More Kraken Musing

Continuing on Kraken, by China Miéville:

China Miéville imagines a wizard who, unable to defeat death, manages to cheat. Grisomentum burns himself on a funeral pyre, has his ashes gathered by a devotee, who then combined the ash with water and gum arabic. The devotee then picks up the ink of his master in a fountain pen, and writes out his thoughts, orders, commands... on paper. Grisomentum lives on in the ink, he has BECOME the ink.

It's important to look away from the page as the devotee scrawls his pen across the paper. It's curious because I have a friend who's father was a missionary, and he once asked his dad how he thought the bible was actually written, and this devout Southern Baptist pastor described a process we might easily call "automatic writing".

"In the beginning was the Word"

I'm enjoying the idea that Abraham/Jehovah was just such a magician. He attaches himself to any war-mongering race with "chosen people" aspirations in order to spread his holy book, the more copies, the more likely he would be to succeed. The Gideon's must be his most noble of knights, as well as the Jews and of course the Mohammedans, who forbid the destruction of the Koran as a mortal sin.

It would be clever to foster three religions that all include your basic book as holy writ, and yet all feel they are in direct competition. Sort of encourages printing. If God is a book, I wonder what it would take to remove Jehovah/Allah from the world? One hell of a bonfire...

Curiously, I accidentally drowned my Kraken library book this week, carrying it in my bag that was in the roof rack, driving through a pouring rain. Instead of a book burning, I had a book drowning.

This syncs with a number of strange submarine or subconscious syncs of the past week. As if there were a blurring between consciousness and the subconscious going on. For instance, I was creating an illustration of a yacht just before Thanksgiving, but for some reason I forgot to include the waterline stripe. This stripe symbolically divides the above from below, the light from the shadow. If the stripe is gone, then what is now separating these two worlds?

Exactly. The barrier is down. Make a run for it.

Some Like It Hot

I’m reading Kraken, by China Miéville. One of my favorite novels, I think. All about an occult London underground of wizard unions and scabs, witch gangs, squid worshipping fundamentalists, sync cops, angels of memory, familiars on strike, and an Architeuthis specimen that goes missing from the London Natural History Museum, which just might cause the End of the World - by fire.

One character is a powerful wizard named Grisamentum, and when I read that word I couldn’t help but think of Grissom - Gus Grissom - the astronaut who died by fire inside the Apollo 1 space capsule on 1/27/67, and fathered the NASA moon hoax meme.

“Every knacker in London did some work for him at some point or other. And it was you behind that spectacular send-off. The funeral. Great fire. The cremation.” ~Kraken

That Firebird

Grisamentum, having an incurable blood disease, arranged his own funeral, by fire. A professor of pyrotechnics, name of Cole, did the job. As it turns out, Cole was married to a Djinn, which in Kraken, is associated with the element of fire (and yes, it's a pun).

Which brings us to Larry Hagman, recently deceased. In fact, he died on November 23, the same day JFK died, after being shot in Dallas on the 22nd. “Who shot J.R.?” was the famous line from the Dallas TV series, starring Larry Hagman, or as I like to call him, the hanged man.

The thing about Larry is that he played astronaut Tony Nelson, who married a Djinn in I Dream of Jeannie. Fortunately, we never saw the offspring of such a marriage in the TV series, but it makes me wonder...

Magically Delicious

“This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Luke 22:19

I discovered a new vegetable today. It's a perfect fucking fractal.

Romanesco broccoli - Brassica oleracea - resembles a cauliflower, but the inflorescence (the bud) has an approximate self-similar character, with the branched meristems making a logarithmic spiral. In this sense the broccoli's shape approximates a natural fractal; each bud is composed of a series of smaller buds, all arranged in yet another logarithmic spiral. This self-similar pattern continues at several smaller levels.

Var said, "Brassica are like the Jesus veggie". Wait... what? What if the Eucharist is a vegetable?

Cruciferous vegetables are vegetables of the family Brassicaceae (also called Cruciferae). These vegetables are widely cultivated, with many genera, species, and cultivars being raised for food production such as cauliflower, cabbage, cress, bok choy, broccoli and similar green leaf vegetables. The family takes its alternate name (Cruciferae, New Latin for "cross-bearing") from the shape of their flowers, whose four petals resemble a cross.

I know that many say the Eucharist is a mushroom, and right said Fred, but I'm amazed by the geometry this little green vegetable is showing off. The most common member of the Brassica or Cruciferae family is broccoli, and if this humble vegetable family is indeed the Eucharist, it makes perfect sense that George H. W. Bush famously declared that he hated broccoli - Satan can't stand it.

This quite naturally leads to the James Bond film franchise, started by Albert "Cubby" Broccoli. But since I haven't seen the latest offering, I'll need to save all that for next week.

'Til then, eat your greens!

NOTE: This post is definitely inspired by "the bud" of a green recently made legal in my state. 

The Number of the Counting

As we all know, I have more than a passing interest in the trident, that triple-pronged, magical weapon of Shiva and Poseidon. And I wonder, why THREE prongs? They say three times the charm, and it made me think of the number 3 and time being somehow connected?

I see that we live in a 3D universe, the first dimension being a point, the second a plane, and the third a cubic volume. So it seems to me that Shiva's "weapon" is aimed at these three dimensions, or "citadels" as it were.

Antahkarana

The fourth dimension is time, and perhaps this element is represented by the shaft of the trident, wielded by "will" or intention.

In All Good Things, the final episode of STNG, Captain Jean Luc Picard is shifting back and forth in time between three time periods, and in each time he causes a tachyon beam to be emitted from the Enterprise, aimed at the same point in space. This causes an anomaly that destroys the world, but if you look at it from a magical perspective, this is exactly the magician's goal - to "destroy" his current world and "create" a new one.

So, I think about my intent, or will, or shaft, being aimed at the same point in space, at three different times. It's Saturnian judo.



The Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

...And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O LORD, bless this Thy hand grenade that with it Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits, in Thy mercy."
And the LORD did grin and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit bats and large chu... [At this point, the friar is urged by Brother Maynard to "skip a bit, brother"]...
And the LORD spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less.
Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three.
Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three.
Five is right out.
Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it."

Walking Around Jericho

I've lately taken to walking around my neighborhood once a day, a loop of two miles. I pass this sign on the way, noting the Joshua reference. I was reminded how Joshua and the Israelites walked around the walled city of Jericho.

I've looked at the Jericho myth before, see The Yellow Rose Again, where I examined the role of the virtuous whore, Rahab, but that was a long time ago. Now I'm examining all that walking around in circles. Why wasn't one time around enough? As we all know, Joshua and the Israelites, carrying the Ark of the Covenant and blowing their horns, marched around Jericho for seven days, and on the seventh, marched around an extra seven times. This gives us a 77, or "lightning bolt" of cosmic enlightenment, and so we can see the "walls of Jericho" as representing "The Tower" card.

The Tower is our subconscious belief system, our fundamental and 'inviolable' concepts about life, the universe, and everything. The subconscious, or dreaming mind, weaves these beliefs into the brick and mortar reality we experience as "the real world" and so if we can somehow change the programming of our subconscious, then we can change our reality. At least, in theory. It's a simple concept, but it requires blowing your own mind.

I am devising a work around, or a hack, if you will.

It involves a lot of repetitive walking in circles and trial and error, but lately it seems to be bearing some fruit. I judge my successes and failures by sync. As I experiment, cracks appear in the walls of my own space-time continuum - the visible fissures in my "real world".

My two feet will never get me to 88 mph, but Joshua tells me that I don't really need to. Just keep walking.