01 Everything At Once (and more)

New recording.  Vinyl should be done by springtime!  Stay tuned and dig us on Facebook!

New song….

Press play to hear a song from the new album:

01 Houses for Ghosts

hierophany music 2011

You are not the country I’d imagined
so I go out and split wood
instead of hairs
celebrate another point of view
in silence
the coming winter
the autumn finale
in the trees
fiery
holy!
the welcome ceremony
of Pale winter–
Back inside
I hear you two
in the little room
play school and talk.
I promise I won’t leave ashes in the fireplace;
it will be clean when the guests arrive.

How many faces
are there?
Only a couple
wander through time.
Only two
faces
in all –
that’s her
that’s him —
you’ve forgotten
the originals
lost in
all these
reproductions
for so long
the earth
has died
beneath your feet
in your hands
a few faded prints
prototherian
people
you used to know
people you used to be
and be no more
one life
that’s all
two faces
somehow
that
is all
remember
how we walked naked
through the mud
in the rain
holding hands.
you know I don’t
then I do
You know I’m me
then I’m you.

“For the last fifty years, the basic capital-formation device to create a shift to planetization has been war and terror. If you look at World War II, it seems like chaos. It is all about destruction on a global scale. That is the usual way we look at war. However, if you look at it from another point of view, a Gaian dynamic, war is a paradox. It expresses maximum planetary organization, but that structure is organized for ‘de-struction’. Yet the destruction never threatens the organization that is established for destruction. The whole thing is a planetary coordination in two oceans with massive movements of troops and people and information and machines at a level of organization that is staggering. But what is the basis of this order? Chaos. Destruction. That is a most peculiar paradox. Our whole post-industrial economy has been put in place by trying to terrorize populations to amass capital. Why are we trying to amass capital? What is it we are financing? We are financing the next stage in human cultural evolution . What is this human evolution going to be? Well, nobody knows for certain because it is an emergent property. It is like asking the prebiotic soup to predict the evolving membrane of the cell.” from William Irwin Thompson’s lecture The Big Picture and the Messianic Delusion published in Reimagination of the World Bear & Co 1991

If the above is true, what would the alternative be. Can we structure positive creation through planetary chaos birthed by a confounding of order– planetary de-coordination. If we suppose the basis of this new world’s order to be coordination of organization at a level of organization that is staggering– can we suppose the inverse be true: if the basis of our disorder be creation and order of an empathic civilization will the results be Order and Creation?

Part 1
Kleenix is the symbol of the common man– sterilized and disposable– in a city where everybody knows the time it takes to get from A to B. They wear hood over their heads to blow up their friends’ building from across powerline alleys. They are urban– they are the final permutation of urban– their hoods are kleenix hoods with eyes cut out: homemade ghosts. The city is absolutely New York, but the New York you’ve never seen and never will. The Empire State fortress of granite and chinese sumac, the tree of heaven, that grow from cracks in the sidewalk. This is the human race–weed trees that eek out existence from nothing, from zero-nourishment, impossibly, no soil, only the Light. We can’t tell who walks around; whether they are materialized holograms or flesh and blood. They monitor the living, the adaptable, that way– people have a habit of following the herd– but the herd is a hologram/hollow-gram– they remove them on their monitors and the living remain. He wakes down to this, as from an unremembered dream; a feeling there was something else once, something the unremembered dream contained in its vanished images. Something akin to waking from the dream of childhood to the hallway of middle-age, filled with foreboding and a desire to return to a place that may have never been.

Wakes to this and a job interview– how much time can you give The School, the Exemplar asks? We have dedicated our lives to re-nourishing the soil of humanity, the children. We are the biodynamic farmers of humanity; we hold the heirloom seeds of knowledge, but first must purify the soil, feed the back to the soil the life that was removed from it in the empty festival of materialism that has raged for centuries. It was all true, he thought, impressed by the dedication of the Exemplar. He pulled apart his Baroque Baritone Yamaha recorder fabricated in the last quarter of the 20th century and put it in its case, sure that he would not be hired, sure that he would be incapable of dedicating himself to their mission which was his, but only his dream, not his reality. He went out of their building, a place that may have been the cloisters once, a place he remembered from his school boy days, a place where the Unicorn tapestries were spread out, like the flayed flanks of esoterica, to the eyes of the final generation of the old-privilege, and into the strange streets of the present.

for Joan Vollmer

“There are no villains in the piece. Crime, like disease, is not interesting: it is something to be done away with by general consent, and that is all [there is] about it. It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us.” GBS

We cannot know her legendary head
or the petals of skull she gave
for his viral words
to earth that does not pity–

what smoke drifts from her mouth
imbued by distant inspirations
inhaled into the hungry lungs
of foetal beatitudes.

There are in the end no words
able to carry us far enough
from the tiny spaces we inhabit
but one– and William will
never tell.

My uncle, Prolemy Tompkins, author of The Divine Life of Animals, Paradise Fever, The Beaten Path, and This Tree Grows Out of Hell, recently turned me on to the works of Bulgarian Christian mystic teacher Master Peter Deunov, also known as Beinsa Douno, who worked from the late nineteenth to the heart of the twentieth century. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, said in a conversation with Boyan Boev (Munich, 1910): ‘The Slavonic people are destined to have a great mission. They, and particularly Bulgaria, will contribute a good deal to the elevation of humankind. Return to Bulgaria, there is a powerful spiritual movement in Bulgaria, headed by a great spiritual Initiate.’ After this conversation Boyan Boev became one of the closest disciples of Master Beinsa Douno. It is difficult to find Deunov’s work in english; and, according to Christophorus (keeper of the Beinsa Douno site), the texts and translations are often edited and corrupted.

In his lecture of Truth, Deunov speaks this wonderful passage which references Easter:

‘Christ says: “The truth shall make you free”. The truth is a necessity for the man and for the woman: the whole social system rests upon it. Everyone strives for freedom and is entitled to live freely; but this freedom will be given to one insofar as he one is able to make use of the gifts of the Truth. The sufferings of a nation are [just as] needed for the latter as they are for the separate individual. The torments and torturings are our inventions. Your husband receives a salary, say, 5 levs, which are barely enough to carry you through the month: “But Easter, you say, is coming; there is not enough for an Easter cake [1] – the sugar and the eggs are expensive, there is not enough for shoes, for a hat 50-70 levs are necessary, why shouldn’t we have 150-200 levs?” For there to be peace, leave the Easter cakes for next year -there is not only one Easter in this world. “No, now!” But the Lord has granted only 50 levs, be content with what is there already, do not spoil the Easter. The wife [2] in this respect should give freedom to her husband [2], and the husband – to the wife. Down with the Easter cakes! This is what freedom is, and also the truth. And this is why the Scriptures say: “Be grateful for everything”. Do not think that the Lord has not given you wealth; He has given it, you are all rich, but you have to search for it.’

inspiring Deunov prohecy

Baby Cheeses

“There was this guy who was able to do these amazing things,” I’m telling my daughter Olivia about Easter; “He could heal people who were sick, and do things like walk on water and turn water into wine. Miracles.” We are sitting on the floor by the dog’s water bowl and considering the different kinds of Easter eggs, plastic, real, etc, and what the whole Easter thing is about. “The thing is this guy was really plugged into the universe and he lived from his heart. He was kind. People started following him around; sometimes he would just need to be alone, so he’d go out to the desert and meditate.” Olivia is looking at me with her clear deep brown eyes and I hate to tell her what happens next. “So this guy really loved the people and wanted them to be able to love the world like he did. But he did some things that these mean people didn’t like;” I’m taking a deep breath, figuring out which words to use to lighten the blow, “They didn’t like what he did so they killed him.” She is heartbroken. “But you know what happened, Olivia? and this is how Easter fits into all this; “After he died his friends buried him in a cave and three days later he came back—“ Olivia’s eyes widen with relief and joy and she asks,

“As the Easter Bunny!?”

II

Filters

Sometimes we live on lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I was down there last year tending to some business and visiting with friends. They were telling me about the cyanobacteria bloom that had occurred in the warmer weather of the preceding of summer. The whole lake filled with a stinky sludge of toxic algae, born of excessive amounts of human waist dumped into the lake, mainly by the hotels and gringo homes that in the past fifteen years have bloomed on the lake’s shores. As my good friend put it, “We’re shitting in the well.” It is a powerful image; and one that is all too true. How is it that we have become so dissociated from our environment that we could do this? The detachment necessary for such self-destruction reminds me of drug addicts and alcoholics caught in the unpitying grip of spirits and chemicals too powerful for them to use. In a sense, we have aligned ourselves with technologies, foods, and conveniences, which necessarily enhance our stupor; for it is only in this somnambulance that we could proceed, only as sleepwalkers that we could so casually approach our collective demise. These things that make our lives so easy seem like alien beings that have possessed us in order to perpetuate themselves within our forms— body snatchers. The water had cooled enough for the algae to disappear; as I looked over the beautiful lake from the rocks of San Marcos la Laguna I thought about Xep’s comment. The lake is the well– a well that has been forced into being a filter.

In his book Food Is Your Best Medicine, Dr. Bieler, describes the process in which our bodies deal with toxins when the liver and kidneys are overwhelmed: other organs take over the job. Some forms of lung cancer can be attributed to the lungs trying to do the job of an overwhelmed liver. As he says in the book, “The lungs don’t make a very good liver.” One of the first things learned in ecology is that ecosystems, wetlands in particular, are organized in ways that help clean the rivers that feed them. When marshlands, or swamps, are removed so subdivisions or strip malls can be built, one often finds the rivers that used to feed them die. Silt builds up, silt that now has nowhere to go, that used to be deposited on the wide shallow swamp floor; the river becomes murky, fish become unable to see well enough to get their food or breath. Looked at this way, the natural world seems like a hierarchy of filter systems, a stack of reciprocally altruistic systems nested in one another; often the waste or by-product of one part nature is the nourishment of another. The mirror like symmetry emanates outwards and inwards at the same time, in an organic interactive network of great grace. So the lake is tries to deal with our presence and is overwhelmed by the task we have set upon her. And this is happening everywhere: we are asking too much of our mother. In the end, humans end up trying to do the job that the earth is made for and find that we don’t necessarily do the work of the earth as well as she does. Whether we change our ways or not is up to us.

There is another element to the filter metaphor, though it seems more literal than metaphorical. Suppose for a moment that we are spirit and that we incarnate here on earth repeatedly. Imagine this process of reincarnation as a time of purification for the spirit; that somehow our spirits are involved in a meta-evolutionary process of refinement. In a very real sense, our spirits are being pressed through these bodily lives, through this filter of materiality, like coffee through a French press; and each incarnation brings us closer to the pure Spirit we are. The earth must reflect in some way the fact that our collective spirits are asking much of our incarnations, that our material bodies must be helped in some way to deal with such an onslaught of karma. As people begin to become aware of the approaching massive change, a shift from one way of being to another, or one way of seeing to another, many worry that the end of the world is upon us. Belief that the 2012 prophesies of the Maya are true and that the world will end eight short months from now seems to grow stronger as people look around and survey the terrible landscape that surrounds us: dwindling resources, growing disease, ruined landscapes, overpopulation, hunger, war, and global warming— these are but a few of the issues on our plates– one might expect Jesus Christ to return on his horse and see the Revelations to the prophesied conclusion. As the author Richard Leviton wrote to me,

“Most of the fear is the edginess of people not understanding what the Earth is doing, or why, because our culture has so totally cut them off from any awareness of that, then all this compounded by fear pictures called Apocalypse and Mayan Calendar denouement. It’s all horseshit to make people con themselves into believing they are powerless. Rubbish. The Earth and everything it’s doing is interactive and negotiable. People just have to step up to the table. The awakened, or awakening part, is good, because actually apocalypse means the revelation of the divine revelation, the blueprint, the rationality of reality. The word does not mean have your ass kicked to Hell. It means seeing the world as it actually is, and that “actually is” part is geomantic, and geomantic is the map of your consciousness. Even the attribution to humans for global warming is a misperception, based on unawareness of the geomantic actuality. It is also very presumptuous. Global warming is a subset of a profound morphological change underway in the Earth’s Light grid, which has a geometric basis and is directed purposefully and intelligently. Humans did not create it. However, it offers the opportunity for humans to get into a dialogue with the Earth, with Gaia, rather than to be asleep takers. And it does require people to take responsibility to keep their geomantic terrains grounded”

In the end, the changes we face will be a spiritual shift more than a shift on the physical plane. The materialization of spirit is what we are faced with now. The Second Coming will be an elevation of human consciousness to Christ consciousness; humans will come to this consciousness from within themselves, unmediated by organized religions or middle-men, by will alone. As we enter the time of the Easter festival it will serve us to meditate on the mysterious event to which this festival owes its being. May we celebrate the coming of a new age on earth, an awakened age. After centuries of the enlightenment party, a new day is rising. In our collective hang-over, we shudder at the tasks at hand, and with trembling hands seek the hair of the dog that bit us; but we know that doesn’t work. We know also that hangovers don’t last forever, unless we keep drinking poisoned water; that hangovers pass and life goes on, one day at a time.