Nostalgia

I think I am definitely getting to an age where looking back on the past doesn’t so much happen, as surge into your life at times with a surprising power of yearning and delight. Not for who you were, but for what the experience of a time was like. It’s something which is certainly nudged on by the death of certain famous people from your youth, because when you are young enough these people are like gods that would live forever in a world lit by the same quality of light.

Such was the case recently when the British film director Ken Russell died. I loved Ken Russell and his films, and I associate them with the gleeful passion of the late sixties to seventies. He was iconoclastic and brave and serious about sensuality and opening up to vision. He understood that cinema was magic I’m sure. In that world “artist” was not an ironic word, and personal, direct experience changed lives and drove them in search of meaning and answers. Cinema, like television, was a democratic medium by virtue of distribution and replication (and Ken started off in TV as a film maker). His artistic heroes were human and fallible and extraordinary, and ordinary people were poetic. We watched “The Music Lovers” after his death, and it was so obvious that nobody made films like this anymore. In fact nobody ever made films quite like Ken, but it’s difficult to imagine anything remotely like his films being made now, which isn’t to say that something as good couldn’t be made, but conditions are different, and so are audience expectations. We were, relatively speaking, cultural virgins then.

Another thing we saw recently (with gentler effect) was a documentary from 1971 called The Power of the Witch. This had a lot of unintentionally funny bits, but was certainly interesting to see now, featuring interviews with people like Doreen Valiente, Eleanor Bone and the Sanders, all figures from the development of modern Witchcraft. I think most touching was the quality of the people interviewed who often seemed rough, idiosyncratic and unencumbered by a sense of style which modern media sensibilities seem to decree as needing to be slick, or exhibiting attitude. On film these people were less of a performance than the average person speaking on a mobile phone is nowadays.    The documentary looked quaint now, part Hammer Horror, part village policeman, part earnest and respectful. It’s a subject which could still have a good documentary made about it, but I can imagine the allure this had at the time.

Both TV and film have become far more a matter of personal choice nowadays, and I think that has changed how the medium works. DVDs, satellite and cable TV channels and online streaming means you really don’t have to be watching what the rest of the national population is watching at all. How it used to work was if you wanted to see a film you had to go to the cinema and watch it with other people in a large, darkened movie theatre. If it wasn’t at your cinema, you didn’t get to see it until it came on TV, when the premier was a big deal. Films were enormous, and not just a matter of entertainment. The 70s was also a great time for independent film making. As for TV, we used to have a max of three channels (actually two in our household till the mid 70s).

What all this meant was that when you were seeing something, so were a whole lot of other people at about (or exactly) the same time. Film and TV had a real impact on the collective psyche; something that flopped really flopped and could disappear without trace, but “getting through” to broader consciousness was also more definitive. The TV play was a real art form in which the medium was part of the message, because it was part of how it worked.

When “The Naked Civil Servant” screened in 1975 it really made a big impression. When something made a big impression on TV (especially a controversial one) there would be people talking about it at work or school the next day, it would be in the papers, interviews would probably follow, and so on. In short it entered into national life and could significantly shift a little bit of that life. Other plays worked a bit more like modern media, having a big impact on a minority of people who remembered them (eg Penda’s Fen and Stone Tape for me), however as there was not the option of repeat availability and sharing (Penda’s Fen is still unavailable except for poor quality pirated versions), these tended to get carried as memories of the experience of having first seen them, which tended to intensify their natures.

I am certainly glad that choice has opened up and I can now select what I want to watch (I didn’t give up having a TV for twenty years for nothing!), and I’m also glad that it is so much easier to make a low budget movie or record and get it to its self selected audience without losing out and disappearing entirely in the attempt. But when it was good you knew damn well the old style TV and film was not just changing your world, but changing a load of other people’s worlds at the same time, and that now seems unique to a time when a relatively newly established medium was open to breakthroughs and eccentric voices and visions, and a particular kind of reflection going on between artists and the public at large.

I can’t help looking back at Ken and thinking “yes! we did it”, even though it was him and his crews who did it. But we all felt a part of it somehow. That’s what I remember those times doing. And somehow he’ll always be there, in some better, more interesting part of our psyche.

still from "The Devils" by Ken Russell - click on image for source page

my most popular posts of 2011

Well according to WordPress these were my five most popular posts of 2011:

• 1 the choice within anger  March 2011
• 2 Pagan transphobia – no, you can’t pretend it’s hip anymore March 2011
• 3 “Man seeking Man”  July 2010
• 4 Gods, goods and shadows  January 2011
• 5 sex, pornography and human community  January 2011

It was interesting that the single most popular post was about the transformation of anger, and questioning how anger as a compelling emotion could be looked at consciously. I guess anger is something that affects everybody, and we’re all looking for answers to that one way or another.

The post about Paganism and transphobia is one that continues to get hits, with people looking for the sparking events of that controversy in their searches (see below). I think it would be fair to say that this recent breaking of trans-issues in modern Paganism did hit a nerve, and something there isn’t going away, which I think is a good thing.

Another topic that people have kept looking for on my blog is the short film “Man Seeking Man” and its main actor Asko Sahlman, which again is pleasing as it’s a gem of a little movie on a hard subject, and Asko gives a great performance.

“Gods, Goods and Shadows” got a lot of hits thanks to its being chosen for inclusion on the MetaPagan blog aggregator, for which I thank Cat Chapin-Bishop of Quaker Pagan Reflections. This post did not sustain hits long term, but I’m glad it got read a little more widely as it’s one of the posts that I am particularly happy with.

“Sex, Pornography and Human Community” came in number five, and who knows how many people clicked on this for the right reasons lol. I hope they enjoyed it in any case – pornography or things considered “pornographic” are and have been valued parts of people’s lives for a long time, and I wished to separate out how we treat people under capitalism from other issues of the sexual and moral heresies of erotic appreciation. I hope it gave a slightly different take on things.

The most popular searches were:

- man seeking man short film

- hairy gods

- z budapest transphobia

- asko sahlman man seeking man

- damian abraham bear

Most of these I’ve mentioned above, but I’ll add that I’m delighted that people search for hairy gods, and also for Damian Abraham (something of a hairy god himself) who deserves it in so many ways, both as a performer of great heart, and a lovely guy.

Anyway, that was it for 2011. Thanks to all who visited my blog, I hope you enjoyed it, and a very happy 2012 to you all!

“Janus” by Wolfgang Sauber (Own work) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

newborn

Here we are at the Winter Solstice again, and for a lot of Witches this is thought of as a time of rebirth of the light, of the Sun which has sunk as near to the horizon in its daily course as it will go, bringing short days and long nights with it, now to begin its climb back to the heights which it will reach next Summer.

This year when I thought on “the child” I was reminded of the wondrous, hopeful and free qualities of childhood and I realized that, contrary to the more common iconography of popular Paganism, what I really perceived was a being quite free of any determined gender. That was real freedom and joyous relief. It reminded me of the essence of childhood, and of the essence of selfhood; creative, free and un-selfconscious.

This sense of the child I find very healing, and it reminds me of a freedom long forgotten, but not lost.

With so many suffering so much hurt and harm based upon whether they are seen as a man or a woman, followed by all the machinations of mind that follow those categories as they are projected, something that no one seems to escape, no matter how young or old or innocent, the light of the ungendered child was a sweet liberation. Not insignificantly, I simultaneously had a sense of how inner peace comes with the realization that one has raged enough at past hurt, that there comes a point when one has gone far enough in oneself, and that one now goes too far to continue, and this realization is an immense relief. I think we often need “the child’s” consciousness for this to happen.

Peace and laughter is alive and well.

Just one question though: if this really was “the child of promise”, why would anyone need to know if it was a boy or a girl or something different?

"The Sun" tarot design by Pamela Colman Smith and A.E.Waite

Forgiveness and remembrance

Throughout my spiritual searches a recurring theme that came up was that negative emotion was one of our biggest blocks, and the transformation of negative emotion was one of our key tasks for ourselves, as a species. That also went well with the realisation that the opening of the heart and the centrality of love was the big sun rise news that could turn our lives upside down, which is to say right way up in terms of reality.

All that being so, I had a long history of just not “getting” forgiveness. My mother used to say “you can forgive, but you can’t forget”, but that just never hit a right note with me. There was a taint of nursed hurt in that kind of statement,  of a wrong held onto, of holding out. Similarly when people say “yeah, well they’ll get their karma”. Nope, they have their karma already, and expecting the universe to enact your personal vision of human justice is not a universal or naturalistic view, it’s an expression of hurt. Letting go doesn’t come with conditions, that’s not how the physics works.

Hurt and bad experience does bad things to people. It distorts them if the reaction just follows the common emotional course. Resentment, anger, fear, passive aggression, sense of moral entitlement, depression and sadness, hopelessness. At its worst it can lead to clinical depression or to the ingrained groove in the psyche that is hatred. I think both can lead to even more serious psychological disturbance.

There is a definite place for drawing boundaries, and saying no to destructiveness, and for telling your truth like it is, and for not allowing victimization or oppression. Forgiveness isn’t about saying it was ok, or it ever would be ok, if it wasn’t.

Sometimes people need to get angry. Sometimes it is healthy to get angry to move out of an even worse place. But that is very temporary. Ultimately people need to get free, and the quicker the better.

I now have come to really appreciate forgiveness as a practice. Not as a special case action, but as an ongoing practice. The malaise of negative emotion is so prevalent among human beings, that to not forgive is to never truly be emotionally free. I am not a forgiving person by nature, and I do not believe in cosmetic forgiveness, but forgiveness as a universal practice is powerful medicine.

When the ultimate destination of anger, in every case, is the practice of forgiveness, it changes the root emotional reaction. Our practice of the transformation of negative emotion starts to travel across space and time, to the deepest parts of our own lives. We heal the past, and we find our present starts to heal also. We start to heal the present moment, and we start to heal everything.

We can forgive, and we can remember who we really are.

"Expressions of the Emotions - Plate VI" - image in public domain

Elvis is leaving the building

We are presently at a slight interlude in the Journey of Neptune. He’s back in Aquarius, having put a toe into Pisces earlier in the year. He’ll be back in the sign of Pisces for the 13 year long haul in February 2012.

There’s a lot to Neptune’s travels through any sign, and each time it’s going to be a synergy of interlocking influences astrologically, but as you look back you get some sense of what Neptune actually does. He colours our collective dreams, passions and visions. He also turns things “mass” in a certain way. Mass-consciousness, mass-trends, mass-infatuations, mass-ideals, mass-delusions. Neptune moves things through powerful ebbs and flows of deep sentiment, attraction or aversion, a fluid magnetism that changes the landscape of how we thought things were at the time.

I was born with Neptune in Scorpio, and it was there until I was 11 years old. Throughout my entire infancy and childhood really (I count my childhood as having ended the Summer before), Neptune’s vibration transmitted through the station of the scorpion and the phoenix. It actually went into Scorpio at the end of 1955. 1955 – 1970, with typical dips in and out before going in properly in ’57. These were really times of the rebirth of a post war, post A bomb consciousness, of counterculture, and something that lay beneath the sex, drugs and rock n roll label. People dove down to find hidden light, and eliminated constraints (or believed they did) in pursuance of that illumination. Others responded differently to this tide, whether with fear, bewilderment, denial or detachment, but the landscape changed nonetheless. By 1971 the station had changed to expansive, wide ranging but potentially fanatical Sagittarius. 1971 – 1984 is the purest Neptune in Sagittarius period. This period sees the hey day of urban guerillas and zealous “terrorism”, the popularisation of political Islamic ideology, and I suspect the foundation work of the ascending religious right. It also saw a lot of deepening of spiritual search idealistically, and the proliferation of alternative belief systems both in religion and health. International travel had become something that many, many people undertook, even if it was only to Benidorm.

By 1984 Neptune had entered Capricorn, where it would be till 1998. The collective dream seemed to become very material during this time. Wealth and meritocracy, matt black, yuppies, quick profit, fools gold. When Neptune met Uranus in this sign the Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War unravelled. Kids started wearing designer labels as identity and status markers. The collective psyche seemed to have been corporatised at some level, like never before. Mass passions became acquisitive.

And so, in 1998 Neptune entered Aquarius. Our dreams turned to connection. The internet, which had been about for some time, now really started to seep into everyone’s lives. Technology created a kind of virtual astral plane, and it was mind blowing and life changing for those to whom it was new. Our whole sense of community and interrelationship shifted and became both expanded and selectable. Information became the King’s new wardrobe.

Now Neptune is about to leave Aquarius (for the next 165 years or so). It’s easy as an amateur astro-freak to either be wistful or just think “thank god”, depending on your personal bias towards a sign or a time. But as the tide ebbs and leaves us with the beached wrecks that we thought were eternally sea going vessels, it’s an interesting time to look at our ideals and dreams and what they mean to us, and what dreams themselves may be for.

I think we are about to realise what the internet could never do for us, as well as appreciate how much it did do, most especially for those people in need of connection just to find themselves, eg dispersed minorities. Dreams can be precursors of real change, and real work, actual fulfilment of real needs. And are not most dreams of worth if they inspire, and even prove useful and sustaining? They make us reach for what we suddenly see could be possible. Furthermore, are dreams not capable of realization within limits that exact a realistic price? We can be surprised at both how much is realistic, and what turns out to be real at all.

Neptune is now to take its latest residence in Pisces, and this might be both sobering and inspiring. I suspect the synthetic astral plane we have created with technology will now prove too material for our deeper needs, and too transient for the demands of durability and physicality. Neptune in Pisces offers something a lot older and more perennial, but not amenable to the same uses. Different time, different job.

What opportunities and what follies could this offer? Up to us I guess. Easy gold is always fools gold, though the taste of the dream is of course something in itself. Neptune can bring glamour, and glamour is a bitter trail to wisdom. But Neptune can also bring illumination, with our conscious work, and rewards that come to all.

Surfs up.

"Broken iPhone" by Zain Sohail on Deviant Art

a dream of herds, freaks, and peace

At the Full Moon which is just subsiding, I had a dream. Early in the morning about 6am, after a night of disturbed sleep. Phil had sprinkled jasmine oil around the bed, and that may have had something to do with it being such a dream laden night in conjunction with the Moon’s fullness.

The dream was like a story being told within the dream, which became the dream itself. There were a lot of animals, most similar to horses and cattle, in an area that was part natural and part built, like a market square on uneven earthen ground, with some wooden posts and railings, and a lot of these animals. Then in came just a few of these mutant-like horses, golden brown with many legs, but lopsided, like most of the legs on one side. I think I only noticed one at first, but in any case the freaky horses were chased by the others and attacked by them.

Then it became apparent that there were two freak horses running side by side, and they were male and female, not coupled as yet but there they were running side by side from the other horses, thrown together by chance. This was an amazing occurrence, that these rare, despised horses had found each other, their compliment, their mate. They ran, and when they got to a clear space they mated.

At their mating before all the other horses, the animals surrounding them got down on their knees and lay down facing them, as if in respect and a kind of reverence. It felt like a religious scene, and was very moving, and I cried in the dream, and then I woke up.

Something about the end of the dream was almost reminiscent of a Christian nativity scene, except that the animals were peacefully “bowing” before a mating couple, rather than the “holy mother and child”.

This dream really spoke to me very personally. The freak animal attacked by the herd, for it’s difference of nature or form, I think that would strike a chord with a lot of people from the LGBT community. That these freak animals found their mates against all odds, again struck a real chord with me as a gay man. Not sex, not just finding “some place” in the world, but your true mate. There’s no doubt that our relative aloneness predicates a lot of both our early self experience and our treatment. In the dream, it was the sudden appearance of the mate that was the turning point of the dream, that changed the entire meaning of their freakdom. Even before it was apparent that they were actual mates, the meaning had changed, though the chasing and attacking didn’t stop till they’d found their own space, however temporary, and consummated their union.

I realized as well from this dream that at a level of my psyche “male” and “female” symbolised the animals’ “other halves”, and that this was actually beyond gender, for there was no doubt for me that the dream was about gayness (in my case) or queerness more broadly, yet the “male” and “female” symbols held. I felt that was personally informative for me in terms of questions about “Queercraft“, and at least contributes to the answering of some questions that are simply not amenable to merely rational or political enquiry.

The other animals’ reverence and peace in the face of the consummation of the freak animals’ natures and love was like a deep, perennial hope, that the spiritual recognition of love and nature would indeed annul the herd instinct to turn on “freaks” and persecute difference of nature and form.

"wild albino donkeys" By Dirk Hartung - used under creative commons 2.0 license

how long has this been going on?

Forever. Surely forever. Centuries, millennia, forever. Finding, losing, rediscovering, the technology of love.

Not as in the “baby, baby I love you” song. Love as in who you really are, what everything really is, the whole, whole, whole already done deal.

Technology not as in “build me a wheel, a printing press, a bazooka, a synthetic astral plane”. Inner technology to understand and free our remembering self. How all this is only the way of one thing.

Been going on forever, and it always only just happened too.

I think this is really the mysteries. Doesn’t matter if they are termed Pagan or Christian or Buddhist or Sufic, ancient or modern. I can’t think of anything more fundamental, or welcome, or astonishingly liberating, than the unsuspected truth.

This is a radical simplicity disguised by the nakedness of its subtlety, and its closeness to us beyond intimacy.

"Medieval Gate in Tayac" by Semhur - used under creative commons license