Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Hagalaz

Disruption
Elemental Power
HailChange, freedom, invention, and liberation are all attributes of this rune. Drawing it indicates a pressing need within to break free from constricting identification with material reality and to experience the world of archetypal mind.

The Rune of elemental disruption, of events that seem to be totally beyond your control, Hagalaz has only an upright position, and yet it always operates through reversal. When you draw this rune, expect disruption, for it is the Great Awakener, although the form the awakening takes may vary. Perhaps you will experience a gradual feeling of coming to your senses, as though you are emerging from s deep sleep. Then again, the onset of power may be such as to rip away the fabric of what you previously knew as your reality, your security, your understanding of yourself, your work, your relationships or beliefs.

Disruption takes many forms: a relationship fails, plans go awry, a source of supply dries up. But do not be dismayed. Whether you created the disruption, or whether it comes from an outside source, you are not without power in this situation. Your inner strength -- the will you have funded until now in your life -- provides support and guidance at a time when everything you've taken for granted is being challenged.

Another of the Cycle Runes, the term radical discontinuity best describes the action of Hagalaz at its most forceful. The more severe the disruption in your life, the more significant and timely the requirements for your growth. The universe and your own soul are demanding that you do, indeed, grow.

Monday, April 4, 2011

You Are Here: Personal Geographies

Nina KatchadourianAnnette MessagerFritz Kahn

Where am I?
Where will I go?
Where have I been?
Where shall I go?
What shall I pack for the trip?

“To each, her or his private meridians. To each, a unique projection.”
“It seems somehow easier to conjure up possibility out of a map than out of the sheer ether.”
“Out of one territory, one map, can bloom a thousand geographies.”

“The map is a powerful tool of what Tolkien calls 'sub-creation': the invention of a secondary world.”

“That was my first taste of orienteering – crashing through a landscape without paths, provisioned only with vague bearings and a distant destination. 'Orienteering' is such an odd but impressive word that it has always stuck with me, and in fact moves me to propose a related concept to describe a process somewhat like orienteering but more personal, more historical, more associative, more metaphorical, perhaps more spiritual: 'orientating,' or crashing through the larger landscapes of memory and experience and knowledge, trying to get a fix on where we are in a multitude of landscapes that together compose the grander scheme of things. Orientating begins with geography, but it reflects a need of the conscious, self-aware organism for a kind of transcendent orientation that asks not just where am I, but where do I fit into this landscape? Where have I been? Where shall I go, and what values shall I pack for the trip? What culture of knowledge allows me to know what I know, which is often another way of knowing where I am? And what pattern, what grid of wisdom, can impose on my accumulated, idiosyncratic geographies? The coordinates marking this territory are unique to each individual and lend themselves to a very private kind of cartography.”

“I have roamed across state lines and oceans and continents, backwards in time, each thought colored according to a personal legend corresponding to the elevation and depressions of my private humors: pride, wonder, sadness, remorse.
“Like memory, geography is associative. In this process I can orientating we all carry a personal atlas in our brains (which obliges this psychic gazetteering because it happens to be the most sophisticated, supple map-making device ever created). We flip through it with synaptic rapidity; we crash just so though a wilderness of neurons primed and aligned by experience, traveling a decade in an instant, traversing hemispheres in the span of a few axons, snagging now and then on the nettles of sad recollection, exhilarated by the sheer expanse of territory covered, surprised at how our brains can organize so much information along emotional latitudes, their very architecture a kind of microscopic merging of all the cartography we have acquired and stored. We are damned by the arrogance with which we ignore the immensity of the territories we presume to tame with our absurdly precise instruments of measure, and redeemed by a cunning, even courageous naïveté that persuades us to believe that they are approachable, knowable, chartable.”

“It is hard to look at a map without sensing, in our bones, private hopes and secret fears about change...I see: An erasure, perhaps, of the laid-down lines of the past. A willingness to draw new meridians. A reconfiguring of the private globe. A silent earthquake.”

“We have expanded notions of the chartable world, creating a holistic, multidimensional cartography. There are maps to anywhere: chromosomes, galaxies, the brain, the cell, the spaces between atoms, cracks in the double helix, the edge of time. If maps invite travel, these new maps inspire journeys of an altogether different, more associative sort. At the same time, they still connect to our traditional geographies and are potential destinations of the orientating process; the lend themselves to a form of bushwhacking that is more interior, philosophic, imaginative.”

“Another message, both surprising and exhilarating, is that no matter how distant or abstract the landscape, each has resonance for our more terrestrial, down-to-earth peregrinations. These disparate landscapes have nothing in common except the imaginer; as if I blaze paths between dimensions that exist nowhere but in my head.”

“We need some secure oasis of order, even if only a memory (or a fiction), as a home port for our various explorations, our attempts to make sense of the unknown. This is the place we call 'home,' which appears on page one of every private atlas. Home can literally be home, an abode, or our notion of family, or even a comfortable spot apart from our dwelling place, like work; whatever it is, home is where the lines are straight, the order clear, where even disorder seems predictable and the displacements tolerably temporary. And perhaps that is why when disorder invades the home – when illness, death, divorce, or any of a dozen domestic estrangements upsets the order – our metaphors for the ensuing emotional distress are so often geographical: we are lost, disoriented, have lost our bearings, we are at sea.”

“As we nose around these new-found territories, we may begin to create and ever more complex and useful geography of survival: atop our maps of land, sea, planet, chromosome, and cosmos, we superimpose maps of pain, of revelation, of joy, of disappointment. To each emotion, there is a pin on the map, the pattern of each accumulating and filling in until they have the appearance of growth rings.”

“The most important thing a map shows, if we pause to look at it long enough, if we travel upon it widely enough, if we think about it hard enough, is all the things we still do not know.”

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

"Let no one be deceived, no, thinking that what he awaits will last longer than what he has seen."

"She was lying with her back to the door, and she turned to look at me over her shoulder with a gesture so rapid it didn't give me time to escape. Oh, excuse me, I managed to say, my heart in my mouth. She smiled, turned toward me with the grace of a gazelle, and showed me her entire body. The whole room felt saturated with her intimacy. He nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's Olympia, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.
"I slammed the door shut, embarrassed by my blunder and determined to forget her. But [she] prevented that. She sent me messages with mutual friends, provocative notes, brutal threats, while she spread the rumor that we were mad with love for each other though we hadn't exchanged a word. She was impossible to resist. She had the eyes of a wildcat, a body as provocative with clothes as without, and luxurious hair of uproarious gold whose woman's smell made me weep with rage into my pillow. I knew it would never turn into love, but the satanic attraction she held for me was so fiery that I attempted to find relief with every green-eyed tart I came across. I never could put out the flame of my memory in the bed at Pradomar, and so I surrendered my weapons to her with a formal request for her hand..."

"A contrast that helped me find out which of the two worlds in reality was mine, and I hoped that both were, each in its proper time, because from either one I would watch the other moving away with the heartrending sighs of two ships passing at sea."

"A burning flash flamed across my face. Damn it, I thought, blushing is so disloyal."

"Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love."

"I floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was. My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love."

"On the night of her birthday I sang the entire song to Delgadina, and I kissed her all over her body until I was breathless: her spine, vertebra by vertebra, down to her languid buttocks, the side with the mole, the side of her inexhaustible heart. As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance. She responded with new vibrations along every inch of her skin, and on each one I found a distinctive heat, a unique taste, a different moan, and her entire body resonated inside with an arpeggio, and her nipples opened and flowered without being touched. I was beginning to fall asleep in the small hours when I heard something like the sound of multitudes in the sea and a panic in the trees that pierced my heart."

"...I was shaken for the first time and almost knocked to the ground by the roar of death. It was like a brutal oracle in my ear: No matter what you do, this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever."

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Friday, January 8, 2010

Friend Crush

This is the best way I can think of to express/confess my deep admiration for Julianna Vezzetti. Been friend crushing from afar for quite some time. Lets just hope this is flattering and not creepy. She pretty much rules.