1.) Magma magma magma

Lava: Etymology
Italian lava, lava, originally, in Naples, a torrent of rain overflowing the streets, from Italian and Latin lavare, to wash. See lave
from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lava#English

Lava photos:
First, Second, Third, Forth, Fifth
Jesus fucking christ!

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2.) [Ken] Wilber purports that many claims about non-rational states make a mistake he calls the pre/trans fallacy. According to Wilber, the non-rational stages of consciousness (what Wilber calls "pre-rational" and "trans-rational" stages) can be easily confused with one another. One can reduce supposed "trans-rational" spiritual realization to pre-rational regression, or one can elevate pre-rational states to the trans-rational domain. For example, Wilber claims that Freud and Jung commit this fallacy. Freud considered mystical realizations to be regressions to infantile oceanic states. Wilber alleges that Freud thus commits a fallacy of reduction. Wilber thinks that Jung commits the converse form of the same mistake by considering pre-rational myths to reflect divine realizations.

Although an odd way to discuss it (pre-/trans-), I wonder about this in relation to Campbell.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre/trans_fallacy#The_pre.2Ftrans_fallacy

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3.) I had forgotten about this, the CoSM and MicroCoSM gallery in NYC: the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors: artwork by Alex Grey.

http://www.cosm.org

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4.) The Koryak of eastern Siberia have a story about the fly agaric (wapaq) [Amanita muscaria] which enabled Big Raven to carry a whale to its home. In the story, the deity Vahiyinin ("Existence") spat onto earth, and his spittle became the wapaq, and his saliva becomes the warts. After experiencing the power of the wapaq, Raven was so exhilarated that he told it to grow forever on earth so his children, the people, can learn from it.

The active ingredient is excreted in the urine of those consuming the mushrooms, and it has sometimes been the practice for a shaman to consume the mushrooms, and the rest of the tribe to drink his urine: the shaman, in effect, partially detoxifying the drug (the sweat- and twitch-causing muscarine is absent in the urine).

The British writer Robert Graves theorizes in a preface to his book, The Greek Myths, that the Dionysian rites were conducted under the influence of this mushroom. John Marco Allegro argues in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross that the Christian religion is derived from a sex and psychedelic mushroom cult, although his theory has found little support by scholars outside the field of ethnomycology. In Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy (formerly called Strange Fruit) Clark Heinrich interprets A. muscaria usage by Adam and Eve, Moses, Elijah and Elisha, Isiah, Ezekiel, Jonah, Jesus and his disciples, and John of Patmos. In the book Apples of Apollo the mushroom is identified in a wide range of mythological tales such as those involving Perseus, Prometheus, Heracles, Jason and the Argonauts, Jesus and the Holy Grail.
(This kind of stuff goes on and on!)

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Psychoactive_properties

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1.) "It's inevitable: the same gypsy voices that called you when you were a child, telling you to get on the bus, on the train, to move down the highway - Mahalia Jackson, Hank Williams, Ray Charles - hit the road, Jack! - thirty-five years later, these same voices now urge you to go back home. Don't lose the plot: remember why you came. The road, then, is a trap. You're always caught in the moment of primal love, half way to your destination, always half-way, never there, and no way back. This is the troubadour blues that only the road can teach. The road is inside of you. It's a wound that won't heal.

"And yet healing is what Van [Morrison] is all about. He works live, conjuring, incanting, calling down the blues, drawing up the heat from the moment. He's got the radio on and he's reaching into the invisible night, into the dark we all share. 'Play me the songs for the lonely ones,' he sings, 'play me something I know...' and anybody who has seen him work knows this is true: he's singing about his life. This is really the blues."

from Liner notes for Van Morrison's Down The Road, by Ben Sidran,
see below (duende),
Van Morrison as magician, conjuring, working away, slaving away in the factory of his stage, of his soul.

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1.) This is beautiful, really this is beautiful. Read this if you've found it amongst the loads of shit on this blog:

Duende is a difficult-to-define phrase used in the Spanish arts, including performing arts. From the original meaning (a fairy- or goblin-like creature in Spanish and Latin American mythology), the artistic and especially musical term was derived.

The meaning of duende as in tener duende (having duende) is a rarely-explained concept in Spanish art, particularly flamenco, having to do with emotion, expression and authenticity.

Federico Garcia Lorca on the duende: (1930)

"So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation."

"This ‘mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained’ is, in sum, the spirit of the earth, the same duende that scorched Nietzsche’s heart as he searched for its outer form on the Rialto Bridge and in Bizet’s music, without finding it---"

"All the arts are capable of duende, but where it naturally creates most space, as in music, dance and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpret them, since they have forms that are born and die, perpetually, and raise their contours above the precise present."

Jan Zwicky, a very special person: (2005)

"Music is new when it possesses duende. Black sounds, as Lorca called them. The dark counterpoise to Apollo's light. Music in which we hear death sing........ duende lives in blue notes, in the break in a singer's voice, in the scrape of rosined horsehair hitting sheepgut. We are more accustomed to its presence in jazz, and the blues, and it is typically a feature of music in performance, or music in which performance and composition are not separate acts. But, it is also audible in the work of classically oriented composers who are interested in the physical dimensions of sound, or in sound as a physical property of the world."

"Even if it is structurally amorphous, or naively traditional, music whose newness lies in its duende will arrest our attention because of its insistence in honouring the death required to make the song. We sense the gleam of the knife, we smell the blood... In reflecting on the key images of western music's two-part invention, the duende of the tortoise, and the radiance of Apollonian emotional geometry, we are reminded that originality is truly radical, that it comes from the root, from the mythic origins of the art (music)".

And finally Nick Cave: (1999)

"In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friend and Dirty 3 have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care."

"All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil - the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here - so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende_%28art%29

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1.) Well there's certainly something almost surreal about seeing a photo of Rio de Janeiro...those huge mountains, the beach, the skyscrapers...

See it here.

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from the crow to the raven,
the throat gargles with awe
from the raven to the crow,
caw, caw, caw!

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1.) Moche iconography features a figure scholars have nicknamed the 'Decapitator', frequently depicted as a spider, but also depicted as a winged creature or a sea monster, all three features symbolizing land, water and air. When the body is included, it is usually shown with one arm holding a knife and another holding a severed head by the hair. The 'Decapitator' is thought to have figured prominently in the beliefs surrounding the practice of sacrifice.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moche#Religion

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2.) brief note-taking:

The Maya civilization: Mexico area, c. 250-900 CE
The Aztec Empire: Mexico area, 14th-16th centuries
(Moche: Peru, 100-750 CE?)
The Inca Empire: Peru, 13th-16th centuries

(these dates are perhaps related to the peak of these cultures)

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1.) “Ancient Woodland” is a term used in the United Kingdom to refer specifically to woodland dating back to 1600 or before (in England and Wales), or 1750 (in Scotland). Before this, planting of new woodland was uncommon, so a wood present at these dates was likely to have developed naturally. By this definition Ancient Woodland may have had considerable artificial interference, the important characteristic being continuity of woodland on the land.

By contrast, in the US, “old growth” is often used to imply a forest has experienced little direct disruption during contemporary historical epochs and looks about as it would had Europeans not come to America. This criterion is difficult to apply, since it is often impossible to determine the history of human management (Euro-American or Native American). And, since landscapes are naturally dynamic, there can be no certainty what forests would look like now had pre-Columbian regimes been uninterrupted.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_growth_forest#Defining_.E2.80.9Cold_growth.E2.80.9D

see also: Locations of remaining intact forests

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2.) Click here to see a photo of the Joshua Tree, a yucca plant.
(Not to be confused with yuca, which is cassava, a plant with an edible root which resembles yam, which is used to make tapioca (cassava root, that is, not yam).)

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3.) Salvinorin A has no actions at the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, the principal molecular target responsible for the actions of ‘classic’ hallucinogens, such as mescaline and LSD.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum#Chemistry

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4.) It's interesting that it hasn't been made illegal...

In the United States, salvia is not regulated under the Controlled Substances Act but some states, including Delaware, Louisiana, Missouri and others, have passed their own laws. Several other states have proposed legislation against salvia, including Alabama, Alaska, California, Florida, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Many of these proposals have not made it into law, with motions having failed, stalled or otherwise died, for example at committee review stages.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum#Legal_status

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from the Moche of Peru (100-750 AD?),
as the below photographed item (from 100 AD,
connected somehow to cassava (see above))


see here for more (erotic sculptures) (I would recommend it!)
(I like the second from the bottom in the middle column.)

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1.) Humanure and composting toilets.
I'm reading a book about biomimicry and I got to wondering why we can't use human feces as fertilizer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet

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2.) I've also been reading Charles Bukowski. It's hard to pick one because this book kind of flows (the book is Slouching Toward Nirvana).


Joe

This is Joe
he said
remember him?
I'm sorry
I said
I don't.

well
when we came to your last party
you were
standing in front of the fireplace
naked
and you said
"wait a minute guys, I don't want you to see my
string."

I still don't remember Joe
I said.

Joe was also there
he said
when the 3 college professors came by and
you called them
3 walking sacks of
shit.

I don't remember the 3 professors
I said.

Joe
he said
was nervous because he was carrying a
needle and he didn't know the
people.

oh
I said
I see.

but Joe said he never had such a good time before.

well
I said
I see you guys brought something to
drink.

they put it
on the coffee table and I went into the
kitchen to get some
glasses. I opened the bottle and poured it
around. Benny sat on the
sofa and Joe pulled a chair
up
to the coffee table and lit a
cigarette. I noted
that he was fat, somewhat
kindly,
had on a gold wedding ring and new black
shoes. I'd probably remember him next time but
there was a good chance I
wouldn't. (with most guys if
they don't punch you in the mouth or try to
steal your woman
there isn't much to remember.)

well, Joe
I asked
how you doing?

I'm doing o.k.
he said.

how are the women treating you?
I asked.

I've got no
complaints
he said.

what are you doing for a
buck?
I asked.

oh, I got a few projects going
he said.

Joe lifted his drink and puffed on his
cigarette.

I lifted my drink and thought about
lighting a cigarette.

Benny lifted his drink
sipped
sat it down and lit a
cigarette.

well
Benny asked
how you doing?

my skin's too greasy
I have nightmares
and sometimes I think
that the substance is in the
terror.

Joe & Benny
amused
leaned forward

it was going to be a wonderful night
for me
that no Alka-Setzer would cure for
them.

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Winnipeg

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Sedlec, Czech Republic,
the so-called "chapel of bones" (see below!)

Sedlec Ossuary
image gallery
one of my favorites!
Jan Svankmajer short (apparently the song dubbed onto the short was put on by Czech communist censors: Svankmajer had a bland tourist guide voice instead, which was deemed to be subversive (fair enough))

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1.) The funny swagger of the law.

see http://www.duhaime.org/LegalResources/FamilyLaw/tabid/343/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/34/About-Marriage-in-Canada.aspx

eg: Marriages have to be consummated by sexual intercourse between the couple and are voidable if impotency is discovered. Impotency includes an aversion to sexual intercourse. However, a single act of consummation eliminates this possible ground for voiding a marriage (once consummated, always consummated).

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1.) I wish I could find more information about what percentage of our forests consist of which species of trees. Does anyone know where I would find this?
The pine beetle burrows into the trunk of the tree, effectively starving the tree to death. In BC, 50 per cent of the mature pine will be dead by 2008 and 80 per cent by 2013. Apparently, the warmer summers and winters are disrupting the normal cycle of pine beetles in this province.



from http://mpb.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/index_e.html
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_beetle

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2.) In the 1950s the Panama disease wiped out the Gros Michel strain of banana previously used for export. This was when the search began for a reliable banana and the Cavendish was spotted in Vietnam. It was believed that the Cavendish would be resistant to the Panama disease, however Sumatra and Malaysia suggest otherwise. Because cultivated bananas are spread by conventional vegetative reproduction rather than through sexual reproduction, the Cavendish plants are genetically identical and cannot evolve disease resistance.

(Another additional tidbit of information is that the Panama disease is also called Agent Green. The United States government was involved in a controversial program to use Fusarium oxysporum for the eradication of coca in Colombia and other Andean countries, but these plans were cancelled by president Bill Clinton who was concerned that the unilateral use of a biological agent would be perceived by the rest of the world as biological warfare.)

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_disease
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana

(Yes, I'm wondering about diversification and the fun that it invokes.)

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3.) What is a conjugal partner? Don't worry, we know!:

http://www.entercanada.ca/blog/2007/09/conjugal-partners.html

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1.) Penis envy as outlined briefly a few days ago below (January 4) is what seems to have been called by Carl Jung the Electra complex. Freud rejected this title because it "seeks to emphasize the analogy between the attitude of the two sexes." Jung proposed the title, deriving the name from the Greek myth of Electra, who wanted her brother to avenge the death of the siblings' father Agamemnon, by killing their mother, Clytemnestra.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_complex

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2.) Vagina dentata (the toothed vagina): Freud never mentions the term in any of his psychoanalytic work and it runs counter to his own ideas about castration. For Freud, the vagina signifies the fear of castration because the young (male) child assumes that women once had a penis that is now absent. The vagina, then, is the result of castration, not the cause of it.

Castration anxiety literally means the fear that one's penis will be chopped off, but more profoundly it may symbolize the child's fear that he will, like Oedipus (see Oedipus Complex) lose his power (and his love object as well - ie. his mother). Thus the boy harbours an unconscious wish to kill the father.

The vagina dentata appears in the myths of several cultures, most notably in several North American Indian tribes. Erich Neumann relays one such myth in which "A fish inhabits the vagina of the Terrible Mother; the hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman."

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castration_anxiety
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagina_dentata

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3.) What happens when vagina dentata is somewhat physically possible? See here for information on the RapeX, for example.

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4.) Oh Canada. There was some discussion of changing the name of Northwest Territories after the separation of Nunavut, possibly to a term from an Aboriginal language. One proposal was "Denendeh" ("our land" in Dene). The idea was advocated by former premier Stephen Kakfwi, among others. As well, a popular radio station began to promote changing the territory's name to "Bob".

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Territories#History

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5.) From my basic understanding, the Id is the basic human drives/instinctual impulses, the Ego is the mediator between Id and Super-Ego (the rider on the horse of the Id), and the Super-Ego is the internalized father figure/the Thou Shalt dragon Campbell speaks of/cultural norms/conscience. When the Super-Ego criticizes the Ego with such moves as guilt, anxiety, etc., the Ego responds with Defense Mechanisms, such as: denial, displacement, intellectualization, fantasy, compensation, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression and sublimation ... however, his [Sigmund Freud's] daughter Anna Freud clarified and identified the concepts of: undoing, suppression, dissociation, idealization, identification, introjection, inversion, somatization, splitting and substitution.

Something about this seems rooted in an odd kind of essentialism (I don't know if that's a word or the correct usage if it is). Like his theory proves itself. Or that it's an interesting myth, in Campbell's sense. Additionally I don't know the theories well enough to successfully make the claim that the super-ego is like the Thou Shalt dragon of Campbell (ie can you "slay" the super-ego?). etc. In short, as with everything I post on this website, some detritus from my day.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego%2C_super-ego%2C_and_id

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1.) I suppose I have what is known as Photic sneeze reflex, or: photic sneeze response, sun sneezing, photogenic sneezing, the photosternutatory reflex, being photo sensitive, or even whimsically ... ACHOO syndrome with its related backronym Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst syndrome.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex

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1.) Freudian penis envy theory.
And all of this is supposed to occur shortly after the girl is 5 years old...!?

* Soon after the libidinal shift to the penis, the child develops her first sexual impulses towards her mother.
* The girl realizes that she is physically not equipped to have a sexual relationship with her mother, as she has a clitoris, labia and vagina, rather than a penis.
* She desires a penis, and the power that it represents. This is described as penis envy. She sees the solution as obtaining her father’s penis.
* She develops a sexual desire for her father.
* The girl blames her mother for her apparent castration (what she sees as punishment by the mother for being attracted to the father) assisting a shift in the focus of her sexual impulses from her mother to her father.
* Sexual desire for her father leads to the desire to replace and eliminate her mother.
* The girl identifies with her mother so that she might learn to mimic her, and thus replace her.
* The child anticipates that both aforementioned desires will incur punishment (by the principle of lex talionis)
* The girl employs the defence mechanism of displacement to shift the object of her sexual desires from her father to men in general.

The offshoot of these events, often cited in the media and colloquially, is that a girl really wants to become her mother, so that she can control her father.

But doesn't she want to control her father so that she can have sex with her mother, who is now herself?

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_envy#Freudian_theory

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2.) It's good to laugh.

Juliet Mitchell—another Feminist theorist—attempted to reconcile Freud's thoughts on psychosexual development with Feminism and Marxism by declaring his theories to be simply observations of gender identity under capitalism.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_envy#Feminist_criticisms

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