To Persephone

The season brings such great delight to me

She calls my soul to joys left sleeping long

Since Autumn’s quiet reign began. My love

Had passed to other ‘spheres, to shine her touch,

Her smooth caress, upon those in her care.

For too far long had I waited on the

Asexual red Fall, in its rumpled

Flannel plaid and pumpkin-grooved face. My heart

Has been too long encaged by frigid hands

Of the hard-eyed old miser coot in chill

And stark white plains of Winter-wool brought down

Upon the land. Virgin young Spring has come

All draped in flowered silk and patterned shawl

To smile and chuckle in polite amusement.

But when the sun goes down, her cold untouched

March shoulder turns on me and pimples with

Small geese my skin. My lady she is not.

My Summer-time girl has strawberry blonde

Long waist-length hair. Her skin is fair to tan,

Depending on how long she’s stayed. Her touch,

Like hot oil on my skin, flows, pushing beads

Of sweat so gently from my body, yes.

Her laugh does grab my hair and tousle it.

Her perfumes range from sea-salt spray to cut

Grass, funnel cake and boardwalk tar, fresh rain

In sunlight, asphalt wet and hot. Her eyes

Hold glist’ning rays of late-night sunsets on

Soft, gentle waves. She runs across green fields

And white sands, leaping from cotton ball to

White cloud in clear blue skies. The cold enrapture

Of chlorinated water or the slick

And prickly sea is her embrace. Her lips

Taste like iced lemonade and cotton candy,

Her breath contains a lingering hint of

Overly salted french fries, chocolate

Sauce on vanilla soft-serve, poolside pizza.

And when she dons her coal black gown and sneaks

Along the sky, horizon to horizon,

I can stay for such lengthy hours just

To let her voice run riv’lets down my face

Cascade over my body, ring true all

Through out the streets. I’ll jump as her soft hands

Just clap together and her rough, bare feet

Rumble away across the night, the wind

So fiercely pulling me into her raindance.

When fin’ly it’s time to sleep, we’ll retire

To the warm bedroom where we will lie nude,

And I will let her smooth skin heat my bare

Flesh as she lies atop me. And the gentle

Swells of my love’s soft, pillowy breasts will

Be where I rest my head and dream all night.

-D.M.D.M. 4-27-06

Reflections on Flights

I’m currently reading a book I picked up off the shelf of my roommates section of the bookcases. It’s by a professor who my ex used to talk about. She took his class and she always tried to communicate a very deep moment she had because of him. Granted, she did that a lot, on a variety of topics, but I was usually too infatuated with the way she expressed her passion and the way her nose twitched when she talked to pay attention to the actual content of those moments. But, regardless, my first impression of Professor Ogilvie is one of a sagely pedagogue, the kind I had hoped to find all over the place in college but had not stumbled across at that point.

He popped up a few other times in my experience, such as when I worked at the campus bookstore and saw his book stacked on the shelves next to Freud’s tidy little blue texts. I remember because the cover looked more like a trade paperback than a textbook, with a dust jacket and big colorful cover art. In fact Professor Ogilvie himself says in Fantasies of Flight that his style for this book is half trade book, half textbook. And I think it appropriate his style matches the… theories?... I came to after reading the middle 8 chapters first, as the good professor suggests in his preface.

He speaks of the conflict between Sigmund Freud and his student-turned-rival Carl Jung., not just of their theories but of their interactions as men and thinking, feeling beings. Freud, the stolid sexualist who blamed all problems on naughty little urges we have because of our childhood, felt Jung’s mystical hippie new age theories of the collective unconscious was simply a rebellion against Father Figure Freud. Jung on the other hand simply felt driven to answer questions that had begun at the age of three, long before Oedipal conflict usually manifests, and which Freud’s theories simply failed to recognize. This is a gross simplification, but it works for now.

I find it interesting that, during a period of my life in which I find myself faced with the intense conflict between fitting in the world as it is now and trying to make the world the way I want it to be, one of the most intricate intricacies of our modern civilization, Facebook, would bring Professor Ogilvie’s picture to my desktop monitor over and over. He shows up simply because he and I both went to Rutgers, but beside my connection to him through my tempestuous ex, I also worked with his son in the same musical that brought me together with that ex, Camelot. I played King Arthur, a man trying to change the world who is brought low by the failings of those around him, and Sam Ogilvie played the boy to whom Arthur passes his golden vision of Camelot and right.

Having seen his name so many times, I could not fail to be interested in a book I glanced at, thought it was something by Freud from the title and that vague memory I had of the bookstore, and began to read out of nothing more than a desire to find a way to pass the time pleasantly after a bad day. And after I finished the chapters detailing the personalities and creations of J.M. Barries, author of Peter Pan, Jung, and Freud, I began to think of the interplay between Freud’s death instinct, which he speaks of as an instinctive urge to return to a primordial state of stillness, and Jung’s collective unconscious, a kinship not only with all mankind but with all the universe from which we came.

Jung was drawn to this collective unconscious. He saw it as the Other, and his concept of anima as the opposite gender of the ego can be seen as corollary to the drive he himself felt to merge with this collective, this deep point in the mind that connects us to everything in Creation. In my mind at least, Ogilvie draws a parallel between Freud’s death instinct and Jung’s fascination with myth. The mythic structure, that of disconnection with the familiar, defeat of enormous and near impossible obstacles, then a return to the familiar with tools and experiences that allow the protagonist to change the familiar, normal world as he sees fit, mirrors that of the indigenous tradition of the vision quest. The human is a social animal; we share that trait with most primates. Take him out of his support network of other humans and he is at a great loss for resources and capabilities on he has relied on to survive. Would Freud chalk vision quests up to a desire to return to stillness, a death wish?

I think there is definitely a desire inherent in humans to skirt the edge of the canyon. Mostly people try to find a comfortable balance between having a nice view of the abyss and the surety of solid ground. Their death wish is displayed in how they want to view death, a ways off but close enough to keep things a little interesting Others, though, seek to return to a more primal state of being, living a little closer to the edge, because you can learn a lot by seeing what ends up falling off and away forever. Like any good gambler will tell you, the key in that case is not knowing when to step closer, but when to walk away.

The death instinct in this case I think can be recognized as a desire to dip into the collective unconscious for the resources and tools that will allow us to bring ourselves into better harmony with the world around us. To merge with the Other, to really learn how to properly use the tools and resources presented to us, is to kill the ego, that watcher of all but itself, the personas and parts assumed by the primitive individual just trying to get by in the world, the part that says it knows best because, well, I got us this far, didn’t I? The ego most of the time will find a way to reconcile mistakes it made and its pride, rationalizing things like it would have worked if someone else had done what they should have known to do, or I would be getting this done if I weren’t so tired from all my obligations.

I find myself at a point in my life where I can choose between finding a ‘career’ and working towards it, basically dedicating myself to an ideal and working up through the miserable system of references and agencies we have developed for a person’s placement in society, or living my life one day at a time, trying to my myself as happy as possible before I die. And that could come at any time, by the way. It’s hard to admit at 23 that I’m not always guaranteed the long life everything expects and plans for. But I may not have time to wait for happiness to spring after I’ve gotten tenure at some high school in suburban New Jersey teaching English to kids who would rather surf whatever will replace the internet in ten years, going home to hopefully a healthy relationship and a family. So maybe it’s time I abandoned the idea that I can fit into this world as it exists right now while I try to change my environment to something a little more tolerable. To admit our mistakes is a scary thing, as is to change from something familiar to the unfamiliar. It is the death of the self as we know it, and an embrace of what we might be. But if you’re not happy with the way things are, why would you want it to stay that way?

Stones

You keep your nose to the grindstone for too long and bits of you get worn away

Little bits at first, the same extremities you lose with frostbite

Only this is not just the cold of an artic freeze

This is the cold of an uncaring world

Where every step is a battle

And every victory is just the delay of defeat

And as you get smaller

And lose pieces of yourself

To the constant pressure against that unstoppable grind

A millstone goes round your neck

And forces you closer to the spinning wheel

And you get smaller

And the weight gets heavier

And the pace gets quicker

And you become tiny

And the weight becomes ponderous

And the pace becomes arduous

And you are microscopic

And the weight is back-breaking

And the pace is punishing

And you are just about to lose yourself to the void

But

Your foot is on the pedal

Your hands put the millstone round your neck

Your own doing that parts of you have been ignored

They looked at me and said “Hey, take it easy

Here, take that silly thing off

Let us carry it for a bit; it’s really not as heavy as you think”

They looked at my wheel and said “That doesn’t need to go so hard”

And showed me how to keep it steady and mild

So I could breathe

They looked down at the pieces and said “You’ve really let yourself go”

And picked me up and helped me to my feet and nose and sanity

And steeled me from further wear and tear

In short, they saved me from myself

-D.M.D.M. 8-5-06

Harmonics

That one Big Pluck

On the String on the Universe

Broke it to pieces, frayed it and knotted it

But they all still hum

In accord with that first chord

Multiplying

Dividing

Causing dissonance and harmony

Joy and sadness

And we are just a blip in that cacophony

Part of the Chord that is the Now

A melodic phrase in a symphony of existence

Born from the harmony or disharmony

Of two other phrases

Each born from two more

Back and back

And we seek the harmony of another

To remind us of that first

Sublime note

D.M.D.M. 5-15-09

Our Growth

The human mind is an interesting development.  It is basically identical to the wetware that motivates all animal life on our planet.  In practice it operates almost identically to the way a computer works.  Inputs operating switches operating switches operating switches repeated enough times to be incomprehensible, until those switches operate an output.  The one major difference between computers and brains, and the one that keeps our iBooks from overtaking human civilization, is the mind's capacity to learn, and change it's functioning because of past experiences.  Creatures of all kinds have evidenced the capacity to learn, and this has been accepted as reality since long before modern science has proven it with laboratory testing of rats and dolphins and chimps and dogs.  This recognition of animal intelligence is inherent in the veneration of predators as gods of death, of birds as spirits of ancient kin.  It is evidenced in the medieval vilification of the wolf as a cunning servitor of Satan.  It is only until recently, as advances in technology have allowed us to push back the line of uncertainty and danger that has always existed at the edge of the jungle, that humans have been allowed to shelter in the fallacy that there is some unique character inherent in the human mind that gives us dominance of this sphere.  Once, before science replaced God, it was divine providence that separated man from beast.  God had chosen us, sheltered us in the Garden until we were tricked out by that sly snake.  How else could we comfortably explain how we have managed to gain control of so much of the planet's resources?  Would humanity have come so far if we had admitted long ago that it was only chance, pure and simple, that has allowed us to have brains so scarred from lessons learned?

Ignorance is bliss, as they say.  Agriculture, the foundation of civilization, was not God's gift to us, but a curse:

And to the man he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; / thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. / By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return from the ground, for out of it were you taken; you are dust, and to dust shall you return."

- Genesis 3:17-20

Through the cultivation of plants for food, man gained a toehold on the slippery slope of evolution.  This behavioral adaptation in our species made fulfilling one of the basic needs of life a whole hell of a lot simpler.  It freed up some processing time for other functions, like shelter and security.  But it all depended upon one lucky- unlucky?- hunter/gatherer stumbling across the lesson that if you plant something, you know where it grows and can come back later to eat the fruit it provides.  The actual mechanism of agriculture is simple enough for a wide variety of organisms to duplicate.  It happens accidentally when a squirrel buries nuts for the winter and forgets that one he planted in the good soil where it gets plenty of sun and water.  Unfortunately for the squirrel, it will take many more years for an oak tree to grow and produce more acorns than the squirrel could ever hope to see.  But birds, such as crows and ravens, can frequently live quite a long time.  And check this out:

Perhaps it is too far-fetched to imagine a crow thinking ahead enough to cultivate plants.  But here's a comment from that video: goonsgoons (1 year ago) "Wow, I could have used that crow when I lost my ring down the drain. The plumber just did what the crow did and charged me a hundred bucks."  Human and crow in a very similar situation, and the crow figured out a solution (no offense intended, goonsgoons).  And I think anyone who has cleaned out their fridge is incredibly aware of how easily we as humans cannot notice something growing right in front of our face.  I think it more likely that it was a unique individual human that we can thank for the establishment of mankind's superiority, rather than we as humans being extraordinary as a species.  I think it likely that any organism, allowed to make as many non-fatal mistakes as we human beings are, would stumble across any number of innovations that would advance and benefit their kith and kin.  But just like agriculture was seized to satisfy the primal need to feed, those advances had to be driven by unpleasant experiences like hunger that we would rather do without.

Mistakes are what drive us to learn.  Edison went through a great deal of prototypes before he hit upon a lightbulb that actually worked better than a gaslight.  He had to try and fail each idea before the next.  That ability to try again is what we have gained from our culture.  Each advance that science has brought has allowed us to push back the specter of death and give us a little more breathing room to try things out and catapult ourselves further ahead of the other evolutionary players.  The human animal has in practice more in common with a stem cell than a chimpanzee.  Each individual has the capacity to grow into any number of specialized roles that will perform a specific function for the greater entity it is a part of in exchange for the fulfillment of its basic needs.  Take that individual out of its community and it will die, blood drying as it drips from an open vein of humanity.  But feed it and shelter it, give it a baseline to judge from other than oblivion, and it will use those inevitably unfortunate dips to step higher and higher and better its own existence.  Freud postulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that the human mind starts as a simple pleasure/displeasure switch, differentiating between what is beneficial to the body and what is harmful.  Each experience leaves a trace- a memory- that we use to judge further experience and give warnings as to what will hurt us and point the way to what will help us.  The accumulation of traces eventually comes to resemble what we call consciousness.  He also explained the development of the mind from childhood from the perspective of pleasure coming from familiarization to the basic bodily functions of eating, defecating, and fornicating.  As we master those lesser functions, we move on, trying to satisfy our need not only for food but reproduction, and then for the continued presence of those needs.  That's why we feel the need to find love with someone we can trust to remain around and help us and our offspring out.  That's why we bind together for protection.

It is that realization that is gripping us now.  Each of us are coming to terms with the fact that we rise and fall together, that what we do affects someone across the planet which affects what they do which then comes back to affect us.  The wheel of karma is becoming illuminated with floodlights, and we are learning from not only our mistakes, but the mistakes of others.  But we have to realize that humans are not an endpoint, not something static that came from the heavens as a perfect being and only got slightly cracked on the way down.  We as individuals grow, and thus we as a whole grow.  But it's hard to realize that there are better options than the ones we have relied on so far.  In order to learn, we have to try new things, and those things are probably going to fail.  But there is a way to think like a planet instead of an individual, or a family, or a nation.  And it may involve throwing out some notions we've had for a while, like the idea that we are incredibly different from the other creatures that walk or crawl or fly or swim around the planet.  We've just made a lot more mistakes.