Flashback Queen

( from: proaudiostar )

It seizes the brain and numbs

the soul;

makes the living breathing world

a hell.

Fingers, too,

and hands and feet

belong to another,

but still persist and do their duties

ritually,

longing to touch again, and truly feel

longing to make contact

with reality.

( from: photoshopessentials )

It will come; it will come--

this curtained world has passed before,

and the waking is so beautiful,

but how I want my life to be

a continual display

of beauty.

But to do that would be to 

obliterate memory.

And that's impossible.

So I go on, still

a flashback queen,

that's me.

The Birthday Boy in the Year of the Palindrome

So,

I know you've all been wondering where I've been,

and

if I could possibly ignore David Bowie's 65th birthday,

which is tomorrow.

Well, in answer to where I've been -- it's hard to say --

I haven't been in cyber land, but I've been restoring myself

inside myself.

My hands are aching to write, though.

And in answer to the second point, 

of course not.

Here it is,

the beginning of 2012,

and Mr. Bowie is turning 65 --

it seems only right to offer

a palindromic video:

Forever Diva Bowie

I can't help but notice that

my entry on David Bowie's birthday

gets a lot of hits.

That may be an accident of the language chosen

for a Google search,

but it's actually a nice collection of the man's videos.

If you can't watch the last one,

do please go to You Tube and look for it.

I did find a new video for the fourth spot,

where you could not access the video anymore,

and I love this new video so much,

I'm going to post it by itself too!

Please enjoy the eternal diva,

David Bowie.

And if you like this video,
click the link to David Bowie below,
and watch more like it!

I urge you, too, to go to You Tube
and enjoy these videos again there ---

Today's Diva: Happy Birthday, David Bowie

. . . or:

how to age gracefully

when you're

a true diva:

Tyler Clementi, RIP

I can't say this is a channelling,

but it's felt from the heart.

It's about a story that's very,

very

sad:

First,

I want to send my deepest sympathy

to the family of this young man,

and to the families of all the young people

who have taken their lives

in the U.S.A.

over the past month

(and, really, over the past several years)

because foolish,

childish

people

scorned them for being different.

(I would like to say something about gay bashing,
but will reserve another entry for that.
Suffice it to say,
for now,
that this is the most
homophobic age
that history has ever seen,
and we absolutely need
to start admitting
that physical, sexual desire
does not fit neatly
into one simple mold.
And
if a man and a man
want to be together,
or a woman and a woman,
well,
it's no big deal. 
I mean, really:
who is it hurting,
if they are together,
in the comfort 
and privacy
of their own home?
If we just accept that,
and get on with it,
then we might be able to begin
to curb
damaging perversions
that have been spawned by our age
of confusion,
during which
the media seems to embrace many sexualities
but at the same time
silently enforces
homophobia.)

~ ~ ~

This incident just goes to show how skewed the morals

and the logic

of the youth of the 

United States have become.

Seriously.

The only thing more upsetting than this video

and this story

is some of the comments posted on YouTube after it.

*/.

You might say

that it was just children who did this

-- evil children --

Well, but we must

take responsibility for our children.

The words that tumble

from a child's lips

and the actions

they perform

are reflections of the words

and actions

that child learns

at home.

( sgiquarterly )

Consider these videos,

which I also found

on

YouTube:

I don't mean to be a prude,

but there's just something really wrong here.

This may be just words,

language,

but where can it go?

The young man who 

broadcast his roommate's sexual acts

is home now, and reportedly,

doesn't understand 

what's going on.

He doesn't understand that he destroyed

another young man's life.

And how much money will his parents pay

to get him out of jail, free?

~ ~ `~ ~

America,

what have we become?

The land of freedom of speech,

the dream of our forefathers

has become a world where 

"freedom"

means the ability

and right

to play games with other people's lives,

and to scorn and mock those

who are different 

from our limited, little selves,

while across the world,

our sons and daughters

and other innocent

sons and daughters

keep dying

in a war that will never end.

I love America,

but I, too,

am afraid of it.

No, Well, Probably Three

hiya

now in the last entry, 

I contemplated how a given channelling body

can channel more than one personality,

probably three,

maybe more.

I know I have at least three who are 

pretty damned strong.

Are any of them me?

(insert my name as it is known on this earthly plane, which,

quite frankly, 

just isn't that important.)

No.

Not a single damned one of them can claim that name.

They are all other spirits

working through my

earthly avatar

and the difference

between me

and you

is that I acknowledge

that not one single aspect

of the combination of forces

that exist within me 

is dominant:

they are all equal,

and their primary job

on earth is to find a way

whereby they can function 

as equals.

The only way is by using the mind,

that tool in our Avatar

that we were given,

which has the power

to balance our disparate differences.

( templeton-cambridge )

I mean, honestly, why not?

It seems the most economical way to do it, after all.

Imagine all the fragmented,

fractured 

personalities that resulted

from the shattering of the glass

at the beginning of time

-- that nasty old reflecting surface, that mirror --

(to understand this more, please see my earlier entries on the mirror

and palindromes)

We've gone through time

piecing them together,

trying to find the perfect balance --

(each couple, indeed, could be channeling

up to at least eight personalities,

maybe more,

that have to be absolutely in harmony

in order for the couple

to be happy.)

I'm going back to non-italics:

if you can,

read these sections first,

then go back to the italics,

because that's how my mind works:

So, imagine this:

our bodies are avatars =

containers that carry

the multiple dimensions

of the aspect

of God

which is perfect.

It's funny, because

in the movie 

Avatar

there was only one 

person

per

avatar;

however,

don't you think that,

given the expense of the technology,

and given

the rise in group think

in our society 

even Americans would see the logic

of putting more than one personality 

into on avatar --

that's right:

if the USofA

developed the technology

of the avatar and decided

(as in the movie)

to get to know

another nation or creation,

you'd be damned sure you wouldn't get

an avatar to yourself:

it's neither cost conscious, 

nor effective.

Indeed, folks working
in avatars
would have to learn to work together,
in small groups
wherein the personalities all
have different,
complimentary
strengths.
That would make maximum use of the technology.

 . . . . . 

I mean, seriously,

how many space flights had 

only one man on board?

( spaceflight.nasa )

And for the ones that did only have one man,

did they get very far?

( nasa.gov )

This is not to say that we don't need those rebels,

those daredevils who dare

to go first,

but when it comes right down to getting bigger jobs done,

yes, even America has come to realize

you need more than one.

(  columbia  )

(NO!

I'm not being a communist:

just look at it; 

we - the USofA - are very clearly promoting

the group:

 (Google meeting pods designed after Antarctic expedition igloos

found at:

jonathan fields.com )

in-class presentations,

working environments,

everything ----is moving

towards privileging

groups over individuals

so why do we get so upset

over the idea of

a government that acknowledges

that the health of the group

is at least as important as the health

of the individual?

Huh?

Or a government style that feels that

promoting collective solutions

can be more productive than

individual solutions?

I went off track to point out that,

one of the primary flaws in 

the logic of the American system is that

it places far too much importance

on the individual, even as it is

acknowledging, more and more

that the best solutions are

collective solutions.

Very rarely do we experience

 a genius, 

and I'm about to propose an explanation

as to why that so rarely happens:

( wcotrim )

So imagine this:

Imagine that when we are not in our bodies,

we are in another form -

a spiritual form,

that is nearly perfect,

except for the fact that it

was kind of broken

at the beginning of time.

That's right,

the entity we embody 

when we are not in our bodies

is not God;

it is the representation of God

and it was created

at the beginning of time, 

and

it was kind of broken,

by God, who (if you remember

my earlier entries, on the Creation,

etc. . . .follow the key words)

in a moment of weakness,

had the crazy idea

that He wanted

to create something that was exactly

the same

as Him.

 ( Marassasclass )

That's right:

why the hell did God

want to create something in his own likeness

If he was everything?

I mean:

seriously, folks,

if God is everything

he has no fucking reason

to want to create

something

beyond himself.

come on!

Let's be serious, 

now.

but he did

And the reason why God felt the desire

to see himself,

was because:

He is Everything.

And part of everything is:

desire,

lust,

greed,

jealousy,

power,

subserviance,

dominance

desire

desire

desire

desire

So at the moment when God experienced

a preponderance of Desire,

(because God, being God, goes in cycles,

trying out the various aspects

of everything

at regular intervals)

He produced Us.

So He could look at Us.

Because we are all

part of Him.

We, combined,

are the mirror image

of God,

which -

don't forget 

- is Everything.

Humankind is the
ongoing experimen
to reproduce
the perfect mix
that is God
so we can get back to the task
of reflecting God's greatness
back to God;
indeed
we can get back to the task of being God.

So each human entity
is a combination

of the parts of Him,
but only a limited combination

because

each one of us is limited

in  the qualities we can hold

because we're holding our qualities

in physical containers,

and the physical

is not infinite.

(  completelysmitten )

So please read my entries on tikkun, Kabbalah, and Creation --

I can't explain again everything in them.

Anyway:

imagine this:

at the moment of creation

God broke the mirror,

or whatever the object was

that He intended to view himself in

because, shit,

that mirror had the task of 

reflecting 

infinity,

and,

well,

any created substance

does not match the power

of Everything.

So the mirror broke,

into bits and pieces

that got named at that moment

of creation;

humans are part of that

rubble,

and our task ever since then

has been:

to put it back together again;

to reproduce

the perfect

combination

of all the elements

and rejoin

God,

which is everything,

again.

This is a problem

and a challenge,

because

the inherent aspect

of all life

all creation

is that it is 

individualized

specified

separate.

In fact,

we had to gain

a more specific

sense of our selves,

our specific identities

before we could

merge again

into being

God.

( blackcommenter )

That's what the beauty of America

is.

One of my former husbands said

that America is nothing but

a great experiment

(oh, I know he's not the first to say it)

a great attempt to 

ignore difference, but of course

that's proving to be impossible:

the biggest problem in America today

is that we just can't tolerate

difference.

But to be American,

following the original tenents

of America

is to be

tolerant,

forgiving,

respectful.

( DecOfInd )

Anyway,

America was the first step 

in the evolution of the collective mind

to combine the parts of the broken vessel

on a collective level. 

But perhaps it was too early?

No, I think not --

( sulekha )

At the beginning of time,

when God created Man,

he produced Avatars,

recognizing that the Avatars

cannot contain just one piece

of God,

because if the Avatars

contained just one piece

of God,

they would simply sustain the problem,

the problem being

that God was not Everything

as long as Part of Everything

was Us.

US

The United States of America --

That place where States -

geographical boundaries

retain an individual identity

when the real essence

of the founding fathers' documents

was Union.

If the United States of America

could realize that

it is one country

that is responsible for

all  of its citizens

no matter what

their race, religion,

color, or code,

then the United States of America

could

be the model for the rest of the World.

But the danger, is, this:

we can't do it while also retaining

our stubborn hold on believing 

in the validity of the individual.

We literally have to lose

our Egos

and love one another

Now isn't that the craziest thing

you've ever heard in your life?

. . . . this is not the miracle.

The miracle is this:

if we suddenly,

by some 

insane

balance of all the elements,

all our disparate parts

Fell In Love

with each other,

which means:

loving the black man

loving the white man

loving the Asian man

loving the Muslim man

loving the man who

loves the man;

loving

the woman who loves

the woman because she sees

the woman understands, in a way

that no man can understand

because the Man Is The Mirror

In every couple, we have the reproduction

of the two halves of God -- the women

gets the horrible task of being the more powerful

creative half,

the Man, oh the sad sad Man,

has to recognize that his task

is, well, functional:

the Man is the Mirror,

the object God produced

so God Could See God--Self.

But it gets more challenging still:
if you can acknowledge the premise

that each couple reenacts the creative impulse,

the moment of desire when God wanted to see 

Herself

and if you acknowledge the idea that

the mirror broke

because it was not up to the job,

and WE are the pieces of the mirror

and OUR TASK is to use this earth

+

our earthly avatars

+

all the elements the earth gives us

in order to find

the perfect balance that brings us back to

God

well, hell, if you're still with me,

bless your heart,

If you can acknowledge all of that,

well, then you might see why

it is essential that all these avatars

(AKA: our bodies)

cannot just contain 

(ie: channel)

one personality

To be more efficient,

the avatars

should contain at least three, maybe

even four

of the elements of God,

and if

within that avatar

those elements find a way 

to have balance,

well, 

then,

that avatar,

which we know as a human personality

would be said to have attained a level of self-awareness

that is genius:

genius is when, in fact, a human entity represents

a successful experiment

a successful combining

of the disparate parts

of the pieces of a mirror

that was intended to have the power

to mirror the Almighty.

If you take that the next step then,

what is Love?

Love is the capacity for one human being

who has found a sincere balance 

between the elements he/she is channeling

to absolutely forgive, desire, and respect

another individual who has done the same.

Perfect Love

is when each individual is capable of looking beyond

terrific differences

anyway --

I am channeling at least three personalities,

and one of them is most definitely

Makropoulos --

at least one other

loves the idea of Makropoulos

and wants to play along,

and another does too

but she's the personality

who, to date, has always 

been a Company Girl.

There might be

another one in there,

and I think she's a slut.

The thing is:

the other three are so

darned strong,
and

we're working so hard
at just getting
along.

America, Part One

2.

Jean Baudrillard - AMERICA - Excerpts 1
Translated by Chris Turner
excerpts compiled by Erik Haugsjaa (1999)
From America, Verso, London and New York 1998

...This is echoed by the other obsession: that of being 'into', hooked in to your own brain. What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain.We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord.But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is thespectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to seeour thoughts unfolding before us - and this itself is a superstition.

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting,reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other -fatal - moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-backloop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought,his concepts as images on a screen.

...You stop a horse that is bolting. You do not stop a jogger who is jogging. Foaming at the mouth, his mind riveted on the inner countdown to the moment when he will achieve a higher plane of consciousness, he is not to be stopped. If you stopped him to ask the time, he would bite your head off. He doesn't have a bit between his teeth, though he may perhaps be carrying dumb-bells or even weights in his belt (where are the days when girls used  to wear bracelets on their ankles?). What the third-century Stylite sought inself-privation and proud stillness, he is seeking through the muscular exhaustion of his body. He is the brother in mortification of those who conscientiously exhaust themselves in the body-building studios on complicated machines with chrome pulleys and on terrifying medical contraptions.There is a direct line that runs from the medieval instruments of torture, via the industrial movements of production-line work, to the techniques of schooling the body by using mechanical apparatuses. Like dieting, body-building, and so many other things, jogging is a new form of voluntary servitude (it is also a new form of adultery).

Decidedly, joggers are the true Latter Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy, indifferent even to catastrophes since he expects destruction to come only as the fruit of his own efforts, from exhausting the energy of a body that has in his own eyes become useless. Primitives, when in despair, would commit suicide by swimming out to sea until they could swim no longer. The jogger commits suicide by running up and down the beach. His eyes are wild, saliva drips from his mouth. Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed.

  The only comparable distress is that of a man eating alone in the heart of the city. You see people doing that in New York, the human flotsam of conviviality, no longer even concealing themselves to eat leftovers in public.But this still belongs to the world of urban, industrial poverty. The thousands of lone men, each running on their own account, with no thought for others, with a stereophonic fluid in their heads that oozes through into their eyes, that is the world of Blade Runner, the post-catastrophe world. Not to be aware of the natural light of California, nor even of a mountain fire thathas been driven ten miles out to sea by the hot wind, and is enveloping theoffshore oil platforms in its smoke, to see nothing of all this and obstinatelyto carry on running by a sort of lymphatic flagellation till sacrificial exhaustion is reached, that is truly a sign from the beyond. It is like theobese person who keeps on getting fatter, the record rotating endlessly inthe same groove, the cells of a tumour proliferating, like everything that haslost the formula for stopping itself. This entire society, including its active,productive part - everyone - is running straight ahead, because they havelost the formula for stopping.

All these track-suits and jogging suits, these loose-fitting shorts and baggy cotton shirts, these 'easy clothes' are actually old bits of nightwear, and all these relaxed walkers and runners have not yet left the night behind. As a result of wearing these billowing clothes, their bodies have come to float in their clothes and they themselves float in their own bodies.

Anorexic culture: a culture of disgust, of expulsion, of anthropoemia, of rejection. Characteristic of a period of obesity, saturation, overabundance.The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness,repletion. He says: I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.

The jogger has yet another solution. In a sense, he spews himself out; he doesn't merely expend his energy in his running, he vomits it. He has to attain the ecstasy of fatigue, the 'high' of mechanical annihilation, just as the anorexic aims for the 'high' of organic annihilation, the ecstasy of the empty body and the obese individual seeks the high of dimensional annihilation: the ecstasy of the full body.

Baudrillard, Jean. "AMERICA - Excerpts 1" Verso, London and New York. 1998. Available: http://www.uta.edu/english/apt/collab/texts/america2.html

3.