ANTI-APOCALYPSE

In his famous poem, Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote that he was still waiting for someone to discover America:

“I am waiting for my case to come up

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

and I am waiting for someone

to really discover America.”

He wrote that in 1958. In 1976 Wavy Gravy nominated “Nobody” for president at the “Yippie National Convention” in Kansas City, outside the Republican National Convention. It was the second time “Nobody” appeared. The first time he showed up at a hippy rally in the Sixties. The Hog Farm actually nominated another candidate as well eigtht years prior – name “”Pigasus.” Pigasus could have been his running mate.

“Nobody” was brilliant. And he’s with us today. Nobody solves the problems of the poor. Nobody brings about racial justice. Nobody makes a fair distribution of income. Nobody keeps his promises. Nobody is making the world a safe place. Nobody is collecting the guns. Nobody is giving us affordable healthcare. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out. Nobody should have such power. Nobody cares. And Nobody is “perfect.” His record speaks for itself. He wins every election. – Wavy Gravy opened a store named “Nobody’s Business” – his campaign HQ.

Meanwhile, in the land of the free, 5 percent of the world’s population holds 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. The ironies only loom larger and larger. Ever since the end of World War II, the “winners” of that war have been on a trajectory towards losing everything. “Progress” has been defined one way but applied in an opposite direction. There’s something about the laws of balance that makes the victor his own enemy and executioner, which puts a whole new light on the meaning of “winning.” We win to reserve the right to lose. – This is Greek mythology.

Where does love reside? Between hatred and cruelty. Where does peace reside? Between war and tragedy. Where does sympathy reside? The famous answer: In the dictionary you’ll find it between “shit and syphilis.” A Manichean world will never be understood as long as humans reach for one and push away the other. We excavate our own abyss looking for hieroglyphics written in our own hand. The writing is on the wall before we ever get to it.

What we also seek is a kind of lingua ignota – an unknown language that will bring forth an answer to the conundrum of laws which seem backwards (what Alan Watts called “the law of reversed effort”). The digital universe is an unconscious (and clumsy) way of seeking it out. – the glyphs of one language trying to decipher the glyphs of another. Yet we seek a new symmetry, a new simplicity, in that odyssey. In my own view, there are only a handful of people on the planet who understand this mysterious equation/calculus. They see it from a wide paradigm. There are the shamans and gurus. Then there are the “Four Horsemen” of the “Counter-Apocalypse.”

What does that mean? And who are the “Horsemen?” If the original Apocalypse means an imminent cosmic cataclysm where God destroys the world and brings forth some kind of “kingdom,” the antithesis to that is not a denial of an apocalypse per se, but a total reinterpretation of one. One that takes us out of the theatrical and fictional and into the pragmatic, temporal, logical, practical, and “most likely.” The Horsemen most widely known for doing this were Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and (the now deceased) Christopher Hitchens. For them it wasn’t (isn’t) simply an atheist view of religion or a widely heliocentric grasp of the universe and our place in it, but a psychological understanding of human nature. In psychology, a synonym for counter-apocalypse is “counterpose” – “to place in opposition, contrast, or equilibrium.” It’s about seeing the whole gestalt – the organized whole seen as more than the sum of its parts.

The horseman sees that reaching for the cosmic and magical was wrongly interpreted. One finds it instead in the most ordinary and obvious reasoning – “the extraordinary ordinary.” No differently than how one finds nature in the purely abstract, or the colors of the prism inside a monochromatic white light. There is nothing magical about magic, and that is its magic. Hitchens said, “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.”

Sometimes strange bedfellows like Ferlinghetti and Wavy Gravy see the same problem. Ferlinghetti addressed it with deep solemnity, while Wavy Gravy (the world’s greatest “clown-jester”) addressed it with sardonic wit and irony. Two different responses from two different directions, but both pointing to the same paradox.

Talk of paradigms and paradoxes makes me think of the penultimate terrain for both – religion. Religion can’t exist without its demons and devils. Lucifer was God’s most beloved angel (luci– “light, fer-”bearer”). And it that context I’m drawn to the whole mystery of the Dark Madonna – the dark side of the Virgin Mary. She is where religion goes when the underside of the dominant patriarch demonizes her. She is Kali, Sibyl, Ananna, Ishtar, Annat, Lilith, Diana, Isis, and Mary all in one. She is also all the goddesses found in every other ancient tribal culture, both extant and extinct.

Imagine the wrath after two millennia of Christians shackling Mary to just one function – as a vessel of birth. Then she virtually disappears or is recast as a prostitute. Much later the “wise woman of the woods” is recast as a witch. Chants, dances, plants, stones, rituals, and talisman – all went underground. “Be wise as serpents,” said Jesus (Matthew 10:16). The axiomatic “backwards law” is having its revenge, and the Church is suffering for it.

The word occult means “secret.” In the most circuitous manner conceivable, this is the Phoenix surfacing out of everything masculine, positive, progressive, and “upwardly” mobile in today’s world and with its own message. It’s the great secret still trying to get out. And it boils just below the surface, not unlike a magnitude 5 super-volcano ready to erupt. Yellowstone-type fissures and steam are no longer holding it below ground.

Ferlinghetti is still “waiting” to discover an American way to lock into an understanding of natural rhythms and processes. From that, then to understand human nature, and from that democracy and justice. Until that happens, it will remain occult-ish. And as long as it stays there, it will ooze up through the ground like radon gas, undetectable and toxic. Ferlinghetti will not get his “rebirth of wonder.”

“Nobody” will continue winning elections. And systems designed to promote “progress” will keep resisting progress. We will still have not begun to grasp the meaning of gestalts and paradigms. In-sights will still be manhandled by out-sights, in-lines by outlines, backgrounds by foregrounds, underground by surface-politics.

“Nobody” has actually become flesh & blood. He’s omnipresent in every City Hall. He’s the phantom/faceless figure with a stentorian voice. And we’ve already voted for him. He is the default-president, the reluctant prophet appointed to lead the fallen out of Egypt. In an Orwellian sense, he will remain faceless as well. We don’t need a face, or a persona – just a voice coming from every direction. He’s alive and well through “everything” which is promising victory and delivering failure.

Think of dancing. We are constrained to a rigid “square-” dancing fitted to a mentality which depends on layers of denial, rejection, and rigid protocols. Pit that against round-dancing (like Flamenco) – derived from Iberian, Keltic, Gothic, Byzantine, Islamic, Syphartic, Christian, Phoenician, and Gypsy cultures. The metaphor-analogy fits. “There is no life in a box,” said Sitting Bull. Living lodges are round, like life itself. This is the real apocalypse that waits to erupt like a Vesuvius. But it’s not going to come from the sky or the distant hills. It will rise from buried tectonics, the super-substrata, of the human mind.

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