Christ in a Mercury


I was reading when the dog barked. Specifically I was reading about the Spirit Mercurius appearing in King Lear as the Fool, with his double nature reflected in Goreril and in Cordelia. But then the dogs begin to bark and the hounds begin to howl. I thought it was Craig, who's doing some work for us while he's laid off from his regular job. We started building a fence yesterday. I was on the back deck and I went up the steps and around front. There was a man in a suit, holding a Bible, and his wife, dressed up for church.

Like Mercurius I display a double nature. On the one hand I am the emissary dispatched from order to reconnoiter chaos. On the other when I look at these people I can see my childhood. I can see a lot of my own relatives and my wife's relatives. So there's a part of me that feels a nostalgia, and wants to stand there and listen politely. It usually loses for a simple reason, which is that it is one sided. It's too white.

The man was reading to me from the Bible, from Psalms, and his wife was smiling with the benevolence of a good follower. His subject was how a man can be happy, and of course it revolved around the sun, which had been misspelled and put through anthropomorphic transformations. In one of my songs the chorus is, "When the one god come, his face was the sun it was not your likeness."

So when the man paused, like a telemarketer, and asked me if I agreed with him, I just told him that was a good book. "Let me share something with you," I said. My body tried to stop me by tightening my stomach.

"Just be rude or something, you fool."

But I had already started and though I knew it was egotistical of me to do it, I told him a story from the novel, "Cold Mountain," in which a man and his daughter visited simple folk to educate them, which at that time involved teaching them about Christianity. There was one old boy who listened to what they had to say but never said anything to them, until one day he finally broke his silence: "You say this man wanted to help these people and they done him that way?" The man agreed. "Then the best we can do is just hope it ain't so."

"Isn't that funny?" I asked.

He looked confused. "I'm not sure," he said.

"It's wonderful to talk with you," I said. "It's a beautiful day for a walk, and I'm sure you'll enjoy it. There's nobody home across the street."

Yesterday I wrote about hypnosis, and how it can be refined down to a one sentence induction and a one sentence suggestion. In my story, two lines of logic intersected, which created humor, or at least wit, and it certainly created an evident confusion. While the trance was in effect I then gave the suggestion that they should leave to the left or to the right and be happy to go.

But all the while I was doing this there was a part of me that stayed unidentified with anyone there, and it wasn't so pleased. It was just watching the entire exchange objectively, and it told me I shouldn't practice snap inductions on missionaries. The confusion is not a welcome thing for them because there isn't an appreciation for the intersecting lines of logic. There's an old bluegrass song that says life is like a mountain railway, and that you should "keep your hand upon the throttle and your eye upon the rail."

The objective, or unidentified, part does not take my side in things to justify my point of view. It didn't appear by accident, but by design.

The Mercurius aspect, as I wrote above, is dual natured. On the one hand I don't like what religion does to most people. It divides the double aspect of Mercury into good and evil, so that there is an inflation of the worth of the people in the particular church or group, and a deflation of the worth of those outside it. To divide a real god and then try to replace him with a parental authority figure is to me pathetic.

But there is the other side of it, which is that I have taken responsibility for my own spiritual development, and the objective observer is the centerpiece of it. Not identifying with negative emotion is the advanced work, because what identifies a negative emotion is that it is based only on supportive evidence. This makes a one sided person.

One sided people are dangerous, because they are so identified with this one side of their nature they begin to think they really are "right."

And generally they are ... I try to center myself.

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In other news, Ted Stevens has lost his senate seat. He is the longest serving Republican in the senate, and failed to understand the nature of the prohibition against seeking treasure. He walked into the ambush and there was no god in the machine to pluck him out of the mire. It was on his 85th birthday that Stevens lost his seat and along with it his ass. Rain Man would add the eight and five and get thirteen, concluding that a black cat crossed his path and changed his luck. Or for the more classical interpretation there is the twelve around the one on the evening when social fortunes shift on the Judas axis.

Any way you look at it, Sarah Palin can't hurl herself through a partially open door.

There is no sympathy for Stevens because he has so often displayed his contempt for the anti-Stevens who appear as a shadow over his left shoulder. He swats them away with a nasty assed “No!” and banishes them into a series of tubes which deliver them to a world in which all polarities are reversed, an alternate universe in which, in return for his not being an insufferable old prick, he is rewarded for his public service with something besides seven felony convictions and a lost senate bid.

Sarah Palin and Ted Stevens have ruined Alaska’s reputation. We used to think of Alaska with some romantic projections added, like intelligence to pretty face or ice cream to apple pie. Then Jon Stewart sent a camera crew to Wasila and let some of the locals at the town saloon talk. It took about thirty seconds to recognize the "available to let" sign behind the eyes. Now the image of Alaska has shifted to a sort of hillbilly Siberia.

Now we're looking at Georgia and Minnesota. Georgia and the rest of the deep South is busy proving that it was a mistake to stop their succession from the union. They're like somebody you fuck once and have to pay forever. I always have trouble imagining Minnesota as going for the right wing dude, probably because Garrison Keeler is from there, and he presents a positive image of the state, which Norm Coleman has done his best to vandalize. The Republicans are trying desperately to keep the Democrats from hitting a veto proof majority. Funny, it doesn't seem like that long since the Democrats caved in to threats from Cheney that he'd come in and break the tie on doing away with the filibuster. They had no trouble running rough shod over everybody who wasn't in their party, including their fellow citizens. But of course people like that eventually turn on each other. They're essentially one big dysfunctional family.

Posted: Wed - November 19, 2008 at 11:34 AM