The fantasy I associate with the image above is that I’m the personification of a people. We looked at the world and drew conclusions about how it works. The conclusions that aligned with our desires were refined and codified, and a physical structure was erected, expressing our orthodoxy in columns, arches, and domes.
But one night I dreamt that a great dark horse with a white star on its brow was running wild in the orthodoxy structure. And when I awoke, I was in a vast meadow. Waist-high tawny grass and the boughs of distance trees swayed and churned. The breeze chill on my face was sweet autumn scents and the stench of rotting flesh from an open trench that ran zig-zig to the horizon. There was the buzz of flies and bees, the caw of crows, the laughter of children and the howling of beasts. Shadows of clouds moved hugely over me, alternately cast by swaths of great white formations in an azure sky, then walls of black thunderheads. Light and dark. Light and dark. The earth beneath my feet cried out and there was a sensation in my being like the opening of a door. A wave of unorthodox conclusions about how the world works poured in.
Queen of the Underworld
I’ve been enjoying the extremely satisfying experience of my insides and outsides collaborating on the same project.
As I’ve droned on about at length elsewhere, I’ve been courting my unconscious, and in that service I’ve been thinking of my unconscious as personified by Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and the goddess of springtime, vegetation, and the cycle of life and death. The image above is the latest product of that suit.
I’ve long held that key decisions I’ve made while developing visual images were largely directed by unconscious dynamics. That instinct has transitioned into what feels like a pleasurable mental sensation. As if Persephone is responding to my attentions with abundant, increasingly robust input while I work, proposing prospects that might logically seem far afield from the matter at hand, yet stimulate arrangements of pixels that when implemented seem wonderfully right to me. And there is a feeling of tremendous satisfaction in rendering them.
And then there’s what happens when I stand back and consider an image I’ve rendered. For example, an association I especially enjoy about the image above is that Wikipedia informs me Persephone is holding a sistrum – a ritual rattle. A very long time ago … perhaps in my twenties … I recall visualizing an anxious “primitive” standing close to a small campfire holding a rattle. The fire, the human figure and what he’s holding is all that is visible. The rest is black nothing. I recall thinking, “Reason is a rattle we shake against the darkness.”
I think that memory crosses my mind at this time because I sense myself more and more willfully attempting not to work from a linear thread of reasoned intentionality. Instead, trying to organize pixels in expressions of associations. Then wondering wide eyed what potential meanings the image might suggest.
For an account of an exchange with Google’s AI regarding statistically induced hallucinations related to my comment above about “reason”… click
Persephone
The image above is a dramatization of an experience I had recently on the platform in one of the MUNI underground railway stations in downtown San Francisco. I’ve gone melodramatic in this instance to suggest the impact the experience had upon me. The sense of seeing something highly unusual and hopefully conveying even a touch of numinosity.
In the actual experience a number of other people were present on the platform. For me the figure represented here popped out of the overall scene. The feeling was sort of, “Ah, there you are.”
As I’ve droned on at length elsewhere, I think that our minds organize information by associations. And when any particular cluster of associations achieves a high level of density a personality is spontaneously formed that might be thought of as an avatar for that info bundle.
For a little over a year, gifted with the time retirement allows me to spending doing any darn thing I wish, I’ve been experimenting with lingering on the edge of sleep. One of the outcomes has been that that edge has expanded into a zone where I now have the pleasure of lounging, sometimes for hours, treated to a pageant of images and adventures. The sensation is like visual listening.
Initially, how I entered the edge of consciousness zone seemed random, but eventually I realized that I could not think my way there. Rather, if I hold a particularly compelling visual image in my thoughts, the thoughts stop and I become a largely uncritical observer of visual images. I say images (plural) because as my thoughts retreat what I see is an ever-morphing spectacle … as soon as any particular visual image achieves definition it becomes something else. I theorize that at such times I’m cruising the maze of associations.
One of the many cockamamy theories I’ve come to hold in response to my understanding of my own experiences is that consciousness is the mind’s learned ability to moment-to-moment willfully ignore a tremendous swarm of info, while grasping particular bits of info of current interest which it organizes into a linguistic string.
To return to the figure on the MUNI platform, a couple of months ago I took it into my head to try to willfully cultivate a visually compelling avatar that might serve as a door through which I could consistently and quickly enter the edge of consciousness zone. I decided that I’d prefer the avatar was female and extremely physically powerful. I had imagined that if I mentally cultivated the characteristics I was looking for, the avatar would sooner or later present herself in the edge of sleep zone. But it appears I had that sort of inside out since I encountered an actual person on the MUNI platform that fit the visual bill to a T.
Of course, one might contend that I could only have such an encounter in actuality because the figure was already present in my unconscious. I mean, how can there be a projection without a source image?
In any event, regarding the actual person, though I would have loved to take her picture, I did not approach her or take her pic on the sly, which I felt would have been very bad form. I think in psychological jargon, I had come upon a stranger who could carry for me the projection of the avatar I had been mentally attempting to cultivate. And having had the good fortune to recognize that what I was experiencing probably had nothing to do with whoever that person actually is, I did not burden her with “my stuff.”
The actual person, by the way, was tall, raven haired, wearing a formal black gown with ruffly sleeves. Since the sighting was mid-afternoon on a weekday, it occurred to me that she might actually be a he. Her outfit was stately, but also over-the-top flamboyant. And she moved at a pace, and with enough of a swish, to suggest she might be strutting “her stuff” a bit.
Another of my cockamamy theories is that the unconscious revels in acceptance of conflicting info, perhaps even spontaneously generating within itself the opposite of everything it encounters. If so, that may foster something like psychic equilibrium and allow us to think creatively, presenting alternatives to actuality. Consequently, one of the things I think we are obliged to do when we create linguistic strings that allow us to communicate with each other is to decide which of the opposites we’ll go with. In other words, it seems just right to me that the projection of psychological material I experienced would have a pre-differentiation, androgenous aspect.
And regarding the method I employed while courting the avatar, one of the things I did was compose and contemplate the following haikus. Each is a free-standing vignette rather than episodes in a single story.
a few seem favored
she does not explain herself
prayers are pointless
night’s spectral pageant
hallowed undertow of sleep
rapture in repose
her wild black stallion
runs free in the temenos
white star on his brow
no rest for the king
she declares the rites corrupt
he wanders with shades
her legion ravens
pepper the citadel sky
nothing moves unseen
I am not her friend
nonetheless she speaks through me
words she bids me voice
Regarding the last haiku immediately above, it occurred to me to say that it should not be taken literally. But upon reflection I hesitate to make so definitive a statement. If she has indeed become an active agent residing largely in my unconscious, then how can I know with certainty what she is up to. I mean, “They don’t call it the unconscious for nothing.” Which then begs the question, have I been courting her, or her me? Or possibly both? Perhaps the last haiku above is her best understanding of our relationship, or at least her understanding at the time I penned the poem. Or perhaps it might be pertinent to suggest that she and I are aspects of a single process that is working on something, the goal of which is not fully known to either of us.
An afterthought (8/8/25): I previously had an odd experience in the MUNI underground that you might find amusing. Perhaps it’s time for me to read up on the psychological implications of associations related to subterranean spaces.
Another afterthought (8/16/25): Early yesterday morning, while in the edge of consciousness zone I was exploring the possibility of thinking of the avatar of the edge as a Cassandra figure. I feel lots of empathy for her … blessed with foresight and cursed to never be believed. But as I thought the name Cassandra, the name Persephone was returned. I’m sure I had encountered that name previously, but I could not remember her story. So, hours later, after breakfast, I googled Persephone and learned that in Greek mythology she is primarily known as the Goddess of the Underworld and Queen of the Dead. The Goddess of the Underworld image feels so right as a personalization for the avatar of the edge since, in psychological circles, Underworld is often thought of as a representation of the unconscious. Consequently, I’ve renamed this post “Persephone” (I had originally named it simply “Her”).
Yet another afterthought (9/16/25): This week I happened upon a wonderfully interesting video called The Hermetic Jung from which I learned that the edge of sleep zone I’ve been so enjoying has a name … or two names rather: hypnagogia when you’re nodding off, and hypnopompia when you’re waking up).
Facade and Reflection
The façade pictured in the image above belongs to the second and third floor of a building on Grant Avenue in San Francisco which I photographed in February 2003. That façade is NOT an element of the lovely Peabody Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, at which I had the pleasure of helping to stage a conference in the 1980s.
A fun attraction of the Peabody continues to be the twice-daily march of the Peabody Ducks to and from a fountain in the center of the hotel’s main lobby. Another fun but lesser-known uniqueness of the hotel is the “Lead Duck” pin. If you are wondering what a pin made of lead and shaped like a duck could be about you are already leaning in the direction I hope this post will take you.
The pin is given to key folks who are participating in the staging of an event at the hotel. It lets the hotel staff know that the wearer is to be accorded special assistance if requested because they are an event lead…er. Pleasantly aware that “lead” has at least two meanings, and potential humor can arise from a meaning switch, when the hotel’s delightful convention manager presented me with my pin she declared me a “Lead Duck” – pronounced “led” as in the heavy, bluish-gray, soft, ductile metal. I remain very amused.
I love words that can mean more than one thing. From words soulful like tear, to words colorful (another word that also has a couple of meanings) like booty. Which brings me to façade and reflection and the image above.
I think of my own experience of my own experience as a layer-like zone vacillating in a conical space between unconsciousness and consciousness. Imagine on the left side of the screen an immense globe of swirling unconscious material, each mote of which is related to every other mote by a gazillion associative connections. On the right side of that globe imagine a conical space…a transition area the base of which projects from and interacts with the swirling unconscious stuff. And emerging to the right from the apex of the cone is a line of thoughts, formed when the unconscious stuff moves and is processed through the cone into a linguistic-like conscious thread that allows me to purchase a jar of pickles, open it, and tell you about it.
Regarding that conical space, I think of myself as sort of a band or layer that moves back and forth between the unconscious base and the conscious apex. Often hovering nearer the base than the apex. Especially lately since I’ve been willfully courting a state that, with increasing frequency, allows what I see there to linger as images that can be recalled. Images from a depth within the cone that precedes the point where one or another related meaning gets designated as the next bead in the linier conscious thread – from a depth at which differentiation between things has not yet occurred.
Brittle Husks / Hollywood 1973
Imagine you and I are having a conversation and it occurs to you that what I’m saying does not seem entirely genuine. Perhaps you find yourself wondering, “What does he really think?” And if you asked, I’d probably try to come clean, but I think that even if I threw myself into the task with abandon and total sincerity whatever I said would be as vapor rising from a vast ocean swarming with life below the surface of consciousness. Strictly speaking, I think I’d only be able to say what I think I think. In other words, I think that much of what I’m thinking at any given time is a feeble work in progress emerging in response to immediate conscious circumstances profoundly influenced by a tumultuous underlying universe of unconscious material.
In the movies we often see a whiteboard to which photos of bad folks have been taped, and lines drawn on the board between the photos indicate who is related to who. And sometimes in the movies we also see a basement or attic or garage where a loner has covered the walls, and perhaps even the floor and ceiling, with photos, news clippings and scribbled notes, connected by a dense web of threads that tie together pieces of an improbable conspiracy. I think both the detective’s careful plotting and the loner’s largely incomprehensible web are different flavors of metaphor for the way the human mind connects mental material, only the web of interconnecting threads within any individual’s mind is millions of times denser, with literally every scrap of mental material connected through millions of hops to every other scrap.
I think a detective’s whiteboard is especially metaphoric of the mental activity of someone who has developed the ability to willfully ignore connections that don’t seem pertinent to whatever conscious task is at hand…especially tasks that involve teamwork and require agreement among the participants regarding the basic details of their shared perceived world and what’s to be accomplished and how.
And then there is the poor devil, often characterized as “a conspiracy nut”, whose ability to ignore mental connections is somewhat limited. For such folks, I think, no matter what is being considered, connections are included to various clusters of mental material that have acquired a sort of gravitational pull. And that pull grows stronger each time it is indulged, which is often. In extreme cases I think even when “a conspiracy nut” is discussing the price of tomatoes their words and actions are leavened with ideas about pyramidal structures on the surface of Mars or the suppression of reports of Big Foot sightings.
I will cop to a certain amount of conspiracy nuttiness since it seems to me my understanding of myself and my relations with everything I’m consciously aware of drifts on a sea of unconscious material, every iota of which is connected to every other iota. Most of the time, like a detective earnestly working a case with like-minded colleagues, I willfully ignore all but a relatively few connections. And those most frequently favored connections find expression in habits of behavior that others perceive as my personality. But at other times, like while working on the image above, I think webs of connections usually ignored find overt expression, in this case through arrangements of pixels that I was moved to set in place to a significant degree under the influence of lots of unconscious stuff.
Very Bad Judgement
On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It’s tempting to speculate about the motives of the justices who pushed that ruling through. But I focus here upon what I believe to be an overt circumvention of the fundamental function of law in America.
As reported by NPR:
Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe “must be overruled” because they were “egregiously wrong,” the arguments “exceptionally weak” and so “damaging” that they amounted to “an abuse of judicial authority.”
For Justice Alito to speak of “an abuse of judicial authority” is ironic at best because his participation in the overturning of Roe v. Wade places him radically at odds with the core function of the Constitution, which is, I believe, to guard against tyranny.
I think the American Revolution was necessary to bring to an end the lording of one group over another. And I think the Constitution is a remarkably lucid attempt to establish a foundation upon which a society can evolve that’s primary virtue is that it guards against one group bullying and otherwise tormenting another. (Racial injustice in America remains a monumental societal failing in this regard.)
Above all other considerations, I think the initial gating factor when determining whether something is constitutional must be does it open the door for one group to impose their will upon another, which overturning Roe v. Wade absolutely does. The license to commit acts of aggression against women which that overturning has set in motion is, to my way of thinking, a horrifying example of the general drift in all aspects of human interaction toward self-indulgent sadism.
Self-Indulgence and Sadism
WARNING: This post contains toxic material not suitable for parents of young children or others who may wish to remain optimistic about the future.
In the last chapter of his marvelous and frightening book “Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from within on Modern Democracy”, Tom Nichols observes:
But if we have learned anything in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, it is that people will think hard – or they will convince themselves that they have tried to do so – and still come up with incomprehensible and reckless anti-democratic conclusions … if the citizens of modern democracies were the kind of people willing to engage in the kind of honest reflection that leads to a commitment to political maturity, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.
My reading of Professor Nichols’s book suggests to me that he holds out hope that Americans and citizens in other democracies can still decide not to destroy themselves…that we can think our way off the road to ruin. I’m less optimistic.
The primary reason for my pessimism is that I think human consciousness, like the biological machine that carries it, continues to evolve. And that an ever-increasing number of human beings are now possessed of a form of consciousness that manifests itself in selfish and fundamentally sadistic behavior. In what follows I’ll refer to such folks as “self-indulgent sadists”.
I hypothesize that way back in time the fundamental human experience of itself was as a group, but since long before recorded history the trend in the evolution of human consciousness has been toward increased self-awareness, with the result that now LOTS of human beings experience themselves as entirely individual. These are the folks I think of as self-indulgent sadists because it is inevitable that someone who experiences everything only through the lens of their own feelings and ideas must live in a state of constant, crazy-making frustration. They can’t have everything they want. They are constantly confronted with ideas they don’t agree with. And a great many of their own ideas form around the day in, day out frustration of their desires.
People who are constantly frustrated, and self-indulgent sadists almost always are, seem to live in a state of perpetual anger. Since their exclusively individual experience is the only experience they know, they are unable to imagine that others’ self-experience is different. Consequently, they are certain that whether others admit it or not, everyone else is also deeply, perpetually frustrated and consumed with resentment. This assumption…this projection on others that they are all also perpetually frustrated and consumed with resentment…makes anyone who challenges them in any way “a lying, weaselly jerk who thinks he’s smarter than me, conspiring with other lying, weaselly jerks who think they are smarter than me, to try to keep me from having what I want. What I should have!”
Dickens and Talos
I would stand, book in hand, staring at the page, trying to get my eyes to stay on the first word of the sentence long enough for me to recognize it, at the same time filled with distress about the lengthening silence I was authoring. Finally, I would see the word and offer a tentatively suggestion. “The.” Then the struggle shifted to the second word in the sentence.
Lots of anxious ideas swirled in my head while I tried to get my eyes to hold still. Maybe the first word was a hint to the second. Everyone else can do this! There must be some trick that I just haven’t figured out. But what was that first word again? “The.” No help there. Could the second word be “cat.” Usually, about this time, the teacher would call upon the next student and I’d sit down, exhausted, wanting nothing so much as to curl up in a corner and sleep.
This went on until sixth grade (1962) at which point my parents and the administration of the Catholic school I attended agreed that I could not be given another pass. At a parent-teacher conference that took place at the front of an otherwise empty classroom while I sat within earshot at the back, it was decided that my willful refusal to study could not be tolerated further. It was time for me to flunk. I would have to take sixth grade again.
Antimony
Before social media, isolation was the heavy tax levied on the luxury of minority views. The daring might attempt to reach out to others of like mind, but it was often risky and the cost was sometimes dear.
Nonetheless, as now, advances in information technology offered options. Starting about 560 years ago enterprising and determined Europeans employed movable type and published under assumed names to hide in plain sight, where only those looking for their own reflection might find each other.
In 1685 a book called Currus Triumphalis Antimonii (The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony), ostensibly the work of a 15th-century Benedictine monk, was published in Amsterdam. A colorful excerpt from the book’s “Dedicatory Epistle” follows here.
ercury appeared to me in a dream, and brought me back from my devious courses to the one way. “Behold me clad not in the garb of the vulgar, but in the philosopher’s mantle!” so he said, and straightway began to leap along the road in headlong bounds. Then, when he was tired, he sat down, and, turning to me, who had followed him in the spirit, bade me mark that he no longer possessed that youthful vigour with which he would at the first have overcome every obstacle, if he had not been allowed a free course.
But there’s one thing…
And that one thing is perhaps a memory. Something seen or heard that all thought inevitably circles back to.
Sanctuary
In 1969, my last year in high school, I worked on the school newspaper. I had heard that the previous year’s class president – his name was Curtis as I recall – had sought sanctuary from the draft in a local Unitarian Church. I visited him and we talked for a while, then I wrote about him and the ideas he had shared with me in the following week’s edition of the paper. About a week later I heard that soldiers in uniform had gone into the church one night, beaten Curtis, and dragged him out onto the lawn where police were waiting and took him into custody. That was in Whittier, California. A sleepy college town where Nixon had spent much of his youth.
Late one Sunday night shortly after Curtis’s arrest I was working alone at school cranking out the Monday edition of the newspaper on the mimeograph machine. The paper’s staff moderator had given me keys so I could come and go at odd hours, and it was after 10. I was not expecting to bump into anyone, so I was startled to discover a guy named Don who I had known since first grade standing in the doorway in army dress uniform. Continue reading