Anthony Wesley

Via Susan Delaney on Twitter:

ALERT: observational astronomers: plz train your telescopes on Jupiter for possible impact event tonight

Dark impact mark first noted on Jupiter at approx 1330UTC on 19th July 2009 from home observatory near Murrumbateman NSW Australia

Jupiter C.M. transit times, 2009.07.19 19:17 Object longitude: L2= 216,0° + 0,0000°/d * (T – 2009 Aug 01,5) Time interval: 20090719-20090801

Jupiter: 2009Jul 19 06:09 ( 216°) 16:05 ( 216°) 2009Jul 20 02:00 ( 216°) 11:56 ( 216°) 21:52 ( 216°) 2009Jul 21 07:47 ( 216°) 17:43 ( 216°)

New Link: http://www.universetoday.com/2009/07/19/possible-new-impact-on-jupiter/

Update/Anthony Welsey to Spaceweather.com:

I have imagery of that same location from two nights earlier without the impact mark, so this is a very recent event. The material has already begun to spread out in a fan shape on one side, and should be rapidly pulled apart by the fast jetstream winds. I recorded a lot of footage, and will be generating more images and a rotation animation soon.

Today is 12.19.16.8.12 10 Eb 10 Tzek

1268 shopping days until 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahau 3 K’ank’in.

A sign of summer.

This beetle is called a June bug, presumably because we see them, hereabouts, on warm nights beginning in June. I have no idea what species of beetle it is, the Linnaean taxonomy, but June bugs have been part of summers here in Oklahoma as far back I can remember.

June bugs are slow, cumbrous fliers, which makes them easy to catch. When I was a kid I used to catch them, and then put them in my sisters’ hair, or down their backs. The June bug usually reacted to sister insertion by emitting a rapid fire clicking noise. Much flapping about and screeching would ensue. This all was fine entertainment for a ten odd year old boy on a hot summer night in the late sixties. Nowadays, I would not be so cruel–to a bug–or to my sisters, for that matter. Both of my sisters are in much better shape than I am these days, and could beat me up.

June bugs seem to be somewhat phototropic, but they don’t arc around a light bulb the way moths do. June bugs sort of veer into the glow of, say, a porchlight, seem somehow disappointed, make a turn like a tiny overloaded cargo plane flown by a drunk, veer out of the glow, veer back, are again disappointed, and so on. I don’t see them as often, or as many at a time, as I did back when. I don’t know if this is because there are actually fewer June bugs, or whether untrustworthy memory has multiplied them into a retrospective swarm, or simply because I don’t turn on the exterior houselights that often. I like to sit on the porch in the dark.

The June Bug in the image above  flew into the kitchen through the open back door one night. I swept it out the air just as I used to when I was a boy.  I took its picture with my dcam, and released it back into the warm night air, rather than putting it on my wife.

My impulse control has improved over the years.

One of the most famous apochryphal statements in annals of  science was allegedly made by the evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane (Jack, to his friends). When asked by a theologian or theologians what could be inferred about the mind of the Creator from the works of His Creation, Haldane replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”  Entomologists are up to 350,000+ known species of beetles, so if there is a God, Haldane may have had something there. Haldane also said,

My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.

Accept the premise that God has an inordinate fondness for beetles (He made so many), then it must follow that entomologists that specialize in the study of beetles must be the most Godlike of people. But only if they love their work.

I am very fond of June bugs–almost as fond of them as I am of fireflies.  At the peak of manic episodes sans medication I have experienced what can be called “godlike” exhaltation. But I haven’t believed in God since I was five years old. I vividly remember the moment. The TV buzzed like a bug in the living room. I said to my mother, “I’m going to die.” She said, “No Honey, of course you’re not going to die.” I went and sat down on the floor in the front hallway. The door was open, the screen door on its latch. I looked out at the night–summer night. Heat lightning flared soundlessly in the distance beyond the blink of warning lights on tall radio towers. June bugs (and other bugs) bumped against the other side of the wire grid of the screen door. I was going to die. It was alright.

The Importance of Being Michael, Redux

Given the variety of comments I have received on my short post on Michael Jackson, here and elsewhere, I evidently did not make clear what I thought was a relatively simple point:

Michael Jackson, as a public personality and as an artist, transgressed racial, gender, and other societal bounds, and was so successful in doing so, that some of those boundaries and catagories were in effect blurred or erased in mainstream popular culture, particularly for people who were children when he was at his zenith in the late seventies and early eighties.

As I wrote in that post, I was never a fan of Michael Jackson–Neither of his style or his music. At the time he was most popular I was listening to Leonard Cohen, the Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega, Patti Smith, Gamelan music, David Bowie, Tom Waits, John Fahey, Miles Davis, Glenn Gould playing Bach, and a lot of other stuff, but no MJ. I didn’t watch much MTV, because for most of that time I didn’t have cable or even own a TV.

I don’t care about his music. I don’t care about his effect on the music industry. (The music industry no longer exists as far as I’m concerned.) I don’t care whether or not he was a pederast or not, a vic or a perp or not. I’m supremely uninterested in the sordid details of his wretched life.

Michael Jackson was (and is) of no interest whatsoever–to me. For me, he was just a passing sideshow, a flash of a pale face mutilated by plastic surgery–the King of Celebriabsurdity. 

But I was not writing about Michael Jackson’s effect on me, but on the degree he first expanded toleration of oddness in the general society, and later made things like, say, gay marriage, or transgendered people, or teen vampire romance novels for that matter, and real sideshow geeks, seem downright normal and wholesome in comparison. As a cultural phenomenon, Jackson opened up possibilities for people on the fringes, whether the fringe was in their heads or on their jackets.

In spite of the long, slow motion train wreck of his life, and the hurts done him and the hurt he may have done to others and himself, his effect on opening up mainstream society to new styles of behavior and being yourself in public was, in my opinion, positive.

Since I’m not a fan of his, but am very odd, I wanted to acknowledge that.

As mom used to say, that’s all there is to that.

Wacko Jacko: The Importance of Being Michael

Talk to the glove.

I was never a fan of Michaell Jackson.

First, you couldn’t tell whether his music was soul or pop or disco. You couldn’t tell whether he was a child or man. Soon, you couldn’t tell whether he was black or white. Then, you couldn’t tell whether he was a boy or a girl. Finally, you couldn’t tell whether he was a human being or an alien from outer space.

And that was precisely what was important about him–he transgressed all those bounds. He blurred, even erased the lines we all draw around those catagories, lighting up squares as he danced.

People forget how strange and out there Jackson was, even when, still an attractive, relatively normal looking young man, he first broke out as a solo act and conquered MTV. The way he dressed, the way he danced, the way he spoke and behaved, nobody had ever seen anything like him before–nobody in the mainstream, white culture bubble, anyway.

Suddenly teenyboppers, gradeschoolers, and even kindergardeners all over America and the world were bopping and moonwalking (sort of) like Michael Jackson. If it was ok to be like Michael Jackson, then it was ok to be weird.

That is what Wacko Jacko did. He made the world a little bit safer for weird people, a little bit safer to be different. He created cultural space for the free range odd. Going into the Age of Reagan, he bent gender when gender was begging to be bent. That all this arose not only out of his talent but his pathology, and seems to have destroyed him personally matters not at all in terms of the seismic shift of social mores his advent helped set in motion.

As tired as I am of hearing endless replays of his greatest hits everywhere I go, I have to give him a tip of my papal tiara for that.

Requiescat in pace.