Writer, Poet, Impudent Philosopher: (Pulling the gold thread from the grey weave.)
A wonderful story- a gift from Erica Verillo
Zayde died last Saturday. This afternoon we gathered to attend a service over a plain pine coffin and to remember him over cold cuts on rye. I remembered my grandfather chiefly as a madman.
“He died happy,” said my mother. “That’s all that matters.”
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Two days ago it gave me great pleasure to introduce you to Jose Diez Faixal’s extraordinary paper in ‘The Lyre not the Flute’. One thing I have reason to understand is the gnawing compulsion that follows a gift of vision, gnawing in his case for forty years. (In mine for a little longer) Finding a language in which to convey something that arches across creation, snakes deeply beneath superficial appearances, surfaces only for long enough to catch a glimpse before submerging, and runs contrary to all received opinion makes for a prolonged loneliness.
The labours of Sisyphus must roll vision against the collective gravity of opposition. ‘Who are you anyway?’ echoes in the mind, and enlarges because vision is a gift not unlike that described by Virgil Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. ( I fear the Greeks even when they come bearing gifts).
The Trojan Horse is an apt reference with the capacity to destroy the citadel of sanity.
The compulsion of an idea carries with it a sense of being unworthy for it and inadequate to find a language to do it honour. What makes it worse is the prevailing climate of hostility to anything that challenges orthodoxy, and the assumption that as ‘beneficiary’ of the idea the unfortunate visionary sets himself ‘above’ those he hopes to reach. Who would seek his place when the mockery, disparagement, cynicism, and open hatred is almost constant? Yet he is a Gurkha on Everest, burdened with an obligation to keep trying, if only to shift the load of responsibility, and set it down.
Jose Faixal admitted that he was not looking for what happened. ‘I was focused on vivential and theoretical research of non-dual Reality. I had no intention of proposing any evolutionary hypothesis. But intuition “fell from the sky” and I felt compelled to check its validity. I’ve been 35 years trying to make the testing with the scientific data that I found’.
It gave me such pleasure to walk with him a little way, and take his arm.
Can anyone understand what receiving a similar arm unexpectedly yesterday might have meant to me? Joe Linker’s response to Involution came late at night, unheralded, and like a fresh wind off the sea. Not just because he wrote what he did ‘this is a book to live with’ but because I sensed that he understood what saying it might mean to me. Such gifts come from the same place as the original ideas do.
Just when I had resolved to turn from it, and walk away, it gave a wave through him. ‘I might be Okay’
Here is Joe’s gift to me, and it might stretch to being shared. Today gratitude is impossible to express!
The harmonic pattern underlying evolutionary emergence. Kepler, Pythagoras (and Involution) vindicated.
EXCITEMENT SPILLS OVER! A Glorious Revelation. (In Seventh Heaven-literally!)
Pythagoras has come to dine
With Plato as companion
Musicians tune his Universe
His octave soup in fractions
The fundamental harmonies ( they heard in the Aegean)
Were suspended til maturity
Clamoured for a cadence
Yesterday I received , out of the blue, a cadence: the first ever indication that a scientist (in the broadest sense) considered Involution-An Odyssey….scientific! How a Spaniard who does not speak English easily had discovered my book is yet to be revealed but more importantly he sent me the most exciting and independent corroboration- a paper he had been working on for almost as long as I have on Involution: forty years. Involution suggested that collectively the recovery of memory had returned us to the Aegean philosophies of the pre-Socratic Greeks. Let me remind you first…
Kepler’s tunes are newly sung,
All coheres, perfection’s
Mathematics of the mind
Was always intuition.
That microcosm in the man ( the macrocosm’s fractal)
Held the secrets of the Universe
Heard in contemplation.
Let me first explain the title of this post and its relevance to the work of Jose Diez Faixat.
Plato in the Republic suggests that in a just society the flute (auylos) should be banned. It is immoderate and impure unlike the lyre, in which the harmonics follow the mathematical proportions.
In the case of the auylos, (flute) there is no necessary, direct correlation between the mathematical proportions of its physical structure (e.g., distance between finger holes, for example) and the sonic harmonies it produces. Or rather: to produce sonically consonant frequencies–to get the instrument ‘in tune’ so that it sounds the right notes–the auylos’s physical structure is mathematically disproportionate. If you think of a contemporary oboe or bassoon, they keys are neither evenly spaced nor do they follow systematic mathematical ratios like the 12:9:8:6 ones Pythagorean harmony uses. This is what Plato’s referring to when he says, for example: “in the case of flute-playing, the harmonies are found not by measurement but by the hit and miss of training, and quite generally music tries to find the measure by observing vibrating strings. So there is a lot of imprecision mixed up in it and very little reliability” (Philebus 56a).
Not only does the pattern govern the ways by which creation has happened through time but in the development of each and every individual which recapitulates these precise periodicities, in uterine time. And continues in the development of the man thereafter, from absorption and necessary preoccupation in the physical world, the emotional world, then mental, then spiritual, tracing the seven Chakras which are the legacy (and integrated governance) of the evolutionary journey retained in every fractal (individual).
Why is was exciting for me will be obvious to anybody who imagined that Involution- An Odyssey was a vague and unsubstantiated hypothesis given a veneer of poetic licence. Almost nobody involved in science has taken it seriously, as science. Jose Diez Faixal does not talk of memory but shows a harmonic progression in an orderly and accelerating ( higher pitch) complexity, that simply allows no room for chance of any kind. In that, his evidence maps across Involution as a purposeful, orderly process of self determination ( co-creation) newly integrated in greater complexity at precise moments in time. This implies a fundamental harmony for each, within all. Our relationship with everything is total! Not simply in origins but continuing in mental and emotional patterns throughout life.
Was there any idea more seductive or exciting?
In the long term, according to our pattern of rhythms this path will lead not to the “belief” in the world of the Absolute, but rather to “empirical” evidence of our own identity with the Absolute Itself.
His evidence is more precise than Involution ( the fossil record and the history of ideas is better documented than the recovery of memory) but essentially the message is the same- active co-creation from Alpha to Omega which is also Alpha to a new cycle.
Here is the start and the link to ‘Beyond Darwin’. It is worth deep reading and sharing. Please do.
AbstractThis article surprisingly reveals the existence of a very precise spiral rhythm in the emergence of the evolutionary leaps that mark the history of the universe.The proposed hypothesis is very simple: just as in any musical instrument successive second harmonics (1/3 of the vibrating unit) progressively generate new sounds; these same second harmonics generate all the major evolutionary novelties in universal dynamics as a whole. It is truly surprising that such a simple proposal is found to be precise and categorical when cross-checked against historical data. Let us see.
Fitting our ‘periodic table’ of rhythms to the date of the appearance of matter –the Big Bang– and of organic life, we see that every single instant of the emergence of successive taxonomic degrees of human phylogeny is marked out with utter precision:Kingdom: animal, Phylum: chordata, Class: mammal, Order: primate, Superfamily: hominoid, Family: hominid and Genus: homo! The same then occurs with all the stages of maturation of our primitive ancestors: H. habilis, H. erectus, archaic H. sapiens, H. sapiens and H. sapiens sapiens! Once more, the precision of our hypothesis is repeated in the successive transformations that humanity has experienced in its more recent history: the Neolithic, Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Modern Age and the emergent Postmodern Age! If, as we see it, all these stages resoundingly fit the provisions of the ‘periodic table’ of rhythms that we have proposed, it is more than likely that our hypothesis may also provide the key to glimpse the successive phases yet to be deployed in the years to come in an ever-accelerating process that will eventually lead to a moment of infinite creativity –Omega– within a couple of centuries.
All this is, indeed, unexpected and surprising, but is now almost certain when we verify that the same hypothesis that has behaved with utter precision when applied to the process of global evolution, also does so when cross-checked against the process of development of the individual human being! Within the same time frame, with the same pattern of folding and unfolding, and passing through the same stages, our ‘periodic table’ of rhythms periodically marks out –step by step– the successive phases embryologists, developmental psychologists and spiritual teachers talk of, thus confirming the old idea of phylogenetic-ontogenetic parallelism and pointing very specifically to an astonishing fractal and holographic universe.
It is impossible, absolutely impossible, that all this accumulation of linked “coincidences” –in both the field of overall development and that of individual human development– highlighted in this paper is the product of mere chance. The conclusions that emerge from all this clash head on with many assumptions of predominant materialistic science. Our proposal, which provides a better fit to the presented data, points to the non-duality of energy and consciousness, as posed by many traditions of wisdom. From these pages, we invite all our readers to participate in this emerging experiential and theoretical research in which dazzling prospects can be glimpsed.
spring, spread your colour let red, white and blue flowers cover this black world *
Source: Plea(se)
After careful consideration I have removed the posts that some of you kindly commented upon. Not because I regret posting them, nor retract what they expressed. I was grateful for considered responses. My reasons are more to do with a feeling that anything that stokes antipathy, or gives any cause for others to do so, involves a kind of ugliness at this point in time.
I felt the need to respond in some way, and that was done. Having expressed my impatience with empty rhetoric in the absence of resolve, (and I stand by all of that) the need for it to remain as permanent ’emotional graffiti’ is questionable.
I sincerely hope my followers will understand. I was asking for discerning ‘intolerance’ and not revenge but this distinction is seemingly not easily understood.
I find I am unable to write anything new, right now. So I offer
http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/narrative-backstage/blerrie-fockin-beautiful-philippa-rees
More cogent is a wonderfully controlled and passionate essay on the sanity of depression. Post Robyn Williams Not only Jihadis find little left to live for. I advise you to read it, if only to share the pain and sanity of despair.
Is it Just Me? by Hal Crowther
http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2015/terminal-depression-it-just-me-hal-crowther
Very insightful points from a one time cinematographer turned writer. Especially likes the image of the train whistle to convey all that train, plus station, plus a journey would do for vision- relatively superficial. The one thing that both book or film lack is the deepest evocation and the most ephemeral- smell.
Like writers, filmmakers manipulate time. They take a story apart and re-assemble it.
Robert Bresson, inquisitor and humanist, stimulated filmmakers and enriched the experience of
viewers. With a tiny leap of the imagination his ‘Notes on the Cinematographer,’ publ. by Quartet Books in 1986, transl. from the French by Jonathan Griffin, also offer inspiration to writers of stories. Here are a few brief notes I collated during my vocational film degree in the early 90s:
An image is transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours. A blue is not the same blue besides a green, a yellow, a red. No art is without transformation.
For the writer – this would apply to action and reaction, resonance or dissonance, anything that develops the dynamic interactions of a narrative.
To create is not to deform or invent persons or things. It is to tie…
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Source: Review of Windward by Kevin McGrath Immediate thoughts on a new book, smudged impressions so you might be persuaded to read it.
Mother, writer, whisky
Source: An irreverent release of stricture, only to reveal something deeper. Belief and celebration. The collaboration of Shelley and Robin is always diverting…
A Halloween celebration of the greatest witch craft- motherhood, fear, glory, terror and celebration. Whew!
From LITTLE SPELLS
By Jennifer K. Sweeney:
LITTLE SPELLS
We are not witches as fable stoops us
hunchback over caldrons, not women
hobbled sinister by absence though we know
there are tides in our blood that lean us
toward some ancient clock. Still
if ox marrow soup is suggested, the pot readies
and if we return from the Chinese market
with a rough bag of earth tea, our house steep
in the dank reduction of bark and root,
cold air cut heavy with mist.
We may have eaten goose eggs, raw
garlic and sweetbreads, charged our bathwater
with carnelian and held our noses as we threw
back shots of chlorophyll and kombucha.
We may have made closet altars,
placed bowls of royal pollen beneath our beds
and because someone swore it worked,
our underwear may have all gone orange, pockets
filled with quartz turtles, a moonstone at the throat.
If…
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PHI lippa. Letters of Love 