Configurations 2: Part 2

So for the sake of clarity, let us cut and paste our 3 bullet points from our last article:

1. The Aryan mentality of a "world-as-myth."
2. Myself as within the tradition of Western religious dissent.
3. My own cosmos and my own work on cosmology as a marginalized point of view.

So I don't want to wander too much in this piece, and cosmologies have a wonderful tendency to wander. It may be that we end up with a third piece to this article, but we'll begin with one of my tribes, New Age, and we can all only outwardly groan at the moniker but it is a fit. Gothic and New Age, and then we'll move on to some more ancient materials. We will see how far I want to go with this early this morning, but more is yet to come.

New Age

1. The Michael Teachings.
2. Spiritualism.
3. Post-modern literature. (I'm being mischievous, but there is a further reason for this point.)
4. The Toltec Way.
5. The Otherkin Movement.

The Michael Teachings were channeled materials from the late 70's, and they were the inspiration for Gary Gygax's original Dungeons and Dragons game. The Michael Teachings' basic concept was called, "the Overleaves System," and the basic idea was that each person had a vocation that was inborn, whether warrior, or sage, or priest or king and that the person would then choose an attractive vocation to complement their inborn vocation to work on throughout their lives.

I am sort of re-working the material, and I like the material a great deal. I guess it should be said that it isn't my intent to say that life is a D&D game where we have, "classes," but this is material that I is part of my own personal beliefs. My own choices for vocations are, "warrior and sage," and the choice of Gwydion as a name is because of the fact that in Celtic and Saxon myth, Gwydion was a, "skald," - a warrior and a poet. He was not so much a deity as a demi-god or a folk hero, and his character was that of a fool, a trickster, and a demon, which is a common convergence in old mythology.

In terms of spiritualism, I am a man who lives in a world of visions and spirits. I usually use names like Hades or An to represent a concept - Death, or Annihilation, respectively. However, there is also the side to myself that sees these concepts as a spirit, and not merely the representation of some complex concept.

In my own way of looking at it, the existent-universe begins as An - total annihilation - a being that is no-being. I usually refer to An as a feminine spirit, and also as "mother An," or "the mother of abysses," or "the mother of voids." Then, and this comes from the traditional Jewish Zohar - a rather unusual traditional Kabalistic text - El both creates creation, and El creates himself. El creates his own creation and himself in the "womb of An." El as a principle is the principle of, "creation."

I divide spirits into two basic triads, which are day, night and twilight - and masculine, feminine, and transgender. To me, both An, who is feminine, and El, who is masculine, have a special precedence, although I fit An into, "feminine and night," and El into, "masculine and day." I do very little in terms of invoking spirits anymore, though that was once a big part of my life. Now I just stick to my new-agey affirmations.

Still, to me An was first and is the true omnipotent, as even El cannot overcome her void in the act of his creating, and El is the lord of what he created - which is everything existent, including his own self as the principle of creation. It is not too different from mystical Judaism, although it is different. Further, no spirit is, "unclean," though this does not mean that any spirit cannot be destructive, even if it were categorized as a, "day spirit."

The post-modern literature part is that I have taken this personal reading of these myths and inter-textualized them. Most of my poetry is "new form,"-poetry at this point in my life, meaning that there are complex forms created for each piece individually, and from time to time I use old metrical and verse patterns, though usually with a very different take on the old forms.

I have a real love of the sestina, and many of my "new forms," contain odd-numbered stanza sets contrasted with your typical four-line stanzas. I have a real love of blank-verse as well, and my latest work contrasts rhymed-lines with blank-verse lines, and uses contrasting line-meters against the iambs to create a sense of enjambment without the look of an enjambment on the page. Also, many of my rhymed lines end with the same word, an, "exact rhyme," instead of a, "perfect rhyme," and this creates both a primitivist sense, and also a sense of a shifting repetition.

I also use consistent parallelisms and avoid language that refers only to modern things like cars - or what have you - in order to create a sense of primitivism in my work. Further, each of my completed works, or as complete as I get them, will have a carefully chosen pen-name and an invented back-story for the person who penned the volume. The author of these works will be a character of my own invention.

That is called - "meta-fiction," and I do enjoy the obfuscation, but part of it is to envision the work from a point of view just outside my own - or to the degree that I am able to accomplish such a shift of my point of view. Each of the characters has their own subject for their work, and each has a different writing style that fits the aesthetic of the work. I don't have multiple personalities, but it is an aesthetic I am choosing to use for every one of my completed works.

Even in my diary work I tell a tall-tale or two about my own biography. A wart of my own is that I do enjoy the obfuscation. However - it is my own diary - and I feel I have the right to tell myself tall-tales in my diary.

I will re-tell a very favorite story of mine, and then we'll have to just split configurations 2 into a third part. Picasso was in his 50's, and was noted as a historical visual artist. Picasso was not incredibly admirable as a man, but this story is just the right statement. So - a woman approached Picasso and asked him to do a sketch of her.

Picasso spent perhaps a minute and a half doing a fantastic art-rendering of the woman. Picasso turned to leave with the sketch, and the woman asked for the sketch. Picasso wanted around 2000 dollars in francs for the sketch. "But it only took you two minutes to draw it!" Picasso then replied sagely, "No my dear, this sketch took me a life-time to draw."

I do need a bit of a break, and then who knows what happens next? Back in a minute or so.