New poem from Tony

THE PESSIMISTS
These pessimists are always talking about death.
Death to the lazy bull
who cowers instead of charging.
Death to all those survivors of atomic bombs
who remember so hard.
Death to the 9th International Congress of Poets
because the 8th was so anti-everything.
A double death to all those
who believe they won't die.
A single death to all those
who believe they will.
I'm sick to death of pessimists
and always keep a wary eye on the optimists.
That's me - enthusiastically depressed.
Concerned, braced for anything,
I stand and ask everyone I meet -
What do you think will happen?
They never have a clue.
When it happens, it'll happen
is all they say.
I notch the wall.
Another day and still no answers.
I have to stick to who I am.
So many battles to fight all at once.
So many nights camped on the edge of chaos,
the dead streaming over the field calling out,
crying for water, for help,
for dreams, for death and more death
and the end of this war
and the beginning of another.
For me the blood never dries.
The cries never dissipate.
II
Growing up in the land
of silver buttons
and bright, big screens,
of terrible events tempered with calm
and monkeys running everywhere,
the sad earth just pulls and pulls
until the strain, discontent and moody,
snaps me off into the land I never
seem to want to be.
And I go, passively, intently,
saying it must be my destiny,
or because my father didn't break his heart
pounding steel into shape for nothing.
I go beat the whirlwind
and watch the birds from the highland fly.
Drinking deeply the national geography
I become drunk with the suddenness of it all.
I listen as
my country sings a song that confronts
but does not comfort.
I watch as
my country imprisons its passion
and condemns me to solace.
In my stupor
I bleed as I sit among the men
with harsh, untreated wounds
and become one of their kind,
bloodied by fear and shot full of despair,
in constant need of a scalpel
and a sword.

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Tony’s response to Merrilee…

Merrilee, your analysis is frighteningly correct in that we may be at a crossroads unlike any humanity has ever faced.  And you are also correct in that it’s all moving too fast for almost everyone to assimilate in any kind of coherent way, causing many to throw up their hands and say to the various powers that be: just fix it; make the chaos go away; give me peace.  And by abandoning our ability to direct our lives, we tumble into the darkest parts of man’s mind where power becomes absolute and woe be it to anyone who chaffs or resists that power.  We’ve seen it many times before, and always with disastrous results.  Can anything be done?  Are we facing various forms of extinction - environmental, cultural, psychological, and physical - that cannot be stopped?  Have we moved beyond the point of no return?  It would be hard to argue that we have not.  My singular question is what does it really take for humanity to transform itself; what did it take?  Have we been at this nexus before?  I have one glimmer of hope. The transformation of humanity has always been, it seems, the result of it being at death’s door with no obvious way to avoid total destruction.  Merrilee speaks of prehistoric peoples who drew images with sharpened stones and pigments made from dirt, charcoal, and animal fat.  It is unknown what were they trying to say, but what they rendered on the cave walls in those simple but powerful images activates our imagination.  We look back through a blurry portal in time and try to grasp their mystical visions, their hopes, their fears, and their uniquely human sense that tomorrow need not be like today, that what is done today can alter what happens tomorrow.  What a revelation that must have been.  What power could be wielded if the future could be changed.  Draw a galloping beast and stare at it in the dim firelight as a hunting tutorial in how to avoid it or kill it tomorrow.  Conjure up in the cave’s dark recesses a mystical vision that imports a talisman with magical powers that promise a coming good fortune.  Gather around a fertility image as a group initiation into the mysteries of birth and death.  If our ancestors were not trying to glimpse into the unknowns of their world, if they were not trying to alter their future, if they were not trying to prepare themselves for battle with some demon or beast that could suddenly appear in the mist, then there would have been no need to summon magical powers from the rocks and drawings.  Only in our dreams can we modern humans drift back to those ancient caves and have some sense of the intensity and immediacy of our ancestor’s waking lives.  Only in our nightmares can we feel the paralyzing fears they faced in the darkness of the cave, and only in our comforting fantasies can we exalt in their ecstasy when, in the firelight, they triumphed over all that awaited them.  But in the reality of the daylight, they must have felt defeated facing down the terrors of their day.  Since then, humanity has constantly reinvented itself to face down the terrors that each age presented.  And this points to what truly separates us from all other forms of life, and that is, unlike the wild beasts, our behavior is not driven solely by our environment, but by our imagination and by our deep desire to anticipate the future so we can alter its outcome.  Can we alter the future before it is too late?  That depends on what we consider as being ’too late.’  Maybe it will take an apocalyptic event to catalyze a ’new’ version of humanity.  It seems we have come finally to the brink of deciding that question.  We are at the stage now that has gone far beyond corrupting our physical environment to the point where we can literally recreate a variant human species using frighteningly simple and available genetic technology.  There is no roadmap and nowhere near enough psychological and emotional acuity to be able to handle this almost unlimited God-like power we have invented.  So the question is how do we deal with this duality of our minds: on one hand our visions and our dreams, as Jung points out, are always trying to drive us out of our unconscious selves towards a future where everything in the unconscious is realized; and on the other hand we stand helpless and paralyzed in front of this shapeless vague future that is shrouded in all same fears as our prehistoric ancestors had.  I think Russ and Paco, and each of you who have been sending in eloquent and meaningful comments, have been intuitively providing an answer to this question.  We humans have a strong need to try to link our days on Earth as if they are a string of pearls, each one connected to the other forming a circle around our intuitive sense of wholeness, of our understanding where we are in space and time.  It is an illusion.  We are more like dotted lines on a map.  Here there is a known path, a clear direction; then over there the path and the lines peter out and we find ourselves going in circles or retracing our steps unknowingly, only to find we are back at the start or, more likely, lost and forced to find another route, another set of dotted lines.  And in this way, we make our way through life doggedly trying to make sense of it all, to nail down our futures, to revisit our pasts in a new, more benign light.  But deep down, buried towards the very back of the cave wall in our minds, we ‘know’ there is something coming; its reflected in our fantasies, in our wisps of intuition, in our rare moments of great joy or sorrow, and always in our dreams that we discard and discount.  Early man had dreams too and they meant more to them than to us.  They must have seen something in those dreams that we do not, and they played out the meaning of their dreams in vivid drawings and rituals that carried them through the night and helped prepare them for the coming day.  It is people like you that will help create a viable answer to the question of where do we go from here.  Humanity will rise or fall not because of any modern weapons or biological entities, but whether or not we have lost all ability to change ourselves and our future and to decide once and for all if we want to be, as Paco discusses in his book, members of the ‘universe community,’ and where his ‘feeling of fellowship’ extends to all things whether seen or unseen.  Paco so beautifully anticipates this in his book when he says, “There may come a time in which new and deeper structures of consciousness will compensate this historical imbalance we have all inherited.  There may come a come a time in which significant numbers of us learn to accept and differentiate our own inner darkness, healing our inner divisions and recovering in the process the discarded values of the soul.’  Well said, Paco.  Al through his book, Paco speaks of love as an all-enveloping resurrected vapor that encased him as a result of his collision with destiny in Caborca and his confrontation with himself as a result.  As Merrilee fears, we are heading for a collision on a global level and that may finally propel all of us towards are own ‘Caborcas.’  And as that goes, so goes the world.  And finally, the stimulation you all are providing me keeps careening off into poetry.  So here is a shorter, poetic response to this latest series of comments.

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Merrilee responds to Russ’ dream scene poem

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?

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Things Seen in a Dream Scene…poem in response by Russ

Things Seen in a Dream Scene

Clustered they were—here and there
Yes, remnants of humans remained
Living on mountains of human remains
No one knows what lies beneath
The alluvial deserting and swamping
The constant rain washes everything
Thirst is quenched but hunger is not
So very hot the wet rises steaming
But the birds do not notice, they are flying
While all the animals follow them northward
Humans not following, they’ve forgotten how
No children are seen, no babies' cries are heard
There is talk of what might have been, what could be
Forgotten now that humans were gatherers and hunters
Not remembering humans are animals, are mammals
Not remembering anything useful now, not even dreams

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“The Gateway,” a poem in response from Estela Bourque

The Gateway

Digging in the quantum field
An idea begins to take shape
Visually forming into a blank circle 
In which a gateway appears
A Dorje over its entrance
Symbol for non-duality
 
The pull into this space is strong
A bell sounds calling one
From the physical world
To the realms of imagination
Interweaving dimensions of reality
Glistening off of one another
Like jewels in Indra’s Net
Creating a kaleidoscopic resonance
Of emerging language and images

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Fictive Response from Mike Daniel

Bumbles Crosses the Line

Bumbles felt himself calm down a bit after his beer bath courtesy of CedrosCM. Jinney’s ministrations didn’t hurt either.  A few hours of celebration later he got up. “I’m going to call it a night blokes” he yelled as he stumbled towards the pub’s front door. “I’ll see’s you later, ta”. Bumbles made it to the door, opened it and froze. It was like something strange had passed through his body. He couldn’t tell if it was the beer, his supper of Buffalo chicken wings or a ghost. Maybe it was the cold night air he thought self soothingly. Confused by this conundrum, pondering “what” as deeply as he could, he began to step over the cill. This being an old English pub the cill had energy unto itself. It was if the cill reached up and gleefully tripped him. He tried to grab the door handle but it swung with him. With his immense girth underway a gentle recovery was not in the cards. Bumbles fell sideways in a gentle unrelenting pirouette landing face down in a thicket of brambles growing on the sidewall of the pub.

“Ow, shite. I’m going to kill you, you damn bushes” he screamed. The brambles were unperturbed. Thrashing in his attempts to free himself only made his pain worse so he stopped. Facedown in the thicket Bumbles realized he had well and truly bumbled this time. Any attempt to lift his head caused the thorns hooked in the skin of his face to cut deeper. “My face, it’s on fire” he sobbed.  “I’m going to die, bled to death by a bush”. Pull yourself together Garth (his true name) came the voice of his mother. Lying still he began to sort out a plan to get free, to LIVE. Wriggling his arms he found they were only lightly hooked. Moving eel like, he broke free of the thorns, slowly moving his hands up to his face.  Feeling around with his fingers Bumbles was able to unhook his skin from the crown of thorns ringing his face.

Lifting his head away from the thorns Bumbles noticed an odd disc like thing mixed in with the dirt and blood. Wrenching free he hauled his bulk up grabbing a handful of dirt and hopefully the disc with his left hand.  Finally released from his thorny prison he staggered to his feet only to hear Jinney say “Bumbles what an arse, you’ve destroyed my dessert bush”. Bleeding profusely from multiple lacerations he didn’t have the energy to bellow some profanity at her. Shaking his head Garth staggered down the street toward home, #10 Drowning Street. A block down the street he remembered the odd object he had tried to grab. Looking down he opened his hand. Mixed in with the dirt and clotted blood was an oddly shaped cobalt blue disc. Stuffing it all in his pocket he began to whistle. “Things might be looking up”, he thought. Little did he know…

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Poetic Response from Tony Albino

BAKERSFIELD

 

He sat on the edge of the bed

waiting patiently for his memory to return.

He knew he’d find it again,

like the left shoe to

his dress-up brown wing-tips

that he liked to keep polished

more than any other pair.

The shoe turned up again,

didn’t it?

Why not his memory?

He looked at his bandaged finger.

Someone said he caught

it in the toaster

trying to fish out his burnt bread.

He didn’t remember having a toaster.

Looking at a photograph of someone

whom he thought he must know,

he had to admit he didn’t.

'I am not sure I ever met that person.

I don’t think I would associate with someone who looked like that.’

Maybe he left his memory in the penny jar:

‘A penny for your thoughts’, he thought.

‘I’ve a penny, but no thoughts.

What are they worth if I can’t remember them?

Now let’s see, I’ve my nice,

polished brown wing-tip shoes on,

but where was I going?’

He sat back down on the bed

to think it over.

He looked down at this shoes and asked them:

‘Do you know where we were going?’

I like my brown wing-tips, he thought,

and don’t want to get them scuffed.

I will take them off.

Maybe they will find their way without me.

But if I don’t know where I was going,

how do they know where they were going?

He untied his shoes and turned them over

so as to keep the soles clean.

He couldn’t help noticing the precise stitching of the rubber soles.

Looking closer at the embossed lettering

He slowly pronounced the word he saw: Bakersfield.

He drew a blank; ‘Never heard of Bakersfield.

Don’t remember being in Bakersfield.’

He looked down at his shoes and asked:

‘Do you remember being in Bakersfield?’

He wondered if Bakersfield was where bakers baked in a field.

Dozens of ovens lined up puffing out smoke

and sweet smelling plumes of sugar and cinnamon.

He realized he was hungry but could not remember

when he ate last.

‘What is wrong with me?

I need to lie down and dream.

I remember my dreams all right

But nothing when I am awake.’

That seemed, to him, very odd.

Should be the other way around, he thought.

Unless, of course, he was not the dreamer

but the dream.

So, of course, then he would remember the dream

since that was his true reality,

while the man with the two brown shoes

was caught in some nexus between waking and sleeping,

and thus quite a fragmentary and forgetful figure.

Unable to decide the matter, he quickly fell asleep

and in his dream, he remembered everything

he knew he had forgotten,

Including his misplaced memory.

It was right there all along.

Right there next to his pair of black shoes,

the ones he bought before the brown ones.

Come to think of it, he remembered, he didn’t buy them at all,

He won them in a lottery, a lottery with a catchy slogan:

IF YOU WIN, YOU CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE;

IF YOU CAN CHANGE THE FUTURE, YOU CAN WIN.

Now he was confused.

Did I change the future before or after I won the shoes?

Then he remembered what he did do about the future and he smiled.

Upon waking, he looked in the mirror and saw that he was smiling,

but could not remember why.

He looked down at this nicely polished brown shoes

and thought maybe that is why I am smiling.

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Dream Response from Merrilee Beckman

DURGA’S NECKLACE   (9/25/21)
I’m in a living room looking down at the carpet and notice a large V-pattern.  The V is made of bright red flecks in a field of gray.
Someone says, “That is Durga’s necklace.”
Then Durga enters the room.  She’s a giant.  My head only comes to her mid-chest.  She's wearing something red and leans over to pick up the V-shape, which begins to separate from the carpet.  Durga puts in on her neck where it becomes a living snake.
Durga motions for me to lie down on my back.  She then takes off the living snake and drapes it around both of my wrists and my left ankle.
Next, another pattern (a black spider over 3” long) in the carpet’s upper left corner begins to rise out of the carpet, travels over to where I lie, and spreads it’s body across my knees.

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Fictive Response from John Woodcock

I receive Russ’ invitation
I do not hesitate.
I take his advice from The Fictive Purpose of Dreams:
I faced the blank page and began falling into a state of receptivity to what presented itself. I let go of intentionality to open more the potential of the dream story. 
So now I stop and look at the blank page in front of me…
In one week I received five new people
who actually want to explore dreams and the imagination
I’ve been in a desert
Now I hear running waters
They need no convincing or argument
To cough up a dream or two
Before dumping it in my lap with a gesture of
“do something with the shapeless mass I give you!”
No I am refreshed by this new eagerness
To swim or even dive in deep
I have worked so long
To persuade thirsty others to come to new pastures
Only to find they prefer their
Dry dusty fenced-in corrals
My efforts led me to face the bitter wind
But this is different
Water rushing to meet water
Story evokes story
Trickle becomes flood
And we are replenished
The Persuader speaks: People just don’t see this. You must work on persuading them. Get them close enough to see, touch, feel the possibility of a new way. Then they will joyfully leap that fence, free of the corral and luxuriate in the green grasses.
ME: Ok, you have had your way for a long time. I tried it your way which is to persuade people’s minds to take the leap. I don’t think that is the way anymore. Remember what Jo Campbell said: if folks today had to choose between going to heaven and hearing a lecture about heaven, they choose the lecture!
TP: But I am trying to persuade them to leap out of their viewing chairs into life, with my rhetoric.
ME: How has it gone so far?
TP: O dear, maybe I have been trying to persuade myself all along.
ME: Well, don’t be hard on yourself. We all carry the burden of the scientific spirit which is skeptical of just about everything and finds its satisfaction in the skepticism. You had to find a way through that skepticism and persuasion has a place in that process. But, my friend, having persuaded yourself, there still is the question of the leap.
TP: I feel a bit lost. I have been turning toward that bitter wind as you know.
ME: So that was you in that dream, was it?
Silence
A poem recalls to me from my doctoral days:
Are you afraid of weakening my son?
Are you afraid of that sweet fire
From fixity to fluidity you go
Let it go! Let it go! Let it go!
Letting go!

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