PARTICLE ON A WAVE

For my birthday last year my sister Joanna wrote me a rap and then rapped it into my voicemail in the morning. It said stuff like The way she behave, particle on a wave and She cries all the time but she doesn't mind. She wasn't wrong, although late last year I did hang my blanket of sadness on the line during a session of gong therapy, (which is another story altogether) and have been much more chipper since. Keanu said it best when discussing Point Break on Japanese TV :
you learn a lot about yourself when that water jacks up.



Funnily enough Jung also had something to say on the matter :

Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve riddles from which we suffer, but not those which please us.

To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths being is not an unconditional persistance but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earths greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island embedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.

As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world have brought you.

C.G Jung, 'One of the Lowly', LIBER SECUNDUS, from LIBER NOVUS or RED BOOK

FYI if you are in Wellington Sir Lloyd Geering who has a Doctor in Divinity is doing a series of talks entitled Jung and the Unconscious, at St Andrews church, for the next 3 Tuesdays.
Details here.

SO SECRET, SO EVERYWHERE

Sometimes I have been known to find myself on a buzz that no-one in my vicinity is on. This can be slightly awkward for human relations, but no matter what, there are always radical dead friends and live ones too who have been on that buzz and recorded it between some pages, in the form of sonic vibrations or papier mache and through their art, give solidarity to an indescribably visceral state.

Transcendental heavyweight Ralph Waldo Emerson can be relied upon to dip your situation in poetry. Here are some pearls from Nature.

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he has in literature, - in all fable as well as in all history. He finds that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and impossible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biography he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted down before he was born....

In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humoured inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.

CHAINZ

All the events in a man's life would accordingly stand in two fundamentally different kinds of connection: firstly, in the objective, causal connection of the natural process; secondly, in a subjective connection which exists only in relation to the individual who experiences it, and which is thus as subjective as his own dreams.
. . . . That both kinds of connection exist simultaneously, and the selfsame event, although a link in two totally different chains, nevertheless falls into place in both, so that the fate of one individual invariably fits the fate of the other, and each is the hero of his own drama while simultaneously figuring in a drama foreign to him - this is something that surpasses our powers of comprehension, and can only be conceived as possible by virtue of the most wonderful pre-established harmony.

From Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, C.G Jung

SPRING!!!!!!!!!!!

Whoops, here's some more :

Jung wrote that it was a difficult task to differentiate the personal and collective psyche. One of the factors one came up against was the persona - one's "mask" or "role." This represented the segment of the collective psyche that one mistakenly regarded as individual. When one analyzed this, the personality dissolved into the collective psyche, which resulted in the release of a stream of fantasies: "All the treasures of mythological thinking and feeling are unlocked." The difference between this state and insanity lay in the fact that it was intentional.

Two possibilities arose: one could attempt to regressively restore persona and return to the prior state, but it was impossible to get rid of the unconscious. Alternatively, one could accept the condition of godlikeness. However, there was a third way: the hermeneutic treatment of creative fantasies. This was the process of individuation.

From "A New Spring Life", RED BOOK or LIBER NOVUS, C.G Jung
Edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani

LIES

I know a little while ago I promised I would quit quoting Jung to you.
That was a lie ! We are so deeply on the same page I just can't let up. Here's some more.

THE BLOSS

Party Artists are renowned for their extraordinarily high albedo's. That's a word I learnt from the mustachioed charisma laden Sean O'Brien while looking at the moon late last year. It refers to the reflectivity of a surface and I use it simplistically and loosely because that's my style. We as Party Artists are a reflective bunch. Synchronistically we can see that the past is shaping the future and it is in our interests to contemplate what's happened thus far.

Sean O'Brien also goes by the name Joe Blossom and is releasing an album this Thursday. He used to play in The Losers with Lynton Denovan (Satanic Rockers) and Dan Lucka (FFM) who is my current roomie in a House On A Hill. Only for a few more weeks though,
due to the lamentable fact that :

Losers never congregate for long, it's one of the laws of nature - S. O'B























Dan Lucka, holding and reviewing:

Joe Blossom – Nocturnes

Couldn't wait to review this one folks. Joe Blossom has made a sophisticated leap since his inelegant days with The Losers. His new band of discerning musicians, summon a tender sway and sensitive boogie through their nocturnal pop and soaring sonics. Their debut album evokes the optimism of the night, its dance floors and love. You would have to be a loser to miss the album release of Wellington’s most dapper band from 8pm this Thursday at the SFBH.
- DAL

GENTLE AWAKENING

If you live in Wellington, please go to Dan Lucka's somnambulant art show at Photospace on Courtenay Place above the Sahara kebab shop...

If not, here is a poignant rendition of someone discovering their Party Within by Rilke :

It might be little more than a year ago, that something strange happened to him in the castle garden which sloped down fairly steeply to the sea. Walking up and down with a book, as was his wont, it occurred to him to lean against a forking of two branches, at about the level of his shoulder in a shrub-like tree, and immediately he felt himself so pleasantly supported in this attitude and given such ample rest, that he remained like this, without reading, completely absorbed into Nature, in a state of almost unconscious contemplation. Gradually his attention was awakened by a hitherto unknown sensation: it was as if almost imperceptible vibrations were passing from the interior of the tree into him; he explained this to himself without any difficulty by supposing that a wind, not otherwise noticeable and which was, perhaps, creeping over the slope close to the ground, was making itself felt in the wood, although he had to acknowledge that the trunk seemed too stout to be so markedly affected by such a slight movement of air. What interested him particularly was not, however, this idea or one of a similar kind, but he was more and more surprised, indeed impressed, by the effect produced in himself by what was passing over into him without ceasing: he felt he had never been filled with more delicate vibrations, his body was being treated in some sort like a soul, and made capable of receiving a degree of influence which could not really have been felt at all in the usual well-defined clarity of physical conditions. In addition to that, he could not, in the first moments, properly distinguish which sense it was by which he was receiving so delicate and pervading a communication; furthermore, the condition it was producing within him so perfect and persistent, different from all others, but so little to be represented by the heightening of anything he had ever experienced, that, for all its delicious quality, he could not think of calling it pleasure. All the same, endeavouring always to account for the least perceptible experiences, he insistently asked himself what was happening to him and almost immediately found an expression which satisfied him, as he said aloud to himself that he had reached the other side of Nature. As happens sometimes in a dream, the expression gave him pleasure, and he believed it to be almost completely apt. Everywhere and more and more regularly filled with this impulse which kept recurring at strangely regular intervals, his body became indescribably touching to him and of no other use than that he might be present in it, purely and cautiously, exactly like a ghost, already living elsewhere, that sadly enters what has already been gently laid aside, in order to belong once more, though even absentmindedly, to a world once felt so indispensible. Looking round him slowly, without otherwise altering his position, he recognized everything, remembered it, smiled at it as it were with distant affection, let it be, like something known long ago, that had once, in former circumstances, been connected with him. He looked at a passing bird, a shadow attracted his attention, even the path itself, the way it went on and passed out of sight, filled him with thoughtful insight, which seemed to him so much the purer in proportion as he knew himself to be independent of it.

From An Experience, SELECTED WORKS Volume 1 PROSE
by Rainer Maria Rilke