who are you?

andrew lovatt, editor

sticking your nose in here. ok, led by a provocative title. fair enough. but this is not a place for the logical minded dry wit; nor clear explanation of pet dogmas. rather it is the hangout of people gone crazy on the fumes that rise from what others take to be 'ordinary reality'.

mad men like captain frank in philly, and kelley the soul doctor, peripatetic michael now in california ex-new york, the ghost of black jerome even! a sweeter expunction of soul was ever heard. and the ghostly eminent moment of rené daumal speaking from the future of his death and seeing the light. these are all illogical visions. yet how they all cut into the weave of life and point to some otherness beyond.

there isn't anyone here. you think there is. but we are not.

yet the first sign of madness is muliplicity, not duplicity which is the realm of logical cunning. a word derived from dog and dogged I'm sure; determined to grasp.

poets let go; and in that movement find more meaningful resonance than ever is found in having.

we have not. all there is to have is sand.

this the poets know. they have tasted the salt of desire and eaten the bread of experience - the only teacher. in a rite whose passage goes unwritten mostly, though mythologists come closest. poets are shamans; hairy irregular upsetting people. they have come to poetics because it is in them, part of the nature of letting go when bean-counting and rationing won't hold, won't offer up just one more dogma to explain itself. some are willing mad. some are risen or smitten so. inspired or touched. shattered, bruised and dented even. but never pristine whole.

the willingness to admit our madness is the first breath of sobriety.

it is that overhealthy wholism that burgeons gargantuan mind bending monotheism again, dressed in california sunshine and mantra foods, which is the post belief ordnung that the poetic spirit struggles against. the poets will venerate doubt, always.

so this is doubting thomas space, where the multiple voices of cracked open souls explore the words & images they are seeing from the inner space of their own experiencing.

in their workings we see the fragments of our scattered soul. it is in the color and the rhythm, the light and the dark, and the inbetween of actions - something is. what if we were to greet this great inevitable recurrent moment with our eyes open, our heads and hearts open too. will it kill us? likely. you never know. but then:

there isn't anyone here. you think there is. but we are not.

or, we might see through...

or, as this man says...

staying with love

james hillman

Let's stay with the love because it is so amazing to realize that love is working toward clarification, that's its intention, and all the ferment, all the seething, is its "increase", becoming clarified like a broth, like a butter, because what happens is transparency. And when we try to "clear things up", go over the past to see it better, or put ourselves through confessions -- all that is part of love becoming clarified. We are working at transparency. Impossible dark spots of the interior person get lit up, the shadow, the ugliest man, all the shames and embarassments regarding the concealed personal tied-up self -- well, there they are. "Good morning! How are you! Nice to see you!" They aren't gone away or healed or integrated. Those hysterias you mentioned, those delusions. There they are, but they have become transparent, for a moment at least, like rubies and emeralds. The leopard can't change his spots, but the spots can be gems. I am trying to say that your shadow is your virtue, and that is what love is mostly about. And that's what remains -- if anything has to remain -- after a person's dead. His faults, his unbearable qualities, or hers, become clarified, and you remember them as virtues. They stand out sharp and clear, like essences. It's amazing how the very thing you couldn't bear in your mother or father, in your wife or husband -- they die, and then rubies show right in the shadow....

[from James Hillman's Inter Views, 191-192 - also excerpted from A Blue Light. Check amazon.com for availability.]

for more by hillman, read The 3 Persons of Eros - click here

comments? thoughts? ideas?
email: editor@deaddrunkdublin.com