Tag: Moon

A Prayer for the Year Ahead

In an effort to set intentions amid the energy of a new moon, I write the following:

May I heal what hurts so as to be available to behave lovingly toward all.

May I learn to behave thus, so as to be other than a mere pontificating white man among other pontificating white men.

May I be a loving father.

May I forgive those who have harmed me, and may I be forgiven by those I’ve harmed.

May my love be true, practiced with the whole of my being, in ways that nourish the beloved and bring forth growth rather than harm.

May I be a great giver of gifts, grateful for the many gifts I’ve been given.

May the year ahead be a year of Lovers: a time of awakenings: a time of sexual and spiritual discovery; realization of love’s promise.

Amen. So mote it be.

Newport Beach in Hindsight

“Here I am again, in this next memory,” says the Narrator. “On the beach. Only this time, it’s a new one: Newport Beach, site of my brother’s bachelor party. Imagine me in dialogue, in a sense, with the one who was there.”

Spacetime shifts here as the character reenters the memory.

***

“Well, what’ll it be?” wonders the Traveler. “If spacetime is reducible to a game of multidimensional correspondence chess, then what’s our next move?”

Rising in the sky above him there at the beach house, the new moon in Leo provides the Traveler a chance to ask questions. He communes with the moon, engaging it in silent dialogue, and sets his intentions for the months ahead.

A ghostly third figure joins him in the course of the evening. It shimmers into being like a hazy wonder there amid the rocks and the waves, and in so doing, intervenes in the Traveler’s thoughts. “Let us be careful what we wish for,” warns the Ghost, “as this is a powerful, wish-granting lunar cycle.”

***

“Warning taken, it was with great care that I made that wish,” interjects the Narrator from the future. “And in retrospect, I regret nothing.”

“Come sunrise, in fact,” remembers the Narrator, “and a commune of sorts assembled itself down near the shore. Members set out mats and, posing silently amid squawking seabirds, practiced yoga on the beach as I wrote.”

Escape from Space and Time

“What about the future?” thinks the time traveler. Could binaural beats be of use, as the Monroe Institute claimed? The narrator has cassettes of theirs in his basement, and could be cajoled into playing them for the time traveler as the latter reclines on a futon at Dada’s House on the night of a full moon.

“The Monroe people seem sort of creepy, though,” warns the narrator. They allege that their “Gateway Experience” enables escape from space and time. CIA thought the technique had some degree of merit, didn’t they? Enough, certainly, to warrant an investigation. The results of that investigation have been declassified and are available now through the CIA website. Thobey Campion reviewed the agency’s findings about the Institute several months ago in a piece for Vice.

Tuesday February 16, 2021

Dereliction of dung heap. Data-driven dumbwaiter at your service. Chronically correct I effect my own cause. Alpha Dog to Omega Man: can you read me? Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around…Comes Around” saddens me, so I head outdoors. I gather sticks. I stand among the trees, finding in the sky above me the crescent moon. The night’s songs are sad ones: Dolly Pardon’s “Jolene” and Regina Spektor’s “Fidelity.” And just this morning arrived the words of artist-friend Irving Bleak, speaking of owls as characters in world mythology. Characters in the lives of children. Guardians, protectors. I think of the Tesseract from Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Owls appear as a ‘theme’ or ‘motif’ throughout the evening. For work, meanwhile, I’ve had to reconsider Freud. Prep for an upcoming lecture. “Aggressiveness was not created by property,” he asserts in Civilization and Its Discontents. “It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form. […]. If we were to remove this factor…by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there” (61). Aggression is for Freud an “indestructible feature of human nature.” Do those of us with children know otherwise? Freud is a cultural chauvinist, a bourgeois moralist, a critic of communism and an apologist for capitalist imperialism. I think now of his critics: Left Freudians like Herbert Marcuse, but also the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro. Most of all, though, I think of anticolonial theorist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. How might we put Freud to radical use today amid Black Radical critiques of Western subjectivity and the rise of psychedelic science? I’m reminded of the opening remarks in Slavoj Žižek’s book The Ticklish Subject. “A spectre is haunting Western academia,” he writes, “the spectre of the Cartesian subject. Deconstructionists and Habermasians, cognitive scientists and Heideggerians, feminists and New Age obscurantists — all are united in their hostility to it.” Žižek himself, however, defends the subject — from these and other of its critics. Ever the provocateur. I’m teaching a gen-ed lit course. My task is to introduce Freud to students new to him. Let us establish the subject before we critique it. During breaks from Freud I watch the new Adam Curtis series Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021) and read bits of Principia Discordia. In whatever book is finally written on acid’s arrival into history, there will be a chapter on Discordianism and Kerry Thornley, “Operation Mindfuck” figuring prominently therein. Colonization of the last free outpost, the human mind.

Sunday October 11, 2020

The semester demands a lot of us — time, care, attention — particularly now as we grade midterms. I wake up most days depressed, sleep-deprived, angry at the state of the world. But Frankie lifts my spirits. Before morning is done, we’re laughing, singing. She reaches out and explores an ever-expanding universe. Each day we follow schedules, hours blocked out for meals, sleep, work, baby care — though we also leave time for reading, writing, meditation, “self-care.” Part of me wants to blow off school for a bit and read Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology. Then again, maybe I should be studying the moon. Do moon cycles affect moods? Each day, Frankie and I read a board book called Kitten’s First Full Moon. Kitten thinks the moon is a bowl of milk and chases after it. Her chase is thwarted and dashed until she returns home to find “a great big / bowl of milk / on the porch, / just waiting for her. / Lucky Kitten!” All’s well that ends well. The moon also figures in recent thinking about werewolves. The werewolf tales that appeal to me are happy tales — comedies like Teen Wolf. I was a werewolf the Halloween after that film’s release. 1985: I was seven years old. There’s a photo of me climbing up the wall, wedging my arms and legs within the frame of a doorway. I was proud and wishing to show off this newly-discovered capacity of mine to brace myself in this way, suspended several feet off the floor. My mom made the costume by hand. What was the film’s appeal? For starters, it begins with the roar of a lion. Already, then, the presence of an animal within the machine — this being the conceit of all werewolf films. Oftentimes that conceit is a tragic one, as in one of the earliest horror films that I remember encountering as a kid: the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London. But in Teen Wolf, it’s a happy conceit: the werewolf both assimilated into and victorious over his surroundings. The soundtrack at the beginning is also quite moving: an echo-effected streak of thud resolves after several echoes into the sound of a basketball. These are liminal sounds, the protagonist way into his own head, heart racing as he prepares to take a foul shot and misses, ball bouncing off the rim. Disappointment returns the protagonist to a humbled awareness of his surroundings, shame coloring his face. Before we’re separate from him, though, what we see at the center of the movie screen is a circular ball of light — a spotlight hanging from the ceiling of the high school gymnasium. The film will later replace this substitute light — an artificial, man-made thing — with the light of the moon. Before the moon shot, though, it maintains an “off” sensation through expressionistic use of sound. The sound effects suture listeners to the anxious spacetime of the protagonist. A sexual humiliation occurs, too, when we discover that the protagonist’s team is named the “Beavers.” Clearly this is a film about adolescence — the boy undergoing a fearful rite of passage in order to become a man. As Michael J. Fox interacts with the oddballs and mediocrities around him, I begin to note resemblances. Characters perform as dream-doubles for figures I knew as a kid. I re-watch the film through to the initial transformation sequence. It ends with the shot of the moon — the one we knew was coming ever since the opening shot of the film. And the movie itself ends with a moon song: Amy Holland’s “Shootin’ for the Moon.” The hero is human again, voluntarily free of enhancement — but his time as the wolf changed him for the better. It imbued him with the will to win.

Friday February 7, 2020

A crouched cat, rustling leaves, the blinking lights of a distant plane: these I encounter on a chill night as I walk about the earth beneath a large moon. The planet’s surface bathed in its light. I stare up at it in wonder (oh mysterious thing, so lovely!) before returning to the house, baby feeding hungrily at Sarah’s breast. The three of us go on a date: ice cream for mom and dad, while baby sleeps beside us in her car seat. F. wears a hat her aunt knit for her. As she and Sarah quiet and settle down for the evening, I enter the basement and listen to a recording of a guided meditation led by Chuck Pereda & Natalie Szendro, featuring music by Pulse Emitter. Time to practice Yoga Nidra.

Sunday January 26, 2020

Baby strokes my Adam’s apple as I burp her over my shoulder. I wrap her in my arms and prepare to step outdoors. These are our doings, our joys. We go for a walk. We see the world. Exploration of outer space. How does one respond to one’s country having landed on the moon? What modifications occur to our myths and our cognitive maps? Anne Kent Rush ventured a guess with her 1976 book Moon, Moon, wherein she quotes the old Chinese maxim, “Love everything in the universe, because the Sun and Moon and Earth are but one body.” Let us strive for a state of pure and fearless openness to all things.

Friday September 13, 2019

1953, the year Gerald Heard first tried mescaline, was also the year he began writing for ONE, the first openly gay periodical in America. In the years that followed, he held seminars for the Mattachine Society, one of the country’s first gay rights groups. He also helped shape the curriculum for the first gay studies institute in the United States, the ONE Institute for Homophile Studies in Los Angeles (Falby 139). For Heard, gay rights and psychedelics both signaled the arrival of a new stage in the history of consciousness. Humanity was undergoing spiritual evolution, a transformation similar to the one imagined by astrologers and New Agers who saw around them “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Meanwhile, I’m humming Madonna’s “Holiday” while walking beneath a Harvest Moon. It’s a magical night, moonlight back-lighting a cover of cloud. Lovely energy, air pulsing with life. A good night, perhaps, to listen to Craig Leon’s Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1, or to lie in a chair and read Anne Kent Rush’s Moon, Moon.

“The first revelations came,” Rush writes, “by allowing myself to make place for the moon in my daily living. These moments have remained the strongest and most palpable knowing. I started with the recognition that because the moon was shining on me at night and pulling on me during the day, it probably had been ‘speaking’ to me for a long time, and i had not been listening. I had to learn its language. I decided to begin my research at night by standing and looking out an open window” (21).