10 Swords Star Goddess Goat

I did a tarot reading on an online website about my passions and seeking a balance in my life. The counseling I received was pretty amazing, but basically the thrust of it was "Do your job; focus on doing it well." Last night I was inspired to at least try to do my job as a writer, and I showed up to the page, but I didn't get anywhere.

I will say that using the "money shot" metaphor of narrative thrust is a useful tool for certain kinds of writing. It's just that it's addictive and over time the bang from that buck gets less and less, and I find I would rather find something that is more sustaining.

My thought right now is to turn to a Tamara sort of experiment, perhaps where there are a couple of characters who have that explosive money-shot dynamic. I'm thinking one of the characters may just have to be Hamlet Etapucci IV or some ridiculous name like that, the gangster-tragic-hero wit da Joizy akzen'. But there would be 6 to 8 other characters all of whom would be the protagonist of their own plays, and I could leave it to the individual audience members with their maps of addictions to decide who they wish to follow. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that most, given what the characters would be, would probably go after Hamlet Ettapucci IV or Starletta Enbittermentus, our fancy-ass celebrinazi.

See, I see I have all this violence inside me, all this rage, and I need to get it out of me and sculpt it into something that can be useful. This stuff is inside me, and it's been lodged there deep. I need out it to pull, and it takes some effort and a careful attentiveness to how I draw the toxins out.

Trees help.

3 swords Hades Dragon - More thoughts on drama

I had a lunchtime meditative talk with Hades about stuff today. Yesterday, my oracles and what-not seemed to be pointing me toward notions of balance and passion, and one thing I know in my bones I have a passion for is divinity. My attraction to divination may just come from the notion of personal divinity, which is that awareness of how my will and divine will intersect and become one. To get to that place, I need to go through a vetting process about my desires as they enter into my awareness, and some of the things I see that I seem to want eventually reveal themselves to be ephemera. Some of the things that I seem to think I don't want have become indispensable, for example kale of all things. Kale and brussels sprouts are two foods that I have come to cherish for the simple reason they make me happy. I have no idea why this should be, but I'm looking forward to having kale with mixed vegetables, pork, rice cakes, butternut squash and an apple for dinner tonight, along with a couple of other small items.

My meditation with Greece's ancient death god today seemed to turn on the notions of drama and how it has been a passion of mine in the past. I used to get caught up in whether or not tragedy was a possible expression for the contemporary American. Now I see it as a rather pointless notion. The tragic hero's definition was way too constricted in order to fit Aristotelian notions of reinforcing the then status-quo wherein proper governance was a bastion of a military and intellectual defense of patriarchal self-aggrandizement which articulated a rather reactionary and paternalistic viewpoint that didn't bother to disguise a hostility toward some notion of "primitive" (read egalitarian and/or matriarchal) peoples. (I acknowledge that I can't really prove this notion on its face, though I believe that Shlain, Gimbutas and others have articulated similar notions about how the alphabetic cultures had warred against cultures of image and imagination.)

Aristotle still continues to have a death-grip on the notion of what constitutes a proper narrative, however, one which is very similar to the male ejaculation process. Hamlet's Money Shot is the moment at the end of th play when Hamlet kills Claudius. Oedipus' Money Shot is of course his realization that he is the contagion afflicting Thebes and he puts his own eyes out. Frank Galvin's Money Shot in David Mamet's screenplay The Verdict is when he calls Nurse Costello to the stand and redeems his sorry-ass ambulance-chasing career. And I suppose we'll be seeing a long-delayed Money Shot when The Sopranos ends this final season.

It isn't a surprise that some women are good money-shot creators, like J.K. Rowling for example--though I will say that the climaxes of the Harry Potter novels are a bit peremptory, kind of like a handjob. I love the Harry Potter series, but that is a characteristic weakness common to all the books, with the possible exception of Book 3. But the thing I love about the HP books is the world she creates, so I don't mind that JK has to hit the buttons to create that rush for He-Who-Must-Be-Served, that Voldemort-lizard brain inside us all. Still, isn't it interesting that the climaxes are the very places where there's not much heart? Oh, there's plenty in the aftermaths thereof, especially in Books 4 and 5. I can't read Book 4's ending without crying, and when Sirius dies in 5, I feel a great loss.

Anyway, these are kind of interesting digressions about the nature of the western/patriarchal/addictive/civilized notion of narrative THRUST and CLIMAX, with scant attention paid to afterglow. I'm wondering about how I as a playwright can play to reconnect the sexual, the sacred, and the theatrical and how all that can work to subvert the thuggish paradigm inflicting its' wounded rages upon the greater populace. Some of our ancient myths probably tell of ways to tell stories that are not as "climactic" but desirable and pleasurable to tell and hear. But to get to that place, it might be that some sort of "abstinence" from "narraporn" might need to be effected. Could it be that Aristotle and his band of soul-thieves over the centuries (and in whose school of cuntishness I too have been trained, but to my benefit, whose dog in my hand don't hunt at any rate), have created an addiction that is just as pernicious as toxic belief or Jack Daniels or Jelly Donuts or Juris Doctorates? Jingo Drama, perhaps? After all, the earliest playwright in the annals of Greek record whose work is still extant, Aeschylus, was a brillliant (gangster) statesman/general.

Sidebar, along those lines, Woody Allen alluded to something very interesting in his brilliant piece Bullets Over Broadway, when he had Chazz Palminteri's gangster character be the real playwright in the works, and not hapless John Cusack. Dianne Wiest's famous "Don't speak, don't. Speak, don't, etc." speech is the ultimate in the censorship of the heart and soul ain't it? But in a cunture like ours, it's cunture-artists we get. Kunt-kunt-kunt, eh? Dracula Falwell would be motht pleathed.

Balance Freyja Jaguar - Tragedy and Thuggishness

This is a thought that hit me yesterday while I was walking past Capital Repertory on North Pearl. The show that's there now, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, isn't one of my favorites I must say. The company did an admirable job of it, though I also recognize that the part of Abigail Williams isn't all that well written. And she's the one who everyone's afraid of. I guess it doesn't have to be well-written--it sort of underscores the vacuity of our civilized culture that it isn't, though I sincerely doubt that was Mr. Miller's intention. In fact, I was thinking about his essay about how "modern" man can have tragic figures. In an odd way I agree with him, but that's because I was thinking of the civilized notion of the "noble."

Basically, if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd have to be writing his tragedies and history plays about folks like Bush, Cheney, the Gottis, the Russian Mafia, the yakuza, etc. Really, today's ultimate "tragedian" is John Woo, of Hong Kong violent film fame. Because the whole civilized notion of "nobility" is really a palimpsesting of all the blood and gore that went into the creation of say, the Plantagenets and the Tudors, the French and Castilian monarchies, etc.

In fact, if we were to get to a more fundamental notion of the "noble" that bypassed civilization, then the ultimate "tragic hero"--that figure who's perfection itself with a tragic flaw--would have to be your average Indian or indigenous tribe member, the very like of which we all emerged from centuries ago. The generic Indian's tragic flaw would be guilelessness and a lack of street sense, and then getting swept up/aside in the maelstrom cancer of civilized progression. The more violent Indian/indigenous would have found his role in the civilized realm fairly quickly, although to be fair most were probably used as soldier fodder for wars waged at a grand scale. All of us are destined to be et up by the civilization maw over time, unless we somehow find our way out of the quicksand.

First thing we do though is stop digging, stop our flailing about and get calm. Perhaps we'd then be able to float over to the shore rather than be pulled under by the muddy sucking of the quicksand.

7 Cups Hekate Bear

Some days I feel wildly out-of-sorts. I just drew Coventina from Doreen Virtue's "Goddess Card" deck, which counsels me to detox my mind and body. (I feel my body is fairly well detoxed but I do have some Splenda and nutrasweet coursing through my system. Perhaps it's time I dispensed with those, as well as the coffee.)

Anyway, I am noticing such mood-swings in the past two weeks. All last week I was down because there are certain "6th Step" promptings to make big changes in my life. One of my character defenses is passivity, which is really difficult to break because I'm so "well" rewarded for it. I don't rock the boat, I don't really talk about stuff. It's gotten so bad that I really don't know what I want right now. It's not necessarily the passivity that is driving me to the lack of self-knowledge. Right now I'm feeling that a lot of stuff is elusive and I keep turning compulsively to oracles and the like to help me chart a course through this painful muck.

Right now I really want to cry. This will pass I know, but I think that there might be some sort of purification that would take place if I did just let go and cry the buckets inside me. This happens to me every once in awhile, I notice. There's a pattern here.

The past three days I've been able to access joyfulness again. It's nice, really nice, but I feel like I've been eating soy--I don't feel grounded and on the planet. Yesterday I finished re-reading Freeing the Soul from Fear by Robert Sardello and I have been using some of his exercises. They really do help to locate oneself in a larger dimension than this mere corporal one, where fear tends to lodge and secure most of its power. In doing these exercises of the imagination (and they are much like physical exercises in that they take attention, time and work), I have been able to transform some of my fears. One oracle I performed for myself last night acted as a confirmation that this was indeed the right thing for me to be doing. And this is also a process of purification too, I realize.

Yesterday I also read Carolyn Baker's "The Spirituality of Collapse" on her website. I recognize that part of my path is to open myself to the collapse that is going on all around us, but with those miraculous eyes of the soul. When I let myself just be with the collapse stuff, I can sense the light of all creation vibrating all around us. Deep inside I know that what's going on is a rupture out of the darkness, a rift of light and beauty is pushing something into Gaian reality. I need to somehow be a part of that process, and I am readying myself. I don't really get it, but I feel like I want to say "uckitfay" to a lot of stuff. Perhaps at some point I'll get to. But I need to show up for what I need to and do it in the spirit of joyful obligation, if for no other reason than it keeps me "sane" (whatever the hell that means these days...).

Prince Cups Brigid Goat - Poems of Murd$rous R*ge

So much depends upon
a field of bloated corpses
of finance mucky-mucks
composting under
the brilliant sun,
raising generations
of maggots!

*********

Therapists like to say
that homicide is better than
suicide. Die Sanmerde Weill
Grand Master C*nt of the Universe!
Die Cuntigroup--
Vampire extraordinaire!
Let us all stake the hearts
of c*nts everywhere!

*********

Beltane Dawn (after Lydia Davis)

Oh, the sun is shining and the tulips are growing. Quick, let us grab the suit-c*nts at the Student Loan Cuntoration and execute them gangland style in celebration of Cernunnos!

Knight Wands Hermes Salamander - Call to Community

A Beltane Call to Community!

I call to the 4 winds,
to the elements,
to all the elementals and the deities,
to all the ascended and not-so-ascended masters,
to all those who are awakening or have awakened to their divinities,
(especially if you are in the northeastern New York, western Mass,
Southern Vermont/New Hampshire areas):

I call to me those who would partake in a community
to earth these vibrant and unruly energies
that are roaming rampant on this planet.
I call to me those who have a Big Eden vision
that welcomes, affirms, and loves we strange human beings
into a place of healing and recovery
from the toxicity surrounding us.
I call to us those who face down fear
in all of its forms, and yet who refuse to judge
those of us who are still in its clutches.
We acknowledge what formidable creatures
Phobos and Deimos and Panic are
and we call to us the allies
who will help us work through and with these energies
with respect and love to transform them
back into the soulful materials from which they were twisted.
We breathe our love and desire back into the earth
and we link up with others who have similar notions.

We call forth from inside our deepest reservoirs,
the soulful imagination to begin the artistic lives
we know we all wish to lead as we grow our own food,
as we support each other's economies of practical love
as we put our attentions onto our glorious communities
including ourselves as an important partner in the web of life,
no greater and no lesser than spiders, dandelions and wolves.

I send out this call to the cosmos and to the blogosphere!
I radiate a golden and loving light to all who would receive it.

Blessed be. So Mote it Be!