Julie McNamara

About suffering they were never wrong, 
The Old Masters; how well, they understood 
Its human position; how it takes place 
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 
For the miraculous birth, there always must be 
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 
On a pond at the edge of the wood: 
They never forgot 
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse 
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden

Three Wolves and Three Women, Grasset.

To help find the soul-voice, one must explore the myths and stories of the Wild Woman archetype in Women Who Run With the Wolves:

“A healthy woman is much like a wolf: robust, chock-full, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving. Yet separation from the wildish naure causes a woman’s personality to become meager, thin, ghostly, spectral. We are not meant to be puny with frail hair and inability to leap up, inability to chase, to birth, to create life. 

How does Wild Woman affect women? With her as ally, as leader, model, teacher, we see, not through two eyes, but through the eyes of intuition which is many-eyed. When we assert intuition, we are therefore like the starry night: we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. 

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move the east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one’s primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wild nature has a vast integrity to it. 

It means to establish territory, to find one’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible. 

The archetype of the Wild Woman and all that stands behind her is patroness to all painters, writers, sculptors, dancers, thinkers, prayermakers, seekers, finders— for they are all busy with the work of invention, and that is the instinctive nature’s main occupation. As in all art, she resides in the guts, not the head. She can track and run and summon and repel. She can sense, camouflage, and love deeply. She is intuitive, typical, and normative. She is utterly essential to women’s mental and soul health.”

She is the soul-voice, the soul-home

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Image from the film Koyaanisqatsi 

Oh man, this film may be long and you will be wondering, when does it start? But it is a beautiful sequence of glorifying shots of our earth and man’s insatiable conquest that overwhelmed it into a wasteland. 

Part I: i see a wasteland

I was sitting on a lovely soft grassy hill at the Buttes Chaumont park in Paris; on the path below me, I saw a man, in his 40’s, walking his small dog, yelling back at a couple of 20 somethings who were apparently taunting his dog and the man. When the man started to protect his dog and yell at the kids, the taller boys got closer and quickly pulled at the dogs ears and ran off as the man, furious, made to hit the stupid kid. The young group walked off, laughing at the frustrated man and his dog.

Today I rode the bus home. I was watching all the people walking and talking and peeking into little shops and restaurants along the sidewalk. A man is yelling at some laughing kids that yell back at him. I can’t tell you what happened, perhaps these two teenagers bumped into the nerdy man on the sidewalk and didn’t apologize, and to the 40 something’s appall, his instinct was to confront the boys who just kept walking and laughing.

My revered Ed Tom Bell says, it starts when they begin to overlook bad manners: individuality, consumerism, lack of respect and lack of love- humanity removed. And all that remains is garbage like ipads and justin bieber and garbage is their god.

I recognize lack of respect and it’s everywhere. We look to the young as gods and idols; we believe prodigies are gods and the younger a man accomplishes something the greater he is; yet we overlook that they have no life experience; they may miss the following which are learned in more than half a lifetime: of love, suffering, discomfort, poverty, appreciation, loss, the good fight, of resiliance… and yet we make these people as gods and forget the calm wisdom of those who have seen so much, who are full of tradition and peace and don’t just think they know.

This was inevitable. Man is progress. He strives to do more and live longer, he starts observing, starts gathering theorems and scientific conclusions about the universe and humankind, he invents medicine and fire and lights and the written word. His curiosity and unrestful heart, these natural biological qualities of man, keeps him struggling and discovering and growing into the sky like Sears buildings. One day he will reach the sun and burn. And his plastic wings will melt and fall to the ground of the universe, which he thought was the sky.

Humans love to struggle, to fail and to overcome, to risk everything for everything. He endangers those around them and worse, themselves, they sell themselves once they choose the path with fortune at the end of it.

He will yell at his father, steal from his mother, ingore his grandfather’s health, kill his brother, rape his sister, betray his best friend, destroy the lives of hundreds of unknown people, runaway from his children.

He is on the path of extreme individuality, one that is fed by the desire of material fortune, a desire and race so empty because the prize is so terribly empty, that he will forget all of those he knew and that once knew him, he will forget his own name and forget the name of love.

We have seen figures in history take this path and we can see it around us as well. It is a wasteland. And they will lose themselves among the barren and stricken earth, following footsteps of those before him that too have lost themselves.

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Dios tangible,

son palpables

tus aguas puras

Río infinito

Montaña poderosa

Árbol fuerte mi defensa

tu suave fortaleza,

creadora, tu niña, pequeña dios,

en tu selva verde,

te quiero verde,

mi luna azul,

mi estrella roja fugaz,

mi montaña negra.

Montaña negra, negra,

qué has visto en este valle

en que acuestan mi casa y el lago

que por tus noches de estrellas de viva cristal

todo me empeña

a necesitarte.

II

Dios está en este techo

trescientos sesenta grados de cielo, un espectro concavo de azules y rosados

y bajo un campo de tejas

y satélites

y chimeneas

y aires condicionadores

como las minas terrestres

el viento fuerte de la noche lleva las voces desde abajo

como inteligibles demonios gimiendo

abajo nadie abre las bocas al cielo

solo bebiera las paredes

respiran aire revuelto de estas minas terrestres

y a la gente que una vez conocí

como cajeros y camareros y vecinos

solo son hormigas aquí

habitando un hormiguero encubierto.

Escasamente la luna corta como una navaja por unos paseos

pero sangra e inunda el campo inmenso de estas tejas y minas terrestres.

************

Tangible god,

 your pure waters

infinite river

powerful mountain

strong tree my defense

your soft fortress

are palpable

creator, your child, small god

in your green forest,

I want you green,

my blue moon

my red falling star

my black mountain.

black, black mountain,

what have you seen in this valley

in which lay my house and lake…

through nights of live crystal daggers

all compel me

to need You

II

God is on this rooftop

three-hundred and sixty degrees of sky, a concave spectrum of blues and pinks

and below a field of shingles

and satellites

and chimneys

and air conditioners

like land mines

the strong night wind carries the voices from below

like inteligible demons groaning

Below no one opens their mouths to the sky

they would only drink walls

they breathe churned air from these land mines

and the people that I once knew

as cashiers and waiters and neighbors

are just ants here

living in a disguised anthill.

Scarcely the moon cuts like a razor through some alleys

but bleeds and floods with light

the immense field of these shingles and land mines.

Morrocco: “Where the sun has set”

On our way from Marrakesh, through the Atlas Mountains; from Ouarzazat to the valley of Daraa to the Zagora Desert

 Our tourist group stopped outside of Ouarzazat, Morocco, a small town composed of a few houses and shops made for the travelers that came to see the Kasbah, which lay on a brown hill beyond a drying river and a circular plot of stones that marked the town’s cemetery. Some of the corners of the walls of the Kasbah were rounded as though the wind, after many years of unruliness, worked to beat it down and there was a low line of rocks that seemed to guard the crumbling fortress.

We wandered under the hot sun looking into the native Berber shops. An orange cat that seemed to blend in with her surroundings howled at some of the shopkeepers who sat patiently outside of their doors. Some hailed us to look inside at their authentic leather shoes and bags, their nice jewelry with the hand of Fatima. But one shopkeeper asked us, “Do you know why she’s crying?” The group moved on to cross the river to see the Kasbah that was shimmering in the hot air. He spoke to me in a soft, slow voice and I encouraged him with a smile. “No one feeds her. She’s crying for her babies.” He wears a Gandora robe of vibrant blue and purple and matching Babouche slippers. Even here, in the middle of the desert, shopkeepers must work to sell their items. Then he told me the orange cat gets pregnant every spring. But the shopkeeper never sees her kittens because she retreats to the forest. Jumping to a corner of the room, he had to read to me from a book of poetry he was just contemplating and translated for me, which seemed so important to him, “Nothing ever dies in the forest. Tombs do not exist there.”

We sat ourselves outside of his store watching a few sunhats amble by. I breathed in the hotsun dust. The heat closed my eyes and I pressed my dry hands on my warm lids. I watched a bothered sunhat take off its shoe and shake it. I laughed at the clever dirt, no matter what it inevitably jumps into your shoes as though fighting back and resisting your footprint.

 Ismael, the shopkeeper and native Berber told me of the timeless immortal earth of the forest and that the kittens always come back to grow in the cat’s tired womb. He said, “The poet´s job is to share the feeling of life and death, and how we can all live like brothers. But we leave our marks everywhere; we build pillars of stones into the restless ground only to remember ourselves, but fearing destruction, it becomes more prominent, and we see the desolation of civilization that worked so hard to preserve itself.”

He told me he wasn’t from this town; he lived in the desert with his family who made everything he sells. He comes back every spring. In spring there were plenty of colorful shoes for the tourists. But this town was tired. The Kasbah was tired, the cats were tired, and despite the continuous flow of wanderers here that seemed to make this vacuum roar, the fertility was in the desert. I told him that was our next destination.

That afternoon, our tourist group continued on the route to the Zagora desert. There were plains of dirt and rocks not yet beat to sand and scattered patches of tall dry grass that swayed and bended in the wind, like the shivering hair on my arms. This land was like an augur, a landscape that predicted everything and told everything of its past.

 We rode a pack of tame camels along a trodden path at sunset that led to our campsite, the sky above completely darkened now, glinting with new stars, and a slow moon was rising from the far surrounding mountains. The desert, like the forest, is timeless and cemeteries do not exist there. The sand is both primitive and ever recycling thanks to the violent churning wind. Finally the white globe rose and floated like a large pearl on the necklace of the night and I saw it turn the sand to snow and a herd of omnipotent camels pad over the deceiving light with their trackless ancient feet.

Hay que buscar “el universo” en google images (que psicodélico)

Explico el problema de los profetas:

 Los profetas como Gandalf de Madrid y Padre Moon de the unification church tienen una seguridad que les hace ciegos.

Es peligroso (para otros y si mismos) porque no tienen un guía; un profeta sigue una fé fantasma, una fé que está basada en el deseo; deseo de poder, deseo de números, deseo de números de cerebros…

Padre Moon dice, “Soy tu cerebro” 

El profeta es el hombre más vacío y cerrado en el mundo como un agujero negro en el universo, agotado de una profundidad de millones de estrellas que quiere consumir en una golondrina.

Está encarcelado por su inmortalidad, su consumismo infinito, interminable; encarcelado como un dios que envidia sus niños mortales que aprenden, cambian, brillan y caen, que son capaces de superar, saltar, volar; vuelan y extienden la vista de sus ojos, como estrellas fugaces. Entre más conocen el mundo y el universo, más lo abrazan, vuelan y descansan encima de ello y llegan a ser el universo y el agujero negro: la sabiduría, la memoria del universo hasta el olvido.

De hecho es el estado de ser verdaderamente abierto.   

 Mira, despiertan los ojos, lleva el cielo en los brazos y lánzalo al suelo del universo para que rompa en millones de estrellas entre tus pies

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I’ll explain the problem about prophets:

The prophets such as Gandalf from Madrid (he really does look like Gandalf though refuses to speak orally, by will or naturally) and Reverend Moon of the Unification Church, who work to open the eyes of their lost steer, are blind leaders; closed and paralyzed by their pride and arrogance and certainty, (some branch groups to ponder are purists, nationalists, conservatives, traditionalists, among many other ists) they are the most lonely walkers of this world. It is dangerous (for others and themselves) because they have no tangible guide, they are the joker who alone knows their secret; slowly the prophet may begin to actually believe his great joke with enough followers, for mass thinking is always our truth, validated by numbers, convinced by those persuasion techniques, propaganda, repetition, mirroring, scarcity, playing with fear and hypo-powered, unaware minds… a prophet follows a ghostly faith, a faith that is based in desire; desire of power, desire of numbers, desire of numbers of brains…

Reverend Moon says, “I am your brain”

The prophet is the most empty and closed man in the world like a black hole in the universe, suffocated from the profundity of millions of stars that hed like to consume in one swallow.

He is imprisoned by his immortality, his infinite consumerism, interminable; imprisoned like a god that secretly envies his mortal children that learn, change, shine and fall, capable of overcoming, jumping, flying; they fly and extend the view of their eyes like shooting stars. The more they choose to understand the world and the universe, the more they embrace it, fly and rest on top of it to become the universe and the black hole: wisdom, memory of the universe until oblivion. 

In fact it is the state of being completely open. 

So, look, wake wake, carry the sky in your triumphant arms and throw it at the feet of the universe and watch it break into millions of stars at your feet.