Justin profile picture

Justin

A Voice Speaking From the Waking Dream

About Me

PoetAll the world is clear! I alone am clouded! All the rest of the world is bright and sharp, I alone am dull! (words of acients, writings of the once glimpsed and lost, now found Lao Tze of the Tao Te Ching before embarking into the Desert at the end of his life, at the beginning of life, before the great wall.....)Maybe the world was my dream. But who's dream am I? ...and I had to wake up, but who would I be upon waking? Some kind of monster? Perhaps. I pray to know and write about the monster: that darkness that comes and overwhelms the virgin/child. Czeslaw Milosz: "Tidings":Of earthly civilization what shall we say?That it was a system of colored spheres cast in smoked glass, Where a luminescent liquid thread kept winding and unwinding.Or that it was an array of sunburnt palaces Shooting up from a dome with massive gates Behind which walked a monstrosity without a face.That every day lots were cast, and that whoever drew low Was marched there as sacrifice: old men, children, young boys and young girls.Or we may say otherwise: that we lived in a golden fleece, In a rainbow net, in a cloud cocoon Suspended from the branch of a galactic tree, And our net was woven from the stuff of signs, Hieroglyphs for the eye and ear, amorous rings. A sound reverberated inward, sculpturing our time, The flicker, flutter, twitter of our language.For from what could we weave the boundary Between within and without, light and abyss, If not from ourselves, our own warm breath, And lipstick and gauze and muslin, From the heartbeat whose silence makes the world die?Or perhaps we'll say nothing of earthly civilization. For nobody really knows what it was.Well there are always "Tidings" and there is always something deeper.Do you want to know the image? Last night I dreamt that I stood in the room of a girl I knew 30 years ago, when I was 8 years old. Last night I dreamt that I was reading a series of inexplicable signs and significances called to each other from a "Post Card" or two from my friend Oppermann: the image on the obverse an aenenome or perhaps a garden mumm...

My Interests

Sorcery THE UNIVERSE WANTS TO PLAY. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity--those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity--those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes.Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results.The incremental openings of perception gradually banish the false selves, our cacophonous ghosts--the "black magic" of envy & vendetta backfires because Desire cannot be forced. Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins.No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass--if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science--not that weak blavatskian crap.Sorcery works at creating around itself a psychic/physical space or openings into a space of untrammeled expression-- the metamorphosis of quotidian place into angelic sphere. This involves the manipulation of symbols (which are also things) & of people (who are also symbolic)--the archetypes supply a vocabulary for this process & therefore are treated as if they were both real & unreal, like words. Imaginal Yoga.The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real--but then so must consciousness be real since its effects are so tangible. The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication--but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind--sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow-- priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web.A poem can act as a spell & vice versa--but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature--it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo, in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence.Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs like dried dreams--the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink--wine & ganja, meat, yantras & gestures-- rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis--the sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.The tactics of ontological anarchism are rooted in this secret Art--the goals of ontological anarchism appear in its flowering. Chaos hexes its enemies & rewards its devotees...this strange yellowing pamphlet, pseudonymous & dust-stained, reveals all...send away for one split second of eternity.

I'd like to meet:

Aliens and poets (I already have a beautiful lover and a mangy but loveable cat) /// There are many facets to each day--- some are dream and some are reality /// I am waiting to meet the rhizome on the internet, because, in the words of David Albahari: "Words are something else!" I could be sitting round waiting to meet myself: a form of masturbation or "self-soothing"--- what else can one do when confronted with darkness /// Or maybe there is the old Police line: "But Darkness makes me fumble ... for a key... to a door... it's wide open." /// Is it wide open? And is the width without a bound? This doorway is a constriction in our tiny selves-- we are little thresholds, each of us, straining at his or her capacity to live ////

Music:

Bob Dylan, Balkan Beat Box, Peter Murphy, Love and Rockets, Transglobal Underground, Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn, Lou Reed, Natasha Atlas, Nyazz, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, and, yes, the Beatles, Marianne Faithful, Brian Ferry, Beethoven's Piano Sonatas and Chopin's Nocturnes, Haydn's Piano Sonatas as played by Glenn Gould, Some of Christopher O'Riley's variations on Radiohead, Some of Steve Tibbits, Tangerine Dream, Shankar (the East Indian Violinist), Michael Brook, Daniel Lanois, Jeff Buckley, Nick Drake, Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page's solo Spin,

Movies:

A Taste of Cherry, The Draughtsman's Contract, The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, 10 (by Abbas Kiarostami), Prospero's Books, Grizzly Man, Aguerre Zorn Gottes, Wings of Desire, Kings of the Road (Im Lauf Der Zeit), Alice in the Cities, Antonioni's Blow Up, Fellini's 8½, La Dolce Vita

Television:

Carnivale and The Twilight Zone, Peter Brook's BBC Production of The Mahabarata

Books:

Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Kafka's Der Prozeß, Carl Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, Emmanuel Levinas' Totality and Infinity, Plato's Timeus, Apology, Phaedo, Republic, The Upanishads, The Bagvad Gita, House of the Spirits, One Hundred Years of Solitude, John Gardner's Gilgamesh, Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth, Phillip K Dick's Valis, Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicle, The Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, Edmond Jabes' Book of Questions, Czeslaw Milosz's Collected Poems, Ted Hughes' Crow,

My Blog

more notations

while the situation of a web log on my space is in a sense without hope... Because hope would be.hope for the wrong thing... I still retain a certain positive relation to posting anything as a kind of...
Posted by Justin on Sun, 01 Jun 2008 11:14:00 PST

This Seems like a waste

I must have spent over an hour writing a long piece that was deleted by pressing the "backspace" button at the wrong time.  In a sense I am glad because i probably spoke too much about God and th...
Posted by Justin on Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:15:00 PST

Doctoring And the Dream (Farewell to the Institute)

Originally this post was entitled "Doctoring Sex and the Dream" but this title became too dreary because sex in this context is over commodified.  I have nothing against sexuality, but my discurs...
Posted by Justin on Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:45:00 PST

Wahrbestand im Versicherungs Agentur

The title is German, sufficiently angst filled to be certain, "Taking stock in the insurance company." It is about as broad as one might like to make it.  You can stand at the maw of the abyss an...
Posted by Justin on Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:54:00 PST