DIAMOND AND PEARLS

Stay tuned for a fresh middle-class remix of the old Sanskrit classic : Diamond Sutra, Jewel of Transcendental Wisdom. Thus named because diamonds cut through the illusion of life not being a party.

SOUND AND VISION

When I became a party, in late 2009, a series of synchronistic events happened in my life, running as a parallel commentary to the radical changes occurring in my mind. I was being flooded with images and emotions from what had once been my unconscious and was now just another part of the party known as Caroline Anderson. This came as an effervescent surprise to me. I hadn't been expecting to change so suddenly and was rapidly and instinctively researching wtf was going on, mostly via wikipedia, music and books full of solidarity that happened into my life at the time.

A few days after things started getting freaky a guy called Leon Salom called me asking if I wanted to make and select costumes for an ABC documentary called MIND based on Tom Cho's excellent collection of short stories, Look Who's Morphing.

Of course I jumped at the chance!

The book is comprised largely of fantasies he had while transitioning from being a woman into a man. He morphs with wanton abandon from one character to the next, often feeling misunderstood and lashing out dramatically. Secretly I was doing that too but with more blogging, drawing, dancing, rearranging, swimming and long walks to music than becoming a giant and destroying little cities.

In one of the fantasies he is a huge 80's cock-rock god with 50's hair smashing up Tokyo with his guitar (pictured above before destruction ensues) and in another he is mid-morph into Godzilla stamping all over his native suburb of Bulleen, and eventually vomiting blue. There was also a kinbaku (delicate form of Japanese bondage) expert on set for when tiny ladies tied him up. My friend Andy painted the clouds. The gaffer, Ed, had also worked on another totally freaky video I did costume for a few years earlier in Wellington.

If you live in Australia check it out on ABC1, Tuesday Feb 8th at 10pm.

Like Jung when he had his fantasies, the content of my mind got really ancient and really futuristic at the same time. I could see a lifelong-and-beyond party art project coming to fruition before my minds eye. The old thinking voice in my head shorted out and notions seemed to be bubbling up joyfully from an eternal fountain in the nucleus of my heart and pumping tingles all around my body. Ideas were bombarding me so thick and fast I became a bit of a raver for a while, not realising it takes more than a sentence or two to revolutionise.

I thought : OMG I CAN CHANGE THE WORLD RIGHT NOW WITH THIS NEW-FOUND INFO ! EVERYONE IS GOING TO LOVE THIS FEELING SO MUCH, I BETTER TELL THEM ABOUT IT QUICKLY !!

Then one day after being on set at MIND in Prahran I went to my friend Andrew Liversidge's masters show at VCA. He had recorded all the texts his girlfriend sent him while they were together and made a sculpture of a graph of the velocity of their relationship based on syllables per text throughout the duration of the relationship. He made it out of romance novels. I stood on my tip-toes, extended my arm and took a shot looking down from the top.

It gave me this sneaky message.

PROMISE

OK, this is the last time I get all Jungian on you, or let Jung do it instead. He's just so good at explaining things. Soon this blog will get really fun and Andersonian. The best attitude to adopt to get the most from this P*A*R*T*Y would be hardcore casual curiosity, which is generally the way I view everything in life, unless it bores me to tears. Then I cry about it.

I will try to explain the term "individuation" as simply as possible. By it I mean the psychological process that makes a human being an "individual" - a unique indivisible unit or "whole man." In the past, it has been generally assumed that consciousness - or the sum total of representations, ideas, emotions, perceptions, and other mental contents which the ego acknowledges - is equal to the psychological "whole" of an individual. But nowadays the rapidly increasing knowledge of phenomena that can be explained only on the hypothesis of unconscious mental processes has made us doubt whether the ego and its contents are really identical with the "whole". If unconscious processes exist at all, they must surely belong to the totality of the individual, even though they form no part of the conscious ego. If they were a part of the ego, they would be conscious, because anything directly connected with the ego is conscious; consciousness is by definition the relationship between the ego and the various mental contents. So-called unconscious phenomena are those that have no connection with the ego. For this reason the ego usually denies their existence, and yet they reveal themselves in an individuals behaviour. A careful observer can easily see evidence of them, although the individual himself is blissfully unaware of the fact that he is exhibiting his most secret thoughts, or even something he has never consciously thought.

C.G Jung in The Integration of the Personality

Becoming a party is exactly this. Integrating all your funny secrets into your accessible consciousness and partying on regardless.

RED BOOKS

Yesterday I checked out Jung's Red Book at the University Bookshop. The book where he drew and painted and documented all his initial dreams and fantasies which were the basis for his life's work. I quote so much Jung because in October 2009 I had the same sense. A volcano nestled deep in the middle of my charisma erupted an explosive cacophony of images and ideas with such party physical intensity that I had to drop out of the lifestyle I'd been living in order to let them crystallize and manifest in a reality that can be shared.

My first visual explosions came out in red books too, but are much less somber and classically mythological than Jung's. His predated some sizable wars you've probably heard of and featured more than one river of blood. Mine are less hellish and more tropical, sensual, sassy and filled with puzzling peace party possibilities. Not to mention scores of love connections.

Which can only mean one thing :
Collective consciousness is hotting up, and nuzzling down.

DOUBLE DREAM HANDS!

Crank it! Let's all get this down for later, when we're literally partying together, on location ! (Ideally this guy would be more to the right) (stage right).

STARTING FRESH

One fun way to start a new life is by getting up pretty early; stumbling across the much lauded Carl Sagan on one of your favourite websites, watch fondly as he marvels at his brazen sphere, have a little cup of coffee, go for a jog on the beach with your friend, then a swim in the salt water pool, pick up some hot new kicks from Para rubber, have a muffin and a warm apple juice and do some sanding.

VIRTUALLY REAL ACCLAIM

I am delighted to announce that last night between the hours of 10 and 11pm, New Zealand time, The Party Within had its first mention on a live radio stream, streaming from a Wellington radio station, into the internet and re-entering the cosmos through various computers and subsequently, ears.

Beaming to such diverse locations as LONDON, MELBOURNE, DUNEDIN, WELLINGTON, HELSINKI, that we KNOW OF. Revellers were tuned into the SAME FREQUENCY and chatting via their computers, including to the DJ (Droszkhi of FFM fame). Proving scientifically that physical distance does not stop us from partying together.

I never thought we would be kickin' the bridge into the stream so soon, so to speak. But then again, in the words of The Clean who I saw play sea-side in BARCELONA last Spring...

CAN'T STOP CHANNELLING JUNG

So I may as well quote some more of his words. The thing about radical discoveries is that there's usually heaps of other people who have discovered them before you and mentioned it in quite a few books or sung HEAPS of songs about it. It's hard to discover totally new shiz these days. But you can word it in a way that sounds more exciting or easier to fathom for the party generation.
If words are your thing.


What happens within oneself when one integrates previously unconscious contents with the consciousness can scarcely be described in words. It can only be experienced.

Whether a change has taken place as a result of integration, and what the nature of that change is remains a subjective conviction. To be sure, it is not a fact which can be scientifically verified and therefore finds no place in the official view of the world. Yet it nevertheless remains a fact which is in practise uncommonly important and fraught with consequences.

I have come to the conclusion that before we settle upon any theory in regard to the unconscious we require many, many more experiences of it.



Copied from Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G Jung, onto the back page of a pink book by me last year.

HILARIOUS BRIDGE

While I'm on the topic of Whanganui and zen. The Bridge to Nowhere is SO ZEN it's not funny. What's more I once bumped into Nigel from Head Like a Hole there. He was smoking a cigarette.

QUESTION ON EVERYONE'S LIPS

Which zen angel colony did you beam down from?

I asked my friend Dan that in a text the other day and he's sending me the answer in the mail. That's the thing about zen angels. We're in no great hurry.

Sometimes when Dan and I are texting we get mixed up with which one is me and which is him. He finds himself addressing the texts to himself and I divulge things I wouldn't really want Dan to know. This could be that we both have especially shiny mirror neurons.

In fact it was Dan who introduced me to Satori in 2008. Satori is an architect from Shikoku with a cafe in a caravan called Tanuke, Cosmic Country Cafe that just sells sourdough bread and chai. Satori also means 'flash of enlightenment' or 'understanding'.

A couple of weeks ago I bought Dan some sourdough starter from the Mayor of Whanganui with some other zen angels. She told us when you arrive in Whanganui the protocol is to splash your face with river water and meet the mayor.
















Whanganui River

Then we drove to Wellington in a white sports car where Dan was in a poncho cooking Mexican birthday soup and tortilla.

Dan is Totally Cool, which is the first and only step to becoming a Party Artist.

Plus he plays bass.

DEFINITIVELY SPEAKING

• party1 n. (pl. parties) 1 a social gathering of invited guests, typically involving eating, drinking and entertainment. 2 a formally constituted political group that contests elections and attempts to take part in government. 3 a group of people taking part in a particular activity or trip. 4 a person or group forming one side in an agreement or dispute. 5 informal a person, especially one with specified characteristics. v. (parties, partying, partied) informal enjoy oneself at a party or lively gathering. PHRASES be party (or a party) to be involved in. ORIGIN ME: from OFr. partie, based on L. partiri 'divide into parts'.
• party2 adj. Heraldry divided into parts of different tinctures. ORIGIN ME: from OFr. parti 'parted'.

• partygoer n. person attending a party.

• party line n. a policy, or the policies collectively, officially adopted by a political party. 2 a telephone line shared by two or more subscribers.

• party piece n. Brit a poem, song, or trick regularly performed by someone in order to entertain others.

• party pooper n. informal a person who casts gloom over social enjoyment.

• party popper n. a device which explosively ejects thin paper streamers when a string is pulled.

From the Concise Oxford English Dictionary

SPACE JUNGLE LUV

My sister Joanna is going to Africa next week. Here is an excerpt from Carl Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections from when he was in Africa that I copied into a pink book last year.

C.G Jung is one of the many radical dead guys on my team who reckon I should go for it. He left Freud for dust because Freud was getting too dogmatic on his ass. My coinage of the term becoming a party basically means what he means when he talks about the process of individuation, which involves doing a deep sea memory dredge and extracting the sweetest most glimmery joules for parties to come.
But will probably be more of a hit with the kids.


The sunrise in these latitudes was a phenomenon that overwhelmed me anew every day. The drama of it lay less in the splendor of the sun's shooting up over the horizon than in what happened afterward. I formed the habit of taking my camp stool and sitting under an umbrella acacia just before dawn. Before me, at the bottom of the little valley, lay a dark, almost black green strip of jungle, with the rim of the plateau on the opposite side of the valley towering above it. At first, the contrasts between light and dark would be extremely sharp. Then objects would assume contour and emerge into the light which seemed to fill the valley with a compact brightness. The horizon above became radiantly white. Gradually the swelling light seemed to penetrate into the very structure of objects, which became illuminated from within until at last they shone translucently, like bits of coloured glass. Everything turned to flaming crystal. The cry of the bell bird rang around the horizon. At such moments I felt as if I were inside a temple. It was the most sacred hour of the day. I drank in this glory with insatiable delight, or rather, in a timeless ecstasy....


More Jungian gems from Africa :


My psychic forces poured blissfully back to the primeval expanses....

The 'moment' in which light comes is God. That moment brings redemption, release....

The longing for light is the longing for consciousness....

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them....


If you are a fellow Jung lover I also recommend Man and His Symbols, the precursor to Babes and their Symbols which is still in the pipeline.




Thanks CJ, for keeping me n sync.

FLASHBACK TO BEING IN SPAIN

Here come some travel excerpts out of one of my blue journals of the less electric variety, May/June 2010...

MY FIRST DAY IN BARCELONA
(According to the dream I had on my first night in Barcelona.)
I left my Pension to explore, got on a bus which I thought would take me closer to the heart of things. Got around the corner and realised I was already in the heart of things. So I got off after talking to the lady driver. She was surprised I didn't mind paying for such a short trip. Said something about generosity and recommended some sights to see including a statue of two people 'fathoming each other'. Said that was particularly powerful.

I stopped in a cafe where my boyfriend was who I didn't recognise to tell him my plans. We kissed for quite a long time and he said he wanted to come and see the sculpture but he wasn't ready.

So I went back to my room to wait. I turned on the TV and Home and Away was on. Someone, a young man, was sneaking into a dark house at night, holding a package. Irene caught him and they obviously knew each other, he seemingly lived there too. He looked sweaty and uncomfortable and surreptitiously tossed the parcel out the window. A few moments later it exploded into a big puffy smoke cloud with pieces of paper spiralling to the ground. The dude was no longer inside, he was out amongst the smoke bomb.


MAGIC POWERS
You can't just tell people about your magic powers, you have to show them. It's only magic until they work out how you do it. I possess the ability to confuse and annoy. LUCKY ME!


HUMAN TOWERS
Yip, so I saw some humans constructing towers out of themselves in the village today. They wore white jeans and magenta shirts. I was wearing white shorts and a purple shirt with more of a blue hue than theirs. So they would've noticed if I snuck into the tower. Also there's like no other gingers around except for one I saw today with a full-blown freckle tan.

My heart pounded in solidarity as he walked past.


BANANA DRAWING
Maybe I'll go look at Joanna's blog. She just had another show and might have some new drawings on it. She would've drawn much more sophisticated bananas than me, given half the chance. I kind of want to turn it into night time behind the bananas. Will that ruin it? Touch and go really innit. I'll go and consult the internet and have a cup of thyme tea and see wha happens... You're right, that would've been a terrible idea. I'll just colour it in blue when I get my hands on a blue colouring utensil. Maybe I'll splash out and colour the bananas in yellow one day too. You only live once (that we know of)...


FIESTACIENCIA
It would help them CHILL THE FUCK OUT TO THE BADDEST and wouldn't that be nice.


NEW FRIEND
I told him how Mum had talked to a psychiatrist who thought I should take lithium and he said "What you need Caroline, is Jesus Christ. You and your family. Give him everything you've got, he'll sort things out."

He doesn't know past tense but like me is mad for the present and doesn't need it.

Then I showed him my house, we hugged and said goodbye until later when I would use the internet. I sent him a link to my blog and told him I had.

"What do you put on your blog?"
"You know..."
"Crazy, stupid stuff?"
"Yeah, insane nonsense."

I taught him some new words: 'letting', 'pleased', 'slept' and 'peek'. He had never listened to the word 'peek' in all his life.

He's writing a book too, on the same buzz as mine but in Spanish. He was saying how people have maps in their brains and need to lose the map. Look out for Bretana Decide Mirar by Matias Giminez [whoops, don't know how to do accents on this computer. Or the wave over the n.] That means Bretana Decides To Look.


FOUNTAIN
I gravitated back towards the epic fountainage in front of the museu d'art. If I had a travel partner it would probably be rude to listen to Ludacris at the fountain. This is muy muy bonito. I enjoy the proportion of white to another colour pants in Barcelona (it's high). I also like how many old dudes wear red pants and a pale pink shirt. That's a rockin look. I recommend fountains at dusk, it's 8:30.

Damn. Just got home to find out if you stay till dark time the fountains are accompanied by an epic light show and Ludwig's 5th. Damn! def have to return.

ZEN SCHOOL

This produces, in those in whom the intuition has begun to function, a "Zen sense" which will lead, as a candle in the darkness, to the feet of a Master who will guide the students energies into the cul-de-sac of the intellect and drive him up to the end. Whatever the poor monk does with his koan will be wrong. He will be abused, ignored, sneered at, struck, but he will never give up. If he does he will not reach satori ; if he fights till he drops he will, as he rolls on the floor, achieve it. Then, in the fierce intensity of the process of the mondo, his mind will be sharpened and sharpened until by a process of ultra rapid reasoning he transcends all reasoning, and the sparks begin to fly between the terminals. The bridge so laboriously built, no longer needed, is just kicked into the stream.

Then he jumps. ...




Christmas Humphries in Zen Buddhism

As you can see, it's not that different from normal school, or work or whatever. We are surrounded by Masters prepared to fulfill these functions all the time. To frustrate and bamboozle us into euphorically, metaphorically and pataphorically breaking free of the Prison Within, known as Rational Thinking, and turning it into a Party, like in that movie Cry Baby.

PUZZLE THY NEIGHBOUR

Zen does not attempt to be intelligible, that is, understood by the intellect. The method of zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust the intellect until it is realised that intellection is only thinking about; it will provoke, irritate and again exhaust the emotions until it is realised emotion is only feeling about, and then it contrives, when the disciple has been brought to an intellectual and emotional impasse, to bridge the gap between second hand, conceptual contact with reality, and first hand experience.


Alan Watson in The Spirit of Zen
Re-quoted by Christmas Humphries in Zen Buddhism
Thrice quoted by me on this Zen Party Blog


Party Artists Unite & Allude !!


Handy Hint : First clue lies just beyond this link.

ELIXIR OF ETERNAL PARTIES

Not sure if anyone noticed, but I blogged off for a while to do some distillation in my think tank. Lot's of funny things happen when you're brewing the essence of your own inner party in word form.


Distilling is beautiful. First of all, because it is a slow, philosophic and silent occupation, which keeps you busy but gives you time to think of other things, somewhat like riding a bike. Then, because it involves a metamorphosis from liquid to vapour (invisible), and from this once again to liquid; but in this double journey, up and down, purity is attained, an ambiguous and fascinating condition, which starts the chemistry and goes very far.


Primo Levi in The Periodic Table


Uh oh, I'm at McDonalds Cyber Cafe and someone to my left just vomited and my credit has nearly run out.


Talk soon!


xx