or this fabulous floating palace, Jal Mahal, in the same area:
I suddenly understand that the worlds of the Arabian Nights,
which happens to be
one of my favorite books in all of the world,
may indeed have a foundation
in something very real.
But more than anything else,
I am struck by the sheer beauty of symmetry and repetition.
It creates an experience
so much like a song,
as I travel from town to town,
past poverty and controlled chaos,
the trip has been held together
by the most terrific harmony.
Let me please share with you
some of the sites I have been lucky enough
to see: moments
of perfection on a landscape in a symphony that helps us see
that perfection is rare,
but possible
in our troubled world:
( Amber Fort, near Jaipur, India)
(Chand Baori, Abhaneri, India (between Jaipur and Agra)
"it's never been like this, during all of recorded history"
even as we hope it doesn't get any worse.
We're living in a time warp,
a warp in which
one time encounters another,
and explosions
happen.
This type of time warp doesn't happen
all too often, and when it does
the events that occur
are monumental,
memorable,
repeatable.
Furthermore,
this is an oral time,
a time when what we speak
and what we produce images of as much as what we say,
has more resonance
than what we write.
We can tell the tale of what we saw and did
much faster than we can
write it.
What we write, too, is important,
but nobody really has the time
to read.
People only read when they have a vested interest
in knowing
what they cannot see
(because what we can see is oh
so fascinating.
Reading and thinking is hard work.
Reading and thinking is scholarship,
and should be the domain of just a few.)
This is an Age of Hyper-Realism,
and Age of Non-Fiction
and intense Avant Garde.
Those who are satisfied with Hallmark landscapes
are incredibly
unsatisfied now.
because we're living in a time
when everything that happens
is legendary
and in such an age as this
people die legendary deaths,
and spark legendary fires. . .
~ ~ ~ ~ for what it's worth, I "channelled" this entry this afternoon; it was only as I was typing it up that someone called me and told me that Osama Bin Laden is dead.
I pray for us all tonight Every single one of us, both living and dead. ~ ~ ~ ~
But when the man you give your love to
is actually
the man deep inside
the mirror,
you have to realize
he
is constantly receding,
because in this world comprised
solely of representations
the mirror
dominates
over the
original
. . . and so
every other woman
who sees this man
also sees
herself the way
she would like
to see herself,
and she wants him for her very own;
and if he's living
continually
in his Mirror Stage,
well,
he's very rarely in contact
with the true he,
he's just continually infatuated
with the perfect he
that he thinks he can see whenever
a woman thinks she has fallen
head over heels in love
with him.
Still,
there has to be a man in the mirror,
a man who on this earthly domain
was given the deadly deed
of having to be the mirror-bearer,
he whose essence
is that mystical 3rd that God created
for the sole purpose
of being able to see
HimSelf.
OK,
honestly,
this is a pretty wild entry here,
but I'm going to ride it out
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
So
how many women fall so
in love (as much in love as I did) with
their psychopath lover?
I'd say almost all of them;
or most of them
So what
is
the
big fucking deal?
There is no deal:
there never was:
for two years, I stood
in front of a
beautiful mirror
and learned to love myself.
Tomorrow
would be
my father's birthday,
had he lived,
but as we all know:
Makropoulos is 425 years old,
so her father,
has long since mingled
with the earth he loved,
with the water he loved,
with the trees he wouldn't cut down,
not even for Christmas:
My father,
the most beautiful man
I will ever know:
tall and slender
and blonde
and quiet; smart
and witty
(I was the one who always got his jokes)
subtle,
and kind,
and so misunderstood,
my
dear
dear
father,
I've only just passed the age
he was at when he died,
or so it seems,
as he's been gone
such a long
long
long
time.
It's been hundreds of years
since I saw him last,
and I was just really getting
to know him.
Yes,
I loved my father
very much,
and I do believe
he loved me too.
And then there was another man:
the man I was married to, many years ago,
he
was 20 years my senior,
I married him
when he was at the age my father was
when he died.
People said to me:
you married a father figure,
and I said: no! I did not!
He didn't look a think like my father, and he was shorter than him, and
he could see color
and play the piano.
My father
was tone deaf,
and could only see red.
But I will tell you something
which
I recently discovered
(or came to terms with)
:
Yes.
I did marry my husband
to replace my father, and I am here to tell you:
the biggest
mistake a woman could make
if in a position even vaguely similar
to the one I was in when I married
would be to marry a man
who is the opposite of her father. Women
make their men
in to the man
they want him to be.
And if the woman is lucky,
the man
is amenable to it.
If a woman feels
she met the perfect man
in her father, well, she tries
to make the man in her life
into her conception of her father.
That is why, quite frankly,
if a woman must marry,
and if she loved her father,
she should marry a man who is like her father,
in looks and temperment,
because if her father is really
a wonderful man (as my father was)
then the man you've chosen
to mold into him won't mind it at all,
and won't mind reflecting him back to you.
Does this mean I agree with Freud, when he said
that every girl and every boy
wants to have sex
with their father and/or mother?
No.
A girl can love her father without wanting to bed him,
and visa versa, just as a boy
can love his parent in the same way.
There is a true paternal love, a love
that adores the daughter
but does not cross that line;
and there is a true daughterly love,
a love that adores
her father, and adores
him all the more
because she knows she is safe with him.
But when it comes to a boyfriend,
a reproduction will suit her fine.
There's no sin in that;
there's not sin in wanting to love your mate
with the same excessive love that a child
once harbored for their parent who was their absolute world.
And if that man (or other mate of whatever gender)
is of like temper,
and seeks to love a woman
with the same adoration that he once
directed solely towards his mother,
well,
they're a match made in heaven.
Soulmates?
Maybe.
That's really another element all together.
Yes, there's no sin in that, because
if we could all find a partner
who we can love with the same love we felt
for the person we loved absolutely most in our lives,
well,
this would be a pretty happy planet,
and would spin
in an energy of
healing bliss.
But alas,
that's not the way the world turns, instead
we live in the tug of war of
users, abusers
used, abused,
passive-aggressive
active complacent
passive passive
active active
and every gradation in between.
Indeed
Indeed.
And we fight and we bicker,
and we flaunt flirt and hurt,
and we ignore the beautiful
simplicity of truth right before
our eyes.
Indeed
Indeed.
(Is it Armageddon yet?)
If it is,
well perhaps
we should
give up our
petty hatreds
now, and love
with a love that exceeds,
like a child loves his mother or her father,
or whomever it was
who once made that child
oh so glad, just to be
alive.
But the truth of the matter is: we're saying it wrong. Because no one who only speaks English can say this word properly; instead they say it like "guitar." That's what the Announcer on NPR said: "when they told us how to say it, they said 'say simply:
guitar.'"
So that's how anyone who spoke both English and Arabic told people to say QATER.
In other words: "guitar" is what some old stinky English dude whose parents had the cash to put him through years of Arabic lessons thought he heard when he heard the word: "Qatar."
Well, anyone who really
looks at that word
can see:
you don't say it like "guitar."
You say
Katar.
2.
Now, this
is where this all gets
kind of strange:
The problem with guitar,
is that it's based on a representation
of a sound,
but the sound
is only
a representation
of a code.
The written word is the first representation
that we ever had
of what
Originally occured
because
the written word
is like a camera;
it is the apparatus through which
we see
the first utterance
ever made
which was a sound.
The first utterance
which was also
the first representation
was a sound,
the sound
came through our being,
this tiny shell
of our being, our bodies --
the sound came --
This is really strange:
as you read this, think
in a line like this:
So,
the first representation
produced by the Creative Being
when it sought to produce
Something Other Than Itself
was a sound,
a sound,
that,
in order to be heard
had to move
through an apparatus.
And that apparatus
aka: the material world
was produced as a
byproduct of
the first action of
production ==the reproduction
of the immaterial, and
that first reproduction
of the material world
went like this:
details right 'chere below:
I know this sounds
absolutely insane,
but try to imagine a scenario
in which
there was nothing,
and nothing sought to produce
something;
but in order to be able to
produce something,
nothing
needed an apparatus of communication
aka: the material world.
The impetus of that
initial production
went
this way:
The physical
world,
then,
is like a
pair of glasses
through which
we perceive
the initial production,
which is
sound.
So,
likewise,
that which has been produced
(aka: the represented)
has to use the Material World
to present itself back
to the force that produced it,
in the first place,
so that force
might see
itself;
yes the represented has to project back through the apparatus an impression of what the perfect looks like so the perfect can see it.
Try To Think Like This:
This is an image of
the represented
in its quest to show
the unrepresented
what it
sought to see.)
* ! *
Notably, there's a problem
if the apparatus
(read: The Material World, aka: Life, the Earth, the Universe & Everything)
is new.
A new apparatus doesn't
understand how to represent
the represented,
because the represented
is so abstract.
Generally, in the case of new apparati,
when asked to represent the initially represented,
it gets all hung up on
the representation
of itself (ie: the Material World)
that is all
it can talk about,
when in fact
the realm of the unrepresented
wants to learn more:
wants to learn all
that is conceivable.
It is the job of the representable to give it to them: the representable has to render into the language of the unrepresented exactly what it sees. That's right: exactly what it sees.
But the problem is: the first thing we saw occurred exactly at the same time as the first sound we heard, and notably the first representation was not of a visible; rahter; it was of an audible.
The visible came second because we needed the visible to see the representation we produced so the first representation was a representation of the audible:
But actually,
we hadn't conceived of any
of those symbols
at the beginning;
the best we could do
was
:
or something like this:
or this:
That was the first
representation
by
the apparatus through which
the represented needed
to travel
in order to communicate what it perceived
back to its origin.
That, only that,
the fragile
written word, or
the subtle, sung
note,
or the trembling, absolute
scream, or
the drawing or
the painting or
the photograph
all serve to show us
every absolute dimension
of both the created,
material world,
(and its creator),
but
this is where it gets hard:
it has to be heard,
because the first representation
was the word.
There was only one word,
only one language
for a long time:
the real problem for us today
occurred at the moment
of Babel --
when the world broke in half,
and new words and pronunciations
happened,
the further away we got
from the soure,
and we reached a point where we
couldn't understand each other, anymore.
For awhile, we (our different nations) were
adrift,
alone,
talking only
to each other
and pronunciations changed
so radically
over time
that when one of us
on this side of the word
met those of another place,
and heard them say:
"I'm from Qatar"
we wrote down,
the best we could
what we thought we heard,
and told others to just
pronounce it
"guitar."
But
Qatar
is pronounced
and
M - I - S - S - I - P - P - I
is pronounced
That's just all there is to it.
In the realm of all that is represented, the written word comes first, representing the sound of Knowledge. And Knowledge is the embodiment of the ineffible.
