‘Voluptas lies curled in the womb of Psyche’….. Old painting of mine from 2009)
“The Poison is the cure”
Let me say it again: the result is not merely the objectification of subjective "me-ness," but the objectification of its material basis. This has been dissolved, calcined, tortured, putrefied, and distilled to a clarity that can be completely seen through, as if it were not there at all, not a speck of literalism remains, not even spiritual literalism. The libidinal compulsion, the organic towardness of hope and desire that would always go further for a faraway grail, turns around on itself and dissolves itself. The snake eats its own tail-another goal image of deconstructive subversion. The snake of healing, transformation, and rebirth, the goals most dearly desired, and the artifex's obedient service, all dry to dust, mineralized. The uroboric motion poisons (iosis) the very idea of cure. Or, poison is the cure.
What is actually accomplished by the alchemical work? According to my psychological fantasies, it is the objectification of the libido-our lives are not our lives. The alchemical goal is the realization in its complete sense of Freud's "object libido," The libido as a cosmic erotic dynamic that permeates the world because it loves the world of matter, even though it has been caught in the personal delusions of subjectivity, so that we believe we love the world, or can be improved or instructed to love the world. Whereas it is the object libido that loves the world through us, despite us. The anima in chains in the matter of "me, " and we place it there each time as we ask psychologically, what is the matter with me? Alchemy answers, saying: you, I, everyone, the world is matter, elemental material, and we indulge in the materials, as the artifex in the laboratory, all along believing that you are working on you, your life, your relations, your processes until the day dawns, aurora. You awaken within the idea of the goal, the goal not somewhere else out there calling for attainment, but you are within the idea. But because the mind is still trapped in me-ness, we shamelessly assert that the idea is in me when your mind is in the idea. You awaken to the recognition that you are already in that stone, mineralized, stoned out of your mind.
If my reading is on track and the telos or "that for the sake of which" is the de-subjectification of the object libido, then we are obliged to imagine resurrection from this vantage point, which hardly conforms with a Christian reading of either alchemy or resurrection. For now resurrection would indicate not the confirmation throughout eternity of the personal subject and its body saved from the world and the devil of its flesh but rather the resurrection of the body of the world with an idea to its eternity. Not the lifting, the Aufhebung, of material worldliness but the full realization of desire for a world that pulsates in the materials of the elemental psyche, those substances that compose the stone and give it its enduring life, a realization that the world itself speaks through the desire in the materials; that desire is the language of the world, that the libido of each individual human is indeed a cosmic force, an eros or object libido which yearns toward and enjoys this world. And we who labor in the garden as if it were a stony ground would find our individual resurrection in attachment to our materials, which are the world's body, this body becoming a jardin des délices, the objectification of pleasure.
Object libido finds its pleasure in the other, the object, the world as a body. This dry term "object libido" calls for a moistened language. Terms such as cosmogonic eros, desire, jouissance, or unus mundus cannot do justice to what is implied. Libido brings with it the aura of pleasure and the Aphroditic world of the senses. Did not Plotinus attribute to Plato the idea that the soul is always an Aphrodite, which suggests that we cannot adequately speak of the libidinal soul without shifting immediately to an Aphroditic language? Then we would imagine that this libidinal drive throughout the whole opus of soul-making and its increasing love has as its goal a resurrection in beauty and pleasure, and we would realize that even such terms as opus and operatio are work-words which distort the libido's nature. The Christianization of alchemy nonetheless retains the Aphroditic vision in the images it presents. She is the Golden One, the pearl is her jewel; the rose, her flower; the bath and the copulations in the bath of the Rosarium, her liquid territory. The translation of sensate images into spiritual value, as if a lifting improvement to the higher realm of Aphrodite Urania, succeeds only in losing the very sensate attraction of the goal as a pleasurable pull toward beauty. Hence Ficino, Valla, and other Renaissance Platonists insisted that Voluptas is nearer to the life of the spirit than the middle region or mediocrity of ataraxic rationality. Voluptas, according to Apuleius, lies curled in the womb of Psyche and comes to birth only after all psychological effort is passed.
This is the Nekyia, the night sea journey through the underworld made also by Odysseus, Aeneas, and Hercules, and by Eurydice, Inanna, Persephone, Psyche, by Orpheus, by Christ. Whether this underworld is frigid and ghastly or burning with the hots of hell, it is a realm characterized by temperatures suitable only for demons, ghosts, heroes and heroines, goddesses and shades who are no longer altogether of the upper world. Outsiders. Marginals. Alchemy is a profession of marginals; those at the edge. Those who live from their own fires, sweating it out, self-sustaining their own temperatures which may be at variance with the collective climate.”
I am grateful and blessed and blissed beyond Measure to have come thru the Matrix of This Particular portal... This Womans Womb, the Waveform of Being entangled in Tidal Seeing rooted here in this Loom on the warp and weft of the pain and pleasure and the games and tricks as I play at Being mortal in Times intrepid Tomb.
It is not the first Dance but an endless Symphony of enfolded genes and hologenetic memory It is not a game of chance but an intentional theophany of unfolding schemes and peripatetic biocartography
I was given the invective Kun! Be! And compressed mySelf into a tiny LightSeed planted within a body that bleeds spirit enraptured and captured by the decree to waver between Doer and deed as the Verb of Me descended Down into Noun of Me embodied in Sound Heartbeat pulsing within Skin of Mothers Drum Echoes of rhythm and melody Willing Birth and spilling memory and MomentsOfMe into the fabric of spaceTime instantly
I crawled thru the walls of her Wonder following the Electro Magnetic storm of Lightening and Thunder that cleaves Egg and rends Asunder the Begging beginning Form of fertilized Feeling that clings to Mothers Walls Safe inside the Measured Space of MaMa Mater Matter Maat Matrice of Mind as Thoth Impregnates and BioLuminescent Grace awaits in Stasis the Amazing exit from the Gates of this Nexus that Enters Existence An.Noun.C.I.ng Me.
There is a cataract in my I As a matter of fact It’s a Matter of Why It’s a Mystery hidden in shattered Minds fractured Skulls manufactured EnMasse MKUltra Doldrums Programmed for the Trumpets Blast As Vying Vultures Dine on dying cultures In the Petri Glass
The Cloudy Retinas Stare back at me In disbelief Regurgitated memes Offer no relief To the crowds Who are gathered In Ether Nets Screaming loud As broken necks dangle From the Nous Of the tangled Hex
They stomp their feet And loudly proclaim It’s simply ‘climate change’ As the simple software In their simple Brains Cling to their masters Who programmmed the Game ‘Take my Vote take my Vote!!!’ As the holes are drilled In their leaky boats As their souls are filled With anecdotes As planned panic In demo(n a)cro(b)atic epidemics Offer up their scapegoats
Splintered psyches Will grasp at straws Every Alter Wanders Lost Within the Halls Of the HollowCost Seeded from the frequencies As Seamen spawns Artificial breeds No need to bleed In the new creed As Paradise is Lost And Paradox is Freed
Which way shall we go? Apoptosis or Necrosis? Pop-culture doses Of symbiosis Or sovereign exploration Of Live Gnosis? Menses-Mined Over-controlled GovernMen.t on Patrol Third eye Blind Dumbed-down souls Craving Slavery Tied to Polls…. Lies are Built LiFe.S deFiled On Wiped FiLes Of the Old..::: Can’t you See Currents……you See, No longer tied To Standards Of Gold… Currency dies As CurrentSeas Rise And blurry Me~s Close their Eyes…
"The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them." - Turkish proverb
If you know, you know…..that the forest can do all those things and more -that the Empty Shells have planned for their new New Temples. You Are the most advanced Technology In Existence. With Your Body, and the Interface of Mind, you actually have Access to all of Time & Space. But you do not ReMember Who You are. So you have been Tricked into using your Infinite Power to Create…..to build a world that is designed to keep you trapped in endless feedback loops of recursive programming…..how many layers deep will you Go?
The Crossroads:::::::
Carbon is Diamond. The Black Goddess Black Madonna in Her Rarefied Form. Thru the Process of Times Dance with Space and the Intense Compression that takes Place….She becomes The Diamond Body Virgin Mother….:::::: A pure and perfect Refraction of Life…::::: But they Are…:In Essence::::: the Same
The Silicon Vale of Tears reigning floods to divert the Sovereign organic Process Pressuring Life into Forms that deForm the Inner Temple ….. which Upgrade will You Choose? Diamond or silicon? No Matter Mother Maat Matrix can be destroyed but it can be trapped in an Endless Loop. How many layers Deep, Are You, In the Soup?
A long slow slide into degradation… shuffled into the perfect recipe for biocessation Everything that you have been taught to fear Is backwards The swords of discrimination Are lacking more each year
Prepping you for the greenhouse You’ve been potted In depleted soil For the smart dome that invades Your biome And becomes your home It’s almost here You’ve been prepped and steered Along the abyss The Judas kiss From the many tiered Mirror Of your fears Here … Create panic , hide from the sun Straight into the blue light of the floodlights That mine sight and tie your eyes Too tight To run….
You are a brief elaboration Of a tube That stretches mouth to ass Filled with steller mass There is a light show within Your skin Inside Where life begins to dine On photons And digest the Aeon Trapped in time
biology uses light’s duality to sculpt life What are you being sculpted into In this blue light haze A maze of fading dreams Owned now by the real Estate Agents of Virtual Things That occupy your inner life And nullify your Imaginal Mind Running from the blind Minotaur Hungry inside his circuitry Waiting for the tender feast Prepared Carefully And risen like yeast Inside the meat Suits Who no longer need To bleed.
The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice. ~Kassner
For a long time he attained it in looking. Stars would fall to their knees beneath his compelling vision. Or as he looked on, kneeling, his urgency's fragrance tired out a god until it smiled at him in its sleep.
Towers he would gaze at so that they were terrified: building them up again, suddenly, in an instant! But how often the landscape, overburdened by day, came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.
Animals trusted him, stepped into his open look, grazing, and the imprisoned lions stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom; birds, as it felt them, few headlong through it; and flowers, as enormous as they are to children, gazed back into it, on and on.
And the rumor that there was someone who knew how to look, stirred those less visible creatures: stirred the women. Looking how long? for how long now, deeply deprived, beseeching in the depths of his glance?
When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home- the hotel's distracted unnoticing bedroom moody around him, and in the avoided mirror once more the room, and later from the tormenting bed once more: then in the air the voices discussed, beyond comprehension, his heart, which could still be felt; debated what through the painfully buried body could somehow be felt- his heart; debated and passed their judgment: that it did not have love.
(And denied him further communions.)
For there is a boundary to looking. And the world that is looked at so deeply wants to flourish in love.
Work of the eyes is done, now go and do heart-work on all the images imprisoned within you; for you overpowered them: but even now you don't know them. Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman, the one attained from a thousand natures, the merely attained but not yet beloved form.👁❤️👁
“To sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense.”
James Hillman
( Continues in photo captions)
“Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each new event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image – in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.”
James HillmanThere is a further consequent of the credit one pays to the im- ages of the soul. A new feeling of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance begins to spread and circulate. It is as if the heart and the left side were extending their dominion. Shadow aspects of the personality continue to play their burdensome roles but now within a larger tale, the myth of oneself, just what one is which begins to feel as if that is how one is meant to be. My myth becomes my truth; my life symbolic and allegorical. Self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, self-love; more, one finds oneself sinful but not guilty, grateful for the sins one has and not another’s, loving one’s lot even to the point of desire to have and to be always in this vivid inner connection with one’s own individual portion. Such strong experiences of religious emotion seem to be the gift again of the anima.
James HillmanThe third step is gratuitous. It refers to the free and creative appearance of imagination, as if the inner world now come to life begins to act spontaneously, by itself, undirected and even unattended by ego-consciousness. The inner world not only begins more and more to take care of itself, producing crises and resolving them within its own transformations, but it also takes care of you, your ego-worries and ego-claims. This is the feminine Shakti of India at a higher state; it is also the nine Muses responsible for culture and creativity. One feels lived by imagination.
James HillmanPanic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the heroic ego sleeps, is a direct participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with life while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger or sexuality, images take on compelling life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this living world is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics is polytheistic pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead’s term nature alive means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality.
James Hillman“A world without soul offers no intimacy. Things are left out in the cold, each object by definition cast away before it is manufactured, lifeless litter and junk, taking its value wholly from my consumptive desire to have and to hold, wholly dependent on the subject to breathe it into life with personal desire. When particulars have no essential virtue, then my own virtue as a particular depends wholly and only on my subjectivity or on your desire for me, or fear of me: I must be desirable, attractive, a sex-object, or win importance and power. For without these investments in my particular person, coming either from your subjectivity or my own, I too am but a dead thing among dead things, potentially forever lonely.”“Isn’t devotio to anima the calling of psychology? So, another deep-seated reason for this book is to provide grounding for the vision of soul in psychology, so that psychology doesn’t abandon itself to the archetypal perspectives of the child and developmentalism or the mother and material causalism. The vision of soul given by anima is more than just one more perspective. The call of soul convinces; it is a seduction into psychological faith, a faith in images and the thought of the heart, into an animation of the world. Anima attaches and involves. She makes us fall into love. We cannot remain the detached observer looking through a lens. In fact, she probably doesn’t partake in optical metaphors at all. Instead, she is continually weaving, stewing, and enchanting consciousness into passionate attachments away from the vantage point of a perspective.
(James Hillman, Anima, ix-x)I like to imagine a person’s psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.
James HillmanDRAMATIC TENSIONS If psychotherapy is to understand the dreaming soul from within, it had best turn to “theatrical logic.” The nature of mind as it presents itself most immediately has a specific form: Dionysian form. Dionysus may be the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, but this force is not dumb. It has an internal organization. In psychology this language speaks not genetically, not biochemically in the information of DNA codes, but directly in Dionysus’s own art form, theatrical poetics. This means the dream is not a coded message at all, but a display, a Schau, in which the dreamer himself plays a part or is in the audience, and thus always involved. No wonder that Aristotle placed psychotherapy (catharsis) in the context of theater. Our lives are the enactment of our dreams; our case histories are from the very beginning, archetypally, dramas; we are masks (personae) through which the gods sound (personare). Like dreams, inner fantasy too has the compelling logic of theater.
James HillmanDionysian consciousness understands the conflicts in our stories through dramatic tensions and not through conceptual opposites; we are composed of agonies not polarities. Dionysian consciousness is the mode of making sense of our lives and worlds through awareness of mimesis, recognizing that our entire case history is an enactment, “either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical- comical-pastoral,” and that to be “psychological” means to see myself in the masks of this particular fiction that is my fate to enact. Finally, to view ourselves from within a drama refers to the religious origins, not only of drama, but of the mythical enactments that we perform and name with the mask of “behavior.”
ALchemical psychology remarkably condenses the two traits of the lion heart–the conformity of its thought and its objectification- into the alchemical substance, sulfur, the principle of “combustibility,” the magna famma. “Where is the sulfur to be found? asks Kramer, a fourteenth-century English Benedictine. “In all substances, all things in the world–metals, herbs, trees, animals, stones, are its ore.
Everything that suddenly lights up, draws our joy, fares with beauty–each bush a god burning: this is the alchemical sulfur, the flammable face of the world, its phlogiston, its aureole of desire, enthymesis everywhere. That fat of goodness we reach toward as consumers is the active image in each thing, the active imagination of the anima mundi that fires the heart and provokes it out.
(James Hillman, Thought of the Heart )
Continued in photo captions
At the same time that sulfur conflagrates, it also coagulates; it is that which sticks, the mucilage, “the gum,” the joiner, the stickiness of attachment. Sulfur literalizes the heart’s desire at the very instant that the thymos enthuses. Conflagration and coagulation occur together. Desire and its object become indistinguishable. What I burn with attaches me to it; I am anointed by the fat of my own desire, captive to my own enthusiasm, and thus in exile from my heart at the very moment I seem most to own it. We lose our soul in the moment of discovering it: “Sweet Helen,” says Marlowe’s Faustus, “make me immortal with a kiss./Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!” Hence Heraclitus had to oppose thymos and psyche: “Whatever thymos wishes, it buys at the expense of soul.”Psychology now calls this love in the heart of the lion compul- sive projection. The alchemical basis of this kind of projection is actually the sulfur in the heart that does not recognize it is imagining. The objective himma is literalized into the objects of its desire. Imagination is thrown outward, ahead of itself; and the task is less to take back these kinds of projections -who takes them back and where are they put–but more to leap after the projectile reclaiming it as imagination, thereby recognizing that himma demands that images always be experienced as sensuous independent bodies. There are styles of projection: it is not a unitary mechanism. Cordial projection requires an equally leonine mode of consciousness: pride, magnanimity, courage. To desire and to see through desire–this is the courage that the heart requires.As Jung says: “Sulphur represents the active substance of the sun… the motive factor in consciousness, on the one hand Will and on the other Compulsion” (CW 14, S15t). Compulsion becomes will through courage; it is in the heart that the operations upon sulfur are performed. We shall come back to these operations in the second part. For now it is enough to recognize compulsive projection to be a necessary activity of the sulfur, as the way in which this heart thinks, where thought and desire are one.Our lion rages and our sulfur burns. Our saint is eaten by lions. We cannot let loose our aesthetic outrage in its simple form. Alchemical psychology recognized this need for work on the lion. Alchemical psychology considered the black and red sulfurs, and the green lion, in desperate need of subliming. One well-known method cuts off the green lion’s paws, depriving it of its reach into the world. Yet it stays alive as a succus vitae in the heart, for “green is the color of the heart and of the vitality of the heart,” as we know from Corbin. The color of the himma must be green like the natural driving sulfur that is also the green/red copper goddess Venus. This ardent green has to be enlightened, the sulfur chastened: a whitening of the heart.To make white the heart is an opus contra naturam. We expect the heart to be red as its natural blood, green as its hopeful desire. This heart operation originates in the dilemma presented by sulfur: the imagination captive in its sulfur that both burns and coagulates at the same instant, imagination held fused into its desire and its desire fused with its object. The himma blinded, unable to distinguish between feeling and image, image and object, object and subject, true imagining and illusion.Alchemy often speaks of subliming to a sulfur white as snow. This is not only an operation of calming and cooling, the “Doves of Diana.” In fact sublimation requires going with the fire, like curing like, raising the temperature to a white heat so as to destroy all coagulations in the intensity of the desire, so that what one desires No longer matters, even as it matters most, mattering now sublimed translucent, all flame.
Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.
For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It's good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.
Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.
But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn't be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.
The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.
BlissNinja 