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Thursday, July 18
Awake in a sleeping house. The humid dawn. Tangled sheets. The cats inside the house - a rarity - the raccoons fighting last night like trapped bears. The primal voice in their barking, the sense of immediacy and threat and violence erects the hair on the back of my neck. Last night when I came in from the studio I surprised a large male raccoon in the kitchen, his head in the cat food bin. An awkward ballet (I closed the door when I came in the house, trapping him - I had to walk past him without cornering him in order to open the door - he heads for the front stairs instead, and I withdraw to the kitchen so he can return through the living room unthreatened).
The poster in the bus shelter this morning: a young woman with lips like diner upholstery, plastic fuschia shot with metallic starbursts. Behind the cracked plexi of the frame, the effect is hightened, invoking ketchup bottles and dented napkin dispensers instead of the intended glamour.
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Reflection on Tuesday's Post: Magick, a Q & A
Q: You sound bitter.
A: Do I? I suppose when I said my initiations were "now laughable" that this was dismissive. The *process* of learning about Witchraft, my early discoveries, were authentic and moving religious experiences - powerful and transformative.
What I object to is much of the language. As a "Wiccan High Priest" this was supposed to make me (or anyone) equivalent to, say, a Catholic Priest - someone with a Degree in Divinity and Religious Studies aquired over years of academic study, a practicum in counselling psychology, and the discipline of isolation and reflection. I found such equivalence offensive.
After years in the "Wiccan Community" I found that there was, in fact, little if any community. The word and very idea of "Wicca" are modern fictions, and I began to wonder if there was anything to the "old religion" other than obesity, myopeia, food allergies, silver jewelry, political correctness, and Star Trek fandom. I came up empty.
Q: Are you a Witch?
A: Yes. Apparently I came that way. I'm a poet for the same reason. But I don't *call* myself a Witch, and that's significant.
Q: Is that your Religion?
A: Sorta. I'm a Gnostic, and Witchraft *as a process* is, to me, an expression
of gnosis. My idea/ideal of Witchcraft is similar to that of Jack
Parsons, who envisioned a PERSONAL Gnostic and Magickal religious aesthetic
based on poetry, psychodrama, theatre, myth, primitivism, technology, and psychoanalysis.
Q: You sound more like a TechnoPagan / Chaos Magician / Unitarian / Buddhist
A: Yeah, whatever. The psyche (and the soul) is a goopy place, and neo-Victorian bolt-on labels rarely hold up in the turbulence.
Q: Do you believe in God?
A: I believe in the growl and roar of the fighting raccoons. Primal, authentic, disintermediated, close, haunting, real and undeniable as a toothache.
This is from the Brasil Diaries:
It is a Religion without a priesthood, but rather a Knighthood. It must be quested for, and championed, fought and bled for. Its saints are Miller and Nin and Picasso, Rosetti, Byron, Joyce and Leary and all rebel angels. Surfers and street musicians, poets and magicians are its altar children.
This is a great and terrible secret.
Tuesday,
July 16
Qabala
The other weekend we went to a party up Indian Arm, which got me thinking about Lowry (he spent several years there in a shack he constructed himself) and also about his occult mentor Charles Stansfeld Jones ("Frater Achad") who lived for some time in a tent in North Vancouver with his wife and baby.
The story goes that Lowry had been reading some Theosophical and Alchemical works, and had run across the writings of Aleister Crowley. Within a period of a few weeks a knock came upon Lowry's door - it was Achad, Crowley's chief operative in North America, stating "I'm the teacher you've been looking for". Shortly thereafter, Lowry's house burned down.
I spent several years studying Crowley's work - both the inspired (The Book of the Law, The Soldier and the Hunchback, Magick in Theory and Practice) and the insipid (Liber LXV and practically every line of his godawful doggerel poetry) but it was Achad's work, particularly "Liber 31" (an analysis and decoding of The Book of the Law), the gorgeous "31 Hymns to the Star Goddess" and "A Master of the Temple" (his account of his Magickal training) that resonated. His Qabalistic texts have Crowley's clarity without his monumental ego getting in the way.
Some context: in the late eighties, having strongly identified with modern Witchcraft and recieving various and sundry levels of (now laughable) initiations, I joined the O.T.O. - a Masonic Order devoted to studying Crowley's works. (To be fair, it was founded in the 19th Century to bring Tantra to the West, but with a fair bit of self-important mumbo-jumbo thrown in). I did learn a goodly chunk from this experience, and served as a Deacon in the Gnostic Catholic Church that serves as a religious arm of the O.T.O. There was of course the usual personality clashes that characterize such things, but I ran a "Camp" of the Order for several years and got a lot out of it.
I was asked recently why I resigned from the O.T.O. (or at least *that* O.T.O. - there are others) and had to answer that it was really Achad and the influence of his writings and his path, with which I so closely identified. I undertook study of the A.'.A.'. material (under direction, which is the traditional way to do it) and found that the game I was playing with the O.T.O. (or at least *that* O.T.O.) was a distraction from what I was trying to get out of the whole thing in the first place.
So what was I up to, then? A childhood interest (and practice) of Zen meditation, and the usual smattering of pre-adolescent psychic experience left me, like many young people, with a sense of "more out there" and looking for a way to navigate these experiences. I was blessed with the absolute certainty of faeries in the garden. This has never left me.
It was the Raja Yoga discipline of the A.'.A.'. work that kept me from being "so open minded that my brains fell out". A good foundation in formal logic, and an awareness of the animal nature of logic - when it hunts and when it eats and when it sleeps. This didn't dampen my intuitive "Magickal reflex" as I'd feared, but it honed it, and taught me to concentrate. So Magick, for me, is the application of my religious sense as a Gnostic, a "proof of the pudding" of my relationship with a benign and loving Universe.
Despite my continued skepticism about Crowley, I still have a very significant relationship with The Book of the Law, and it's Magickal application, the New Aeon English Qabalah. After years of playing Gematria (an intellectual distraction, designed to occupy the Intellect while the Mind can chew on the big cookies) with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew - and results with which I could rarely identify, Jones' formula for an English Qabalah is quite compelling (to me, anyway).
Some curious examples: "Jetpack" (my design company with Z) enumerates to 396, the same number as "Pixel" (our Siamese) and "Anubis" (the Egyptian god of the dead of whom we have a statuette in the living room). "Azrael" (our black cat) is 378, the same number as "Witch". "Jordan Stratford" is 1098, as is "five pointed star" and I've worn a ring with this device on my right hand for close to 20 years. There are some fun ones - my street address is the same as both "Throne" and "Fellatio", for example.
Again, it's important to stress this is just an exercise - a "think about this" as meaningful or meaningless as a fortune cookie. But it *does* raise the idea that language and symbol are expressions of our imagination, as we are in turn expressions of the imagination of the Universe.
Thursday, July 4Monsoon
The boys, groggy from sleep and watching cartoons with the volume down. Raincoat, umbrella, briefcase, train fare. On the train, a man falls down as if seized - almost all riders feign indifference as a man with green hair and peircings offers assistance. I get off with the fallen at the next station, he tells me he just needs a drink.
Outside the station the rain dramatic, alive and roaring and undeniable. A waif, perhaps 18, a Taiwanese student, soaked. I offer her the shelter of my umbrella, and for four blocks I am a knight in shining armour. At Starbucks the barista has burned herself on the steam from the espresso machine.
Monday was Canada Day, and we took the boys to the waterfront to see the fireworks along with literally half a million Vancouverites. After the show, the throng heads to Skytrain. An impassable coral reef of people. We head first west, then south, against the flow, to the less dense streets above the mass. The bus home is packed and lurching and exhausted, but there is still that resonance of the mystical from the fireworks - we have gathered and oohed and ahhed and communed on spun sugar and cordite. The simple illogical splendour of the display has gelled us all together in a way quietly delightful.
Daddyhood
Me: What?
Liam: 90.
Me: That's right
Liam: That's impressive.
Real Friends (a and c) and an Imaginary Friend That Liam Gave Me (b):
a) Ninja Bob
b) Cowboy Jake
c) December Pussycat
Body Image:
These are frighteningly accurate models of me, courtesy of My Virtual Model. I added the tattoo. This guy looks a few years younger and a little more cut, but it really is eerily close.
Sunday, June 23
Cat Burglar:
6:45 AM Saturday, the klaxons sound full blast, the alert panel blinking that the motion detectors in the studio have been tripped. This is like waking up in a strange motel room and finding a semi-trailer parked on your bed, horn blasting away. It's rather disorienting. Naked, I run out, code the system, throw my bathrobe on, grab keys, and head to the studio.
There has indeed been an intruder. Came in through the open skylight, fallen through the vellum blinds that hung sail-like across the well, and landed on Z's desk. Pixel, the Siamese, looking nervous and apologetic.
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When I was quite young, the first real poets I read were the American Aesthetics. Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson. It suited my boyhood to be off in the woods in uninterrupted reflection (for my childhood "uninterrupted" meant "not getting beat up at school" - William Morris once confided that school "is difficult for sensitive boys who have feelings and imagination"). And later the brooding bad boy novelists, notably Fitzgerald and O'Hara.
But it was the women who saved me, who helped me find my voice as a writer. Elizabeth Smart. Anais Nin. While it was Miller's voice that pushed me to the brink of my own thriving experiences, secretly all was in hope that I would be so lost as to invite salvation by the "death girls" Sylvia Plath, or Beryl Markham.
I'm reading what purports to be a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, but in fact is a memoir by his (third?) wife Olgivanna. Her voice is discreet, sophisticated, but ripe - positive and flowing. She has a sensuous nobility in her writing that is extremely appealing, and yet her restraint often occludes her subject. Regardless, I find the whole thing entirely charming; her love for her late husband, her championship of art and community and expression. She's the kind of woman I fell in love with constantly at 14.
Moments when I have been paying attention
And the same sense of suddenness, of total, exhilarating awareness - unbidden: the green hill behind my house, the neighbour boy and I make a trap for leprechauns. It is a red lens from a flashlight, a stick, and a shoestring. We spend the morning making an apartment in a shoebox. We wait in the surprising March heat, making shapes in still clouds.
1985. October, Bavaria, driving. Jack o' Lanterns in night fields. There is the taste of pollen on my tongue, my hands smell of "Caleche" perfume.
1986. Midnight, Sunset Beach and the tiny blue-black crabs, I am walking along the sand. This: this out-of-the-starry-blue pressure from the crane's wing against my ear, the sound made not from sound but from compression, and this sound, like Basho's frog, bringing everything to life - the hungry boys in parked cars, the beachcombers and the crabber's nets and the stars over the barges. (It was then that I became aware of my ignorance, when I did not recognize this ability as precious.)
1991. Drunk, the night surf in Quintana Roo. Tequila in my blood and the phosphor of the waves, grasping at the stars and failing, falling into the shark-rich sea.
1999. When I met Z, our first summer as lovers, dizzy and drunken and unwelcome awareness, pushing aside all sleep and rest and trivia. The next spring-we-knew-as-fall in Lagoa on Santa Catarina, swimming naked under the Southern Cross and laughing like crazed saints...
This weekend we drove, the four of us, across the Second Narrows Bridge (Iron Workers' Memorial - once a utilitarian highway, now by proclamation a conspicuous, garish tombstone) to the forests of my adolescence. The sudden strange-familiar village intersection, the long fire road to my old house. I try to identify the door, the windows? That tree? but am slippery with uncertainty. Parking the car in the new June heat, we walk the gravel road ripe with paths.
A short descent to the river, and a picnic - the boys throw stones in the current. Here a heart-shaped rock, we place it in the basket to bring home. We are beaming, and smell of dust and spore and breathing fern. A pool of water like glass, set aside from the churning river and laughing I strip my clothes and wade to the top of my thighs in the frigid blast, splashing my arms and face. Liam, five and adventurous, joins me in the absurdity of our nakedness. Despite the sun, the water is far too cold for swimming, and we quickly dress in time for the steady succession of hikers-through.
Recent Guilty Pleasures: What is it about the guilty pleasure? Recently I watched "The Princess and the Warrior", a gorgeous, serious, Franka Potente film. I was quite moved by it, it's solemnity and quirkiness and tragedy and oddness. Another quirky little independent film, East is East, about a Pakistani immigrant family living in London in the 60's, made me feel better for having watched it. Like eating spinach or coming back from a long hike in the woods.
About a week later I saw "Psycho Beach Party" - and I enjoyed it tremendously. Cracked me up for hours. This is a tongue-in-cheek shlock / homage to Frankie and Annette Beach movies, and EdWoodian rubber monster flicks. Perfect for the lowbrow-inducing heat of summer, which as fallen on my skull like a lobotomizing cartoon anvil.
Anyway, I'm thinking about other guilty pleasures, such as
Miller and Nin night:
Our search for "quirky French bistro" took us to 37 places on West 4th, all of which sufferred from various sins; pricey menu, meaty menu, modern music, etc.
We ended up at "The Living Room", which was a weird step into my grandfather's world. Flocked Victorian wallpaper, 50's English Pub kitsch, hawaiian lamps, old 40's family
photographs in ridiculously gilt frames, polynesian kitsch, harlequin kitsch. Ridiculously overpriced, good food. Deeply weird.
The next day we were in "that neck of the woods" - mid main - and again tried to check out the Montmartre. Again, closed.
My consolation was, as ever, the company I keep. I told Z "I don't think you've ever looked more beautiful" and she said, deadpan, "That's not true".
The house ("The Architects' House", we sometimes call it, built by a husband-and-wife architect team five years ago for their family, and room for their practice in the studio in the garden) has an extremely sophisticated security system. By "sophisticated" here I mean "really, really loud".
The great stories of my childhood were uniquely English stories - Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, King Arthur, the Highwayman. This was the backdrop to a boy born seven? ten? thousand kilometres from Sherwood, from Camelot - brandishing a sword made from a broken picture frame in the faceless suburb of Delta, south of Vancouver. It was this mythos, this archetypal font that erupted and struck me at the age of five like lightning to the rod - standing in London in 1971 at the gates to some castle, lead soldier (a Beefeater) in hand. I remember thinking to myself: pay attention. Trying hard, harder, to etch this moment, this sense of physical *place* in its tangible immediacy, gulp it down and stitch it to my bones.
I actually enjoy highbrow content. I read Shakespeare and William Blake for fun. I go to the Art Gallery, I like classical music and opera. No kidding. I can talk about modern art without sounding like an idiot, I'm a vegetarian and love to cook. Real food. Wine, brie, salmon - last night I made a spinach salad with a thai peanut sauce for dressing. I like "cinema" and "foreign film" as opposed to "movies". All this stuff is supposed to be good for me, right?
Wednesday June 12
Inspired by the drop-dead gorgeous "Mon Amor, Mon Parapluie", I mapquested the film's cafe, donned my Henry Miller fedora and tie (tie!)
and headed out to the Cafe Montmartre on Main Street. Which was of course closed.