Oh, my, this seems a doubling of the Ragnarök dream!
I'm surprised that anything survived and wonder if the birds flying North are spirits of the birds (as in, they might be dead, too). The same with the animals.
However, we humans seem to have a worse problem than alluvial swamping, hunger, and heat. In the poem we have lost connection not only to our animal nature but to our spirits and/or souls. This remnant of humans no longer remembers anything useful that can help us survive on earth. However, Russ, it's your last phrase I find most chilling: “Not even dreams." We are truly lost if we lose connection to our dreams.
There is no doubt our current crisis is ecological, existential, spiritual, political, economic, moral, etc. all at the same time.
I remember how exhilarated I felt reading Steven Pinker’s THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (published in the ancient days of 2011). I felt pride in how far we, as a human species, had come. I couldn’t believe all the rights we won: women, animals, disabled, etc. Even the far fewer wars taking place on the planet were killing vastly fewer people. On almost every level humanity was improving. How fragile and brief that wonderful Pinker-blast of exhilaration!
Russ’ dream seems to confirm that our problems can’t be averted and any progress we've made isn’t nearly enough. Our problems aren’t fixable, not even with our extraordinary left brain breakthroughs in technology. We seem helpless to avert the “evil” embedded so inextricably in matter, i.e. in each of us. Perhaps our darkest tendencies already exist in the non-existent world as well.
After my recent “Durga” dream — where the giant Durga figure wraps her “necklace”, a living serpent, around my wrists & ankle — I had another dream. In that one I etch a beautiful snake around a martini glass (euroborus style). My work is being shown along with others in the MOMA museum in NYC. The man in charge of the glass etching exhibit puts my glass too close to the edge of the table. I fear it may slip or be knocked off. A second man comes in with an exhibit of his own. He swipes his arm across the table smashing all the glasses onto the floor. I feel fury but contain it because I don’t want to endanger the people moving through the room. Then someone wheels in some coat racks. I see 3 baby flesh-colored snakes on the floor crawling in and out under the racks. A third man enters, sees the snakes, and kills them with a knife. He skins them and hangs their skins like a curtain on a horizontal pole. Now the fury I feel boils over, and I scream, “YOU KILLED OUR FUTURE!” I wrest the knife out of his hand and kill him. (I must say this is the only dream I remember where my dream ego perpetrates violence on another dream figure. It made me wonder if Durga's serpent “bracelets” impelled me to kill the man.)
I’ve had several apocalyptic dreams, including the onslaught of a “Mother of a Storm” and Sekhmet rising out of Lake Michigan in Chicago, declaring, “Flee the cities!”
We live in this amazing multi-colored, multi-sensory world that exists in the midst of nowhere and nothing. WHY??? And, today, because of the Internet’s ability to triumph over space & time, we exist in this flux of rapid change and instability that no one can keep up with, let alone control. On top of that, we’ve learned there doesn’t seem to be any hard, objective “reality” anyway. Our mental-rational structure of consciousness is unraveling. And, as a result, it seems to be expressing itself — faster and faster — in more and more radical, fascist-like ways — as if trying desperately for one last time — to secure its dominance. As if caught in its own trance of mass reactions, conspiracy theories, and “isms”.
Is the Cosmos aware of our crisis?
FEX & COO has shown us that our life is far more psychic and magical than our culture allows us to experience. But if this world is about to end — forever, with no new shoots possible — does the FEX & COO experiment matter? To let go of fear — to surrender in order to open up to meet the NEW, implies that there's a NEW to meet.
Russ suggests that one way to open our ego structure to the unknown can be found in Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ description of “one of the oldest ways of telling”, “a passionate trance state … in the world between worlds, where a story is attracted to the trance-teller.”
Jean Gebser in his THE EVER-PRESENT ORIGIN presents what he calls different structures of consciousness, the oldest being the magic structure when we were nearest to nature. He refers to early drawings at this time of dreamy, almost trance-like human figures moving so that their whole head and body merge with the surroundings. The figures in paintings and sculptures during this time are “mouthless”. There is one from 40,000 B.C. found in Western France. Prehistoric cave drawings in Australia. A figure in Russia dated 30,000 B.C. What do these “older than stone" people “see” during their trances? They don’t require language to transmit it. Do they use telepathy? Do they all “see" the same thing while in their collective trance state?
Once the mouth appears — letting us know that to utter words had importance — the mythic structure of consciousness arrived. Now the images and stories experienced in trance states could be verbalized. Trance sacrifices ego consciousness because of its lowered awareness of "this reality”. Gebser conjectures that In a trance state you enter “the spaceless-timeless effectuality of the vital nexus necessary to create parapsychic phenomena”.
Russ’ poem provokes me to ask: Is it too late for a FEX & COO style writing or Lorca's “Duende" to bring something new into existence, via our current and very heated “struggle between the light and dark”?! Is it too late for us to learn to “look” in a new way? Of course, we can open our "channel to the creative imagination” simply for the pure joy of it — for our own sakes.
The Sufi in John’s tape believes "the outer world reflects the inner and real change takes place in the inner world. The inner is a prelude for what is about to happen out here, and what we've seen is that ‘the emperor has no clothes’. It’s over. It’s done. It’s never going to get better. There is no purpose. You can’t save the planet."
What are Owl Man & Heron Man saying in FEX & COO? Who do they speak for? Are they the same personalities as Russ and Paco? Fex & Coo is all about the inner or “other" side coming through to blend and influence its own characters, and perhaps its readers, too. It models shape-shifting and transformation, but is it too late for us to transform?
What is in the Fex & Coo bank to rob? What kind of enrichment would such a heist bring? Is it possible to pull such a robbery off? Do skills — such as robbing a psychic bank — create a new kind of trance state? One that makes the subatomic world, where mind and matter interface, increasingly accessible?