AURORA RESURGENS

I'm tempted to advertise for Anthony Johnson's new book, AURORA RESURGENS, with these words: when in doubt, think hermetic – and thus remain in doubt. I've done this to an extent in my introduction to this book, and yet, I came out of it with a sense that when you deal with texts that fly, the certainty principle is the last thing you want to preoccupy yourself with. You go with the light. Especially the light that enlightens in obscure ways.

Read this book, which is a wonderful collection of three sets of texts, about Enochian Angels in the legend of The Shining Ones, an opera about Giordano Bruno's The Clavis Magna – and some domestic drama in which characters say to each other things like this: “love is leaving it be” – and poems, poems, poems, formed in diamond shapes, and resounding musical notes of the highest.

Read my intro here, for a preview.

Enjoy!



EYECORNER PRESS

ISBN: 978-8792633057

ZEN

Halfway through the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem my sister is having a moment of purification. As a chess player, I like to anticipate all sorts of scenarios when visiting such places, so I’m prepared when she asks me for a plastic bag. I give her one, I push her into a corner next to a video of dispossessed Jews, and then watch over her as she is puking her guts out. People react in different ways to such things. The spilling of the guts continues through various bathrooms, and then in fact all the way back to Tel Aviv. As plastic bags pass through our hands, all quietly and discretely with hardly anyone noticing anything, I start philosophizing. I tell my sister that although it’s impossible to understand what goes through people’s heads when they decide to dispossess others even of that which they don’t have, on another level, such cruel acts contribute to enhancing what Freud said, namely that “the goal of all life is death.” Generally, as we work contrary to this very fact, judging by the fervent ardor with which we attach ourselves to things, fellowmen, children, and animals, it makes one wonder what indeed we must all be possessed by when we fail to understand that what makes us content is not attachment but detachment. As my sister was preoccupied with the consequences of taking the whole world’s mistakes on her shoulders, I went for a swim in the Mediterranean sea for a splash of self-baptism: in went an Orthodox, and out popped a Zen Buddhist. Only in Israel. Shabbat shalom to ya’ll.

GRAVITY WAVE

At a concert with Emmylou Harris in Oslo tonight, I got struck again. Just before she walked on stage, I was thinking about a song of hers that I referred to in another post almost two years ago, after having listened to it cruising through the Norwegian mountains. I was trying to relive that moment when Emmylou walked on stage, strapped her guitar around her astonishing body, and started singing it. The song “Here I am” had suddenly acquired a double meaning. And by the time she got to the line, “I'm the promise never broken,” a river of tears came down my eyes and I experienced a lift off. I was riding what my friend and master, the sufi mystic and drum maker Norbert Eckermann, calls "a gravity wave." I felt rising above the cruelest month of April, which thus ended on a note of hope. Eight days ago, Norbert told me in a confident moment: “be a secret without religion.” I'm still thinking about it. In eight days I'll hit Jerusalem for a splash of sanctification, but I couldn't help musing that, for me, Norway is and will be the holiest of the holy. It opens my heart, and I forgive. Perhaps that's what being a secret means. Fred være med os.