Bay Area Overpass #1

Self-portrait with belly #8

Self-portrait with belly #7

Self-portrait with belly #6

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The intuition of the Real lying at the root of the visible world and sustaining its life, is present in a modified form in the arts: perhaps it were better to say, must be present if these arts are to justify themselves as heightened forms of experience... We know that the picture which is "like a photograph," the building which is at once handsome and commodious, the novel which is a perfect transcript of life, fail to satisfy us. It is difficult to say why this should be so, unless it were because these things have neglected their true business; which was not to reproduce the illusions of ordinary men but to catch and translate for us something of that "secret plan," that reality which the artistic consciousness is able, in a measure, to perceive.

~Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism

Self-portrait with belly #5

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Maybe the myth of the vampire is a degraded version of the Hades/Persephone story. Perhaps Hades had to become a vampire because Persephone (the virgin soul) would no longer visit him of her own free will. He had become relegated to the realm of evil/death. The ancients did not have the dualistic habit of splitting the psyche into good/evil, life/death, creator/creature. There were rituals for the psyche to encounter darkness, which is also (the orthodox authorities deny) the wellspring of creativity:

The rising world of waters dark and deep
Won from the void and formless infinite.

~Milton

So poor Hades had to molder in a coffin, emerging after midnight to feed surreptitiously on the sleeping (no longer aware) soul. Which only goes to show that the darkness needs us as much as we need the darkness. The Greeks knew this. That is why Persephone ate the pomegranate seed of her own choice.

Self-portrait with belly #4

Self-portrait with belly #3

Self-portrait with belly #2
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What is preoccupying me this morning is how to understand how God can surpass me infinitely without becoming a he or it for me... The being to whom I address myself is someone of whom I can speak (and consequently on whom I can reflect). This possibility implies a double limitation of both him and me; it supposes that I can treat him as someone who is not there, that I can set him aside; and also, as far as I am concerened, that the bond between us is not absolute... In reality the being I love has not got qualities for me; I grasp him as a whole, that is why he is refractory to predication... Nothing is more false than to identify the thou with a bounded and circumscribed content. Participation in divine life can only be grasped as participation in an infinite... To pray is actively to refuse to think God as order, it is to think him as really God, as pure Thou.

~ Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal

Self-portrait with belly #1

Three pounds, fifteen and a half inches long

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About the weight of a head of cabbage. Or half a gallon of milk, I'm told. I can believe the fifteen inches - the simultaneous undulations across the belly span its width. The head of a cabbage is on target in relation to volume, but the weight? The vortex at my navel is a tiny black hole, infinitely more massive than the 3 pounds suggest. Pregnancy affirms what cosmologists have been telling us for years now: visible matter is just about four percent of the stuff of reality. The other 70 percent is dark energy, with 25 percent dark matter thrown in. Dark - not just invisible, but ineffable, outside all known categories of existence. Transcendent.

…thought is only a reaction, a response of memory; and thought breeds time to cover the space between what is and what should be. The what should be, the ideal, is verbal, theoretical; it has no reality. The actual has no time; it has no end to achieve, no distance to travel. The fact is and everything else is not. There is no fact if there’s no death to ideal, to achievement, to an end; the ideal, the goal, are an escape from the fact… The fact, the what is, and the what should be are two entirely different things. The what should be involves time and distance… Death of these leaves only the fact, the what is. There is no future to what is; thought, which breeds time, cannot operate on the fact; thought cannot change the fact, it can only escape from it and when the urge to escape is dead, then the fact [i.e., what is] undergoes a tremendous mutation… When there is destruction of time, as thought, there’s no movement in any direction, no space to cover, there’s only the stillness of emptiness… Then being is timeless, only the active present but that present is not of time. It is attention without frontiers of thought and the borders of feeling... Life is always the active present… It is this life that is immortal, not the life in consciousness. Time is thought in consciousness and consciousness is held within its frame.

~ J. Krishnamurti

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Only in the sense of limit, of a barrier, is time real. As limit it inflicts violence on us, or more specifically, on the part of us which dwells in thought (Platonically speaking, the part of the soul which is weighed and divided by existence). “Time leads us whither we do not wish to go,” (Weil) because we have not yet learned true obedience and have not submitted to non-existence in the ever-present now. However, if desires and fantasies (thought about future and past) are abolished, what remains is the timeless now – dynamic and changing, to be sure, but a now imbued with eternity. “Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters” (Weil, again).

the gift

Experience: meaning and emotion in search of representation.

~ B. Sullivan

Existence is attuned to true sorrow when it experiences a break or rupture in its relationship to a close human acquaintance or some cherished object, but the object of sorrow is not lost with this rupture. If the capacity to be with the object were really broken to the extent that the relationship was destroyed altogether this sorrow at loss could not arise; that thing would simply have fallen out of the world and forgotten, would no longer be there.

~ Medard Boss

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Then sorrow is clearly one important way in which relationship is preserved. She needed to experience the rupture between herself and God – the God that was at an infinite distance from creation – in order for the relationship to remain vibrantly alive. To that end, creation needed to be crucifixion. To be serene or content or satisfied to any degree constituted a forgetting of God.

The days are hot, dry and bright. It's the monotony that's unbearable. Insomnia adds a flavor of eternal damnation to the whole stream of endless stifling light.