From the Other Side

    Holy! Hard to start a blog! Anyway, went digging into old tape-collection. Had to buy a tape deck. Am digitizing some old tapes. Tried one of deceased father's. That time we went to a recording studio in Tioga, Oregon. Tape was wambly as Hell. Daughter and I shaking our heads. She's been sewing. I'm sick of women and bars and smoking. It's all the same. Everyone just hanging around, seeing what fun there is to be had. Read the first English translation of Dante's INFERNO out loud into a podcast. Dates from 1782. Pretty cool. Lots of references to persons of Antiquity as well as, it seems, contemporaries of the author's. Recording is four and a half hours long. Just strove for clarity, not perfection. Did pretty good job.

    Meanwhile, in other big-vistas areas of consciousness, I've been transcribing Manly P Hall's 2nd lecture in his astrotheology-series, on ancient cosmology. And the ladder of the planets is compelling. You start in Ouranos (I'm spelling it that way to make you say it how Hall does) which is the heavens, the outer shell of the firmament, I think it was. And then you come into Saturn, who is Time (Kronos of course) and who eats his own offspring, as time eats all who are of it--all, that is, except one son, Jupiter, Zeus, whose mother sneaks him past his cannibalistic father by giving him a stone in Zeus's stead. He's also somehow hidden in a thigh-bone for some reason, the thigh (I note) being the longest bone in the body. But this son of Time survives: And that is the Soul, which does not die.

    And we move to Mars, which apparently represents the individual will.

    And then we come to the Sun, which is the divine or compassionate will.

    Then Venus for sensual love of course.

    Then Mercury for the critical intellect, and its denizen loses the real world and substitutes for it his vast compendium of opinions.

    Then we get the Moon--I think the opinions and fake world were in Mercury, but they might be in the Moon, because the Moon is the Imagination.

    And finally we go into the damp Earth, where we are intoxicated by the humidity of this place, and finally underground and back to Ouranos, where we can do it all again.

    But you can see that when you get stuck on any one planet, you could climb back out.

    I've stayed on Jupiter, I think, but wherever I've taken up permanent residence, I am watching many souls go past me, and pulling back as someone overlooking an interstate highway from an overpass perhaps.

    Dreams...O aren't they peopled with distractors! My consciousness slumbers yet, and I fail to collect my wits before they molest me with a thousand such distractions.

    But my resolve is growing as I turn from this world of diversions, too.

    Coming back from all the wandering, back to the me I always was, the interests I've always had, and the mission I've perhaps always likewise had.

Later.