The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part Two
Brian George, Monkey on the Lightning Tree, photogram, 2002
“The Proteus who sleeps inside us has opened his eyes. And we say what must be said. These jolts are for us what snares and tortures were to the sea-green prophet.”—Giorgio de Chirico
~∞~
If we are a storehouse for the “seeds of every form and the sprouts of every sort of life,” as Pico della Mirandola argues, who knows but that we might not scare ourselves? “The New Man is living amongst us now!” said Hitler, “He is here! Isn’t that enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the New Man. He is intrepid and cruel. Even I was afraid of him.” Once, we were not so easily impressed. We had not yet volunteered to be eaten by the gods, they to whom we had recklessly given birth. We were not afraid of giants, who burned as brightly as atomic bombs, nor of tiny beings with large eyes, who were skilled at creating simulacra. Our craniums were large, and open at the top, but we did not necessarily need large bodies to go with them. One size fit all. It was endlessly interactive. Mercury had attached its power to our ankles. We did not need wings! Few realize that the oceans fill the footprints that we left, that megaliths mark the vast multitude of our navels, or that the sky is filled to overflowing with our tears.
Much stupider than they think, Earth’s top one percent are nonetheless quite adept at playing games. Let us posit: that they rule by reactivating some antediluvian trauma, the fear of which has been bred into our bones, the records about which have been hidden in the coils of junk DNA, which they, and they alone, have somehow learned to read. Such feats of micromanagement! All data is then made to correspond. Not being actual prophets, of course, their reading of these records is hit or miss at best. “As you are figuring out the world,” they say, “we will have manufactured a new one, and then another one after that!” This does not mean that they are actually in charge. Like us, they are subject to whatever spells they cast, and, as the apparatus of the Great Year turns, they are swept along with the other 99 percent. No part can ever be taken from the whole, nor does the One increase when added to itself. We move as One, unconsciously, and pushed forward from behind.
Brian George, Time-Spiral, 2003
As we free ourselves from the common wisdom, paranoia may be the most immediate of temptations. All conspiracy theories may be true, or none of them, or a fact from this one and an archetype from that one, but in the end such labyrinthine explorations may not lead to greater freedom. The trap is this: that we are always the good guys, and someone else is always to blame for every evil in the world.
Appearances to the contrary, it is possible that the things that matter most are actually very simple. As citizens of the greater city of the cosmos, who have now been grounded, it is our job to remove the layers of obfuscation that cut each person from the core of his/her power, so that each may again serve as a kind of movable Omphalos. Gently but persistently, we must bring our attention back to what I will call the “Boy Scout (or Girl Scout) Code of Conduct,” as this was understood by the Ancients. The 21 “Anamnesian Maxims” that correspond to the seven “Anamnesian Virtues” are below. These are formatted as injunctions. To the extent that they can be interpreted at all, there are some that must be followed to the letter. There are others that might put the practitioner into conflict with the Authorities. In your cultivation of virtue, or “virtu,” if you go with the classical understanding of the word, you must read not only with your own eyes but also through the eyes of your opponent. You must read between the lines, as well as what is on them. Obey at your own risk. These 21 “Anamnesian Maxims” are as follows:
1) We must love to act well for the sake of acting well; all action is circular, and no Uroboros can remove the tail from its mouth.
2) We must work hard and stick to our projects through any and all obstacles, until, as if by magic, we one day finish what we started. Looking back, we must thank all of those forces that conspired to destroy us. We will have died more than a dozen times since we set forth from our blackened port. We must not be so naïve again.
3) We must learn how to accept the full responsibility for our actions, and be the first to gladly admit it when we are wrong. If we discover, as in a dream, that we have caused harm to the innocent, we must accuse those who have dared to point their fingers at us, for it is they who have tainted our otherwise spotless minds.
4) We must cultivate a smile, and be able to transmit warmth from the solar plexus. It is in this way that our energy will tempt space to self-organize. As much as does the sun, we will then be able to micromanage each event.
5) We must be willing to meet each person on their own terms, however self-deluded or sociopathic they might be. We will know that we have succeeded when their flaws become an almost exact mirror-image of our own. We must then kiss the horror that confronts us in the mirror.
6) We must be generous with our friends, but more generous with our enemies. We must hold them as close as Teddy bears. For they MUST be kept off balance. We must trust that our sense of style will make up for the catastrophic damage that we cause.
7) Putting fears aside, we must do our best to act with some appropriate degree of courage, which may mean standing still. We must practice death, as though our lives depended on it, and be willing, at any moment, to shrug off what we love.
8) We must speak honestly, to the extent that we can hide behind a mask.
9) We must keep to the Mean. We must do nothing in excess, except when we choose to violate this rule. This is part of the natural equilibrium of the Mean. Lacking excess, it would not know what it is, or how to tell its butt from its elbow.
10) We must act justly. We must treat others in the way that we would want them to treat us, especially when they deserve a good slap across the face, which, at the appropriate moment, we must know how to apply.
11) We must kill first and ask questions later, like the gods, so long as we have the best interests of our sacrifice at heart.
12) We must care for the orphan, and marry our brother’s widow. If needed, we must be willing to make love to our neighbor’s wife. Grave indeed are the responsibilities of the caretakers of the cosmos!
13) A window is open, and we must thank it. As was done “In Illo Tempore,” we must be able to zip from one place to another with no need to cross through the intervening distance, for this will reduce our dependence upon gas.
14) As blunt as need be, we must perfect what Hemingway called our “built-in bullshit detectors.” We must, if and when we choose, speak truth to power, or else operate beyond the edges of the stage. We must cultivate a sense of the innate law of the omniverse. It is utterly obscure. It is as soft as a breath.
15) We must boldly go where no man has gone before, at first together, then more and more alone. No other will survive the wreck. Once having washed ashore, you will there find Argos, your aged dog, who has been waiting with bated breath for your return. He is a good dog. He wants only to lick your hand before he dies. A loyal companion, he will even then share the deep intelligence of his nose. He will be waiting with his cold head resting on his paws, on the last dock, as the ocean swells.
16) To the one side Birds and to the other Snakes: Keep eyes wide open, but do not enter any contest where you would have to stare them down. Do not offend them with such words as “high” and “low,” for, already, they tend to regard you as a snack.
17) We must cultivate curiosity, for there would be no world without it.
18) We must stay alert, and have no fear of boredom. A wait of 12,000 years is not other than the blinking of an eye. We are not, in fact, obligated to bring new worlds into existence, however much we might like to pretend that this is so. No, for we are on a wheel. On this wheel, each of the spokes functions like the gallery of a museum, and, from where we stand, we are free to wander into and out of any period that we choose.
19) We must be able to bring objects across a threshold with us, whether gargoyle breastplates or stringed philosophical instruments, and then fully translate them into this world from our dreams. Do it well, and these objects will blend seamlessly with other props in the environment, although some few may note their faint radioactive glow.
20) We must be good little boys and girls—or else! But no, we are free to be as difficult and subversive as we want, so long as we keep the Bindu always before our eyes and the apparatus of our primal energy intact.
21) We must cultivate the ability to break through any mirror, leaving, as we go, little evidence of our passing. Moving in and out from behind the surface of projection, we must snatch the archaeological relics that we need.
These seven virtues and 21 maxims will allow us to stay grounded as we venture to reconstruct the non-dual architecture of the city, which exists in no one place. For observe, my wide-eyed shipmates, there is no such thing as time, and the lightning bolt that directs us falls crazily where it will. The emptiness that is space shows no sign of disturbance. We cannot leave, for we never did exist, and, in flashes, it now seems that the whole world is transparent. This transparency then continues to open up and spread, period after period, world after world.
Once, the Kundalini hid its teachings inside forms, as a test of whose skill in camouflage they served, and from whose potency they had been created. We must later on help to free these teachings from their forms. They are subtle. They may make no sense. We must harmonize the scalar energy that spills from the HAARP technology of the Everyday Object. We must break the Sumerian seal that prevents us from speaking with our own reflections in the mirror.
Having once been set in motion, the Kundalini stirs up and expels a volcanic flux of images, as it burns through every obstacle in its path. It rips continents like sheets of paper. It dismantles the prosthetic bodies of the gods. It unravels all of the complexes that defend us from our fears, leaving no means by which blessing can be sorted from disaster. It expunges every trace of the antediluvian records, all arts and sciences, yet without even a small detail being lost. “But why is this necessary?” you might justifiably ask. It is possible that it does things just to show us that it can. It is possible that the Kundalini simply likes to play. Or, alternately, it is possible that our childhood is over, and that, finding ourselves cold and naked on the coast of a dead ocean, we must figure out how to grow up. Said Tertullian, “I believe in the Resurrection BECAUSE it is impossible.” So too, at the tail-end of the Kali Yuga, if access to our first mode of vision would now seem to us impossible, it is for this reason that we must treat our abandonment as a test. It is possible that good vision depends on our having nothing much left to lose. For there is no place that does not see into your bones, your muscles, and your nerves. Of limitation the master, perhaps this is the reason that you have allowed yourself to be blind.
At some point, cooling down, upon finding that there are no laws left to violate, the Kundalini may become much nicer than it was. Then as smoothly as a bell tone through the zodiac or as the arcing of a current through the ocean, it will move on to its predetermined end. Each atom will have 108 eyes.
We do not always have to be picked up and transported to view one dimension from the vantage point of another. A state of clarity will sometimes do the trick. Bypassing the need for hallucinatory display, we can glimpse just how the dimensions fit together, and why they interact as they do. If we desire to reset the parameters of our vision, it will be necessary to begin at the beginning, like those long-eared poets who lifted up dead cities with their words. Joining hands, they danced upon black waters. Withdrawing to their austerities, they each embodied the previous holders of the lineage. They felt no need to speak. When they did speak, what was hidden became clear. Like them, we must not only find a way to begin at the beginning, we must determine just what a “beginning” is.
Brian George, Coiled Snake, 1992
The world is almost infinitely complex, as is time, and human nature, but we should start by drawing a circle on the ground; we should place our feet at the center of a turning 10-dimensional torus, which can be statistically renormalized as a circle no more than 10 feet wide. There, we will begin our invocation. It should be there, in this circle, and not elsewhere, for there is no other space. This circle will be powered by our breath, and its centripetal vortex will then gather up what it needs. Visions will be allowed to visit, but fears and traumas and hatreds and projections will be required stand a few feet off. A standing wave will lead us to the center of the sun, inside of which are cities. Back home, at the edges of the circle, we will find that our bioenergetic vehicles have been transformed into stones. At first worshipped by the masses, they will later come to be seen as normal parts of the environment. In passing, we will note that a day takes 24,000 years. Hieroglyphs buzzing in geometric networks will spontaneously rearrange themselves. The earliest strata of creation will no longer be above us, but rather somewhere closer at hand. Rooted in the philosophical silence of our stones, which do but do not resemble us, we will traverse the disfigured wonders of the landscape. We will gather what we need, no more and no less. We will improvise as we go. Thus will we “walk on the ruins of a vast sky,” as Yves Bonnefoy said.
We must start from where we are, and trust in our own direct powers of perception. If we know, with close to 100 percent certainty, that there will be earthquakes in an earthquake zone, then we will know that this is not the ideal place to build a chain of nuclear power plants. We will laugh as we stare in wonderment at the expert who would be so rude as to disagree! If we know that all reserves of oil are going to give out in our lifetimes, whereupon our way of life will stop, then we had best make haste to reduce our carbon footprint. We should do this not in order to be politically correct but rather to strike a blow against the tyranny of the object. If we fear that, for purposes of GPS surveillance, we may one day be implanted with a microchip, then we had best soon rediscover how to come and go from our bodies. If Monsanto has insured the triumph of genetically modified Frankenfoods, then it might be best to think small: a few out-of-date seeds could be planted in the yard. With some luck, we will figure out how to farm before the last of the trucks stop running. At the end of a night of purgatory in a pup tent, we must prostrate ourselves before the pure light of the Ur-Plant. We must beg it to expound upon the occult depths of green, as well as on why our shoots are just barely coming up. It is important that we push beyond our embarrassment to ask. We will, ideally, have no use for assault weapons. Instead, we will share a good meal with our neighbors. Joyously simple, and on our backs carrying the sum of our experience, like the weight of the whole world, we must dare to be as naked as at the moment of our births.
Brian George, Key Figure, 2004
We must access, without moving, all of the records that we need, and with our small flutes challenge the bone orchestra of the empire.
In the end, it is predictable that any prophesy will fail, for the omniverse is far more contradictory than a clock, and, although we can envision it as a being with two hands, it is in no way obligated to use only the hands that we can see. Then too, of necessity, some chaos must always be added to the mix. In order to get from where we are to the sphere that we once inhabited, we must set foot on a path that does not exist, and in bodies that have not yet been created. There is no door to the Macrocosm. Again, we must find the key.
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