Miracles Of Bach

I first listened to Bach's partita number 2 for solo violin about 35 years ago. I never heard it played like this, however.

Around the year 1720, God spoke to Johann Sebastian Bach, and out came the partitas. 277 years later, the God did the same again, with Hilary Hahn, and out came her playing of the music. That's how it seems to me, at least.

Visitors to Pale Green Vortex will know that the word 'God' is used carefully and sparingly around here. It is a word that comes fraught with difficulty, prejudice, and misunderstanding. When it does get used hereabouts, in a positive sense at least, it does so more as a manifestation of myth and archetype, of a mystical realm, maybe, outside any literalism or dogmatism. It is Source, the root of manifestation. Its use may or may not have much to do with the way it is commonly perceived within the mainstream monotheistic religions.

Yet God is the word most appropriate for what can manifest through this piece of music in the hands of the right violinist. Bach's composition is a miracle. and, to compound the miracle, it is played by Hilary Hahn, at the age of seventeen or eighteen. Did she know what she was doing? For what she was acting as divinely-inspired vessel?

"On a visceral level, it pierces my soul": thus goes one comment on YouTube. It is a clumsy mish-mash of ideas and images; nevertheless, it approximates to my own experience of listening to Hilary Hahn playing the Bach partitas. This music is typically stark, skeleton-like, even, in keeping with Bach's composing it for one Prince Leopold, who was a no-frills Lutheran. Hilary Hahn, however, imbues it with warmth, clothes it in flesh, a wonder which goes to enhance, rather than detract from, its spiritual power. This is a miracle which, I provocatively suggest, only a woman could achieve.

So we have the superficial, the herd, the thoughtless and soul-deprived, following the trends heedlessly; those who fail to give birth to hope, as related in my previous blog piece. And we have Hilary Hahn playing Bach. Far, it seems, one from the other.

At all times, maybe, this has been the pattern. A sea of floundering beings; and, scattered amongst them, individual sparks of real inspiration, of divinity. Flashes of grace, of wonder, of connection with Source; of devotion to the Good, the True, the Beautiful. At times these rare beings can manifest more-or-less publically; at other times they need to lay low, their deeper realities lived in secret, for fear of ridicule, persecution, torture, or worse. Or they may take on a disguise, living esoterically under cover of the exoteric. Whichever, my heart goes out to the beings who embody something of the divine spirit, the world soul, the daimon, the God, the goddesses and gods. I give mighty thanks.

Find Hilary Hahn playing Bach Partita no 2 on, surprise, surprise:  www.youtube.com


    

Five Hours in Barcelona

Part One

I recently had cause to visit the Mediterranean island of Ibiza for several days. The place seems to be a curious mixture of ancient history and mythology, the jet-set life, quiet beaches and tranquil forests, and party-party-party.

I wasn't there primarily for any of these, though, but to attend a wedding. Getting to Ibiza from the Highlands of Scotland is just a little more involved than two-hours on the Ryanair or EasyJet express that's the way from London. No, it's three hours by rail or road to Edinburgh, hotel overnight, before flights the following morning, change Madrid (way out) or Barcelona (return trip).

It was a four-hour stopover in Madrid, five in Barcelona; I can report that the airport in Barcelona is infinitely more pleasant for such a wait than is that of its central Spanish counterpart. Both provided ample opportunity for looking around, checking out what's going down, etc. Personal sensitivity dial adjusted accordingly, so as to prevent total exhaustion by the experience.

Airport waiting areas have little to commend them. They are, however, a great place to watch people, along with various aspects to those people's life. One glaring and discomforting observation was the complete disconnect between propaganda (what we are told life is) and reality (what people actually do). On the one hand, dire warnings about human-induced global warming continue to flood out of high-level summit meetings of extremely important people. Simultaneously, more and more of the affluent sections of western populations (I include here folk from India, China, and the rest, whose lifestyle and aspirations have been effectively westernised) gad around the planet like it's just a millpond. Folk use air travel the way that I use the local bus. The number of people who travel halfway round the world simply to do business at a meeting in Dubai or Singapore has skyrocketed over the past thirty years; I know quite a few people who conduct their life in this manner personally, a situation that would have been impossible until recently. Officially, this is all frazzling us to cinders, but nobody says a peep.

So, at the airport we can observe the total disconnect. I also observed something else, which for me was all the more wondrous. Everyone - or nearly everyone - is absorbed in their machines. Nobody stops, ponders, breathes in the life around them, absorbs in mystical quietude the deeper layers to what is going on. No. It's fast, sometimes frantic, head-down, and relentless. Info, info, info, the main medium for consumption. Substantial communication between individuals is out, soon to be rendered emotionally impossible. Facebook, What's App, Instagram, Twitter, whatever else people use these days. Selfies, photos of Fred at the pub, more photos of Millie the poodle, info about what Shirley had for lunch, what she's watching on tele, how long it took to get home from work. Selfies, more selfies, smile please. This would appear to be the substance of people's lives, the end product of this magnificent culture of ours.

In amongst this endless procession of modern life, its relentless march, the masses of people signed up to it without even realising they've taken out the subscription, something unexpected happened. I gave up hope. I finally gave up all hope for the mass of humanity. Or, rather, any vestiges of hope that I had been clinging onto finally drained away. I was a million miles from Neil Kramer and his optimism about the effects of growing consciousness among more people, and the great things about to happen. No. There really was no hope.

It's not that people are horrible. I am sure that many of those I witnessed at Barcelona airport are friendly, sympathetic, quite caring and warm. Interesting to speak to: more than me, no doubt. There was no sense of antipathy on my part. No. It was simply a question of people's ignorance, of wanton thoughtlessness, of signing up to a programme without realising, a programme that leads to greater superficiality, stupidity. A programme devised to contain, to keep the individual as a sub-individual, in a tiny crappy box within an enormous and magnificent universe. A programme that only leads further and ever further from deeper realities, from soul, from god. Absorption in the trivialities of daily life on Facebook takes us far from god, that is the inescapable essence of the matter. It leads far from the direct personal experience of awe in the presence of the sacred, the divine, call it what you will. It cannot be properly excused.....

Funnily enough, rather than experience panic, existential angst, or personal trauma, after the 'moment of no hope', I felt a sense of relief and relaxation come over me. Whether or not I personally felt hope would make not one iota of difference to the fates of the millions of people out there anyway. Life would unfold as appropriate whatever my feelings about it all. Further, I felt that, were everything to go up in flames, or whatever medium the angry gods might prefer, it wouldn't constitute such a disaster after all. For sure, I'd rather us all stick around and try to make a decent fist of things. But, in the cool clear light of day, the absence of people who have strayed so far from the path of divinity, who have betrayed, or at the least ignored or forgotten, the needs of their soul, would hardly count as tragic. The grand experiment wasn't turning out too well, so starting again from the beginning might not be such a terrible idea after all. And while that may sound harsh, it seems to come accompanied by the ring of truth.

What is hope anyway? Maybe it warrants a little monograph, under the umbrella of the Star card in the Tarot. It seems to be a particular response to our ability to envisage the future, in this case in a better form than is the present. As a survival mechanism, helping people to get out of bed in the morning, it serves a purpose. But beyond that? It could quite possibly be put into that bag of unnecessary attitudes and feelings to be thrown out in an act of psychic uncluttering. Whether or not I personally feel 'hope' probably makes little difference to what I do or don't do during the day. If something turns up that I sense requires me to jump up and down, to generally create a stink, I shall still do so.

Part Two

A recurrent theme on Pale Green Vortex has been the toxic nature of 'news'; at least 'news' as presented in the mainstream media, and indeed in good parts of the independent and alternative versions as well. It deceives, telling the unwary what to think and, as significantly, what is important in the first place.

I personally observe a conscious distance from these sources of falseness and negative programming. I will typically check one or two mainstream outlets daily, taking roughly three minutes of my time (I mean this literally). That is plenty to get a good idea of what topics are being pushed today; and, on the rare occasion when there is something to be followed up, I shall proceed to do so. The independent media I check less frequently, but will invariably spend a little longer perusing.

This strategy has enabled me to develop a far more objective view of what is going on. It's the same with many things: full immersion makes a wider perspective difficult, if not impossible (hence the need for couples to seek outside help with their relationship problems, even if they are both qualified therapists). As with the epiphany in Barcelona, I find an enormous disconnect to be in place. Check out the headlines. Daily, there are stories given great prominence on the themes of racism, sexism, gender inequalities and injustices, discrimination against transgender folk, people being nasty against people with black skins or of Muslim faith. You get the picture. These, we are being told, are the issues, the important stories, the 'news' for today.

This is the biggest bullshit you will encounter in your life. For the vast majority of folk, these are 'issues' which effect them not one bit ever, or only on a superficial level. For most people, this is not 'news' at all. Yet every day it is forced down the throats of the unwary, as being the big problem of the day. It is this incredible disconnect that leads to the inevitable conclusion that 'news' is not news at all. It is an agenda in operation, a programming, to beat down people's resistance, until they finally submit to a set of values, a way of thinking, which someone somewhere has deemed is what is good. In truth, like Facebook, it leads far from our authenticity, far from the divine. If 'evil' exists, it is this: whatever leads us far away from our sacredness. And race, sex, and gender issues as presented in the mainstream media do so because they seek to eliminate our sense of distinctness, of being a unique and different being.

On a metaphysical level, the recognition and valuing of distinctions, as in the union of opposites, appears to be an essential prerequisite to 'wholeness', entering into the divine, call it what you will. So by attempting to remove our sense of sex ie the masculine and feminine within life, this agenda is in effect setting out to bar our personal contact with the sacred. 'God becomes self aware through the experience of opposites.' So, if evil exists, then this is it - in my book, at least.

Part Three

All of which brings us neatly to 'The Secret Covenant of the Illuminati'. This is a text that turned up in relatively recent times; it sounds super scary, nefariously nasty. The one thing that's sure about the Secret Covenant of the Illuminati is that it isn't written by a member of the Illuminati. It is far more likely the creation of some bloke waiting for the delayed late night train to Bolton. Nevertheless, the document is a brilliant expression of what might be said by an Illuminatus, or chief archon, or whoever or whatever may be lurking in the shadows, should they wish to make their actions and motives known. The Secret Covenant points up succinctly many of the inconsistencies and incongruities surrounding events, ideas, 'news', all of which lead one inevitably to smelling a very stinky rat somewhere. It is a decent checklist of the horrors, incongruities, and vicious weirdness, that may lead any reasonably intelligent person to conclude that all is not as it is claimed to be.

The biggest giveaway, or deception if you prefer, is the point where the Illuminati claim that they are enlightened (that is, after all, the meaning of their name: illumination). Whatever they may be, the Illuminati ain't enlightened. The term 'enlightenment' is generally taken as referring to a state of non-duality, the implications of which include a certain connectedness and fellow-feeling for the rest of life. The mentality that spawns illuminati-hood, on the other hand, is sharply and exaggeratedly polarised - as starkly dual as you can get. It feeds on the lust for, and sadistic enjoyment of, domination and control over other beings. If you sense your one-ness, for want of a better term, with others and the rest of the world, that thirst for control just won't exist. It cannot do so. If they are anything, the Illuminati are likely to be sad, tormented beings who have access to other dimensional worlds in extremely darkly polarised form.

Should you wish to check out the secrets of the Illuminati's covenant - and it is worth five minutes of ones life to do so - they are not so secret after all. In fact, they can be easily found on YouTube.

Tarot and the Martin Luther Factor

The most popular Tarot deck by far, and the one which many people will associate exclusively with the word 'Tarot', is that variously known as the Rider-Waite or Waite-Smith deck. It is not, however, a Tarot that I much resonate with personally or feel the wish to use.

There are two main 'difficulties' which present themselves with the Waite-Smith. First up is the undoubted Christian influence on some of the imagery, and hence on the nuances of meaning associated with the cards. This influence is overt in some of the images: Judgement, for instance. The issue first came to light for me with regard to the Hierophant card (see my post 'Hierophantic Revisitings' dated 24/06/2016), but as time has passed I have come to see that Christian touch as all-pervasive. It acts like a wash over everything.

The second element -related to the Christianism - is the aesthetic. Some people seem to like them, but I find the figures stiff, lifeless and lacking in joy, cartoon-like (nothing wrong with cartoon, but quite bad cartoon at that). Little of the magnificence of archetypal manifestation jumps out at me from these cards.

The creator-in-chief of this deck was Arthur Waite, a Christian mystic with his roots in the Catholic tradition. The artist, Pamela Colman Smith, converted to Catholicism shortly after completing the Tarot deck. Yet, despite the Catholic leanings of its creators, the Waite-Smith Tarot oozes a Protestant aesthetic and Protestant ethic as I experience it. The figures are in the main gaunt, dour, static, weighed down with the seriousness of something or another. Delight in the sensuous aspect of life is notable through its absence. The figures are manifestations, if you like, of Logos; Eros, meanwhile, has gone missing.

It's a thing about Protestantism in general, its puritan strains in particular: its unease with, fear of, even, the image, the human form. It's an old story, harking back to the days of the Reformation and the destruction of images in churches. Plain, simple, austere, and with a total absence of sensuous response: these are the hallmarks of worship in such places, reflecting a flight from the flesh, from the body; from the Word made flesh, from the sacred expressed through the beauty of human form, through the realm of the senses. For all its faults, the Catholic side of Christianism has at least held onto this element, the sacred image.

These characteristics are amply reflected in the history of  the visual arts. On the whole, the Protestant countries have given us landscape art. Landscapes and still life - pots of flowers and dead lobsters in bowls. Think 'British art' and you think Constable, Turner: cornfields, haywains, sunrises and sunsets. The human form is painted by Gainsborough, but it is stiff, formal, as far from the sacred image as possible. And in more modern times there is Francis Bacon, testament to the inability to rise up in joy at the sight of archetypal beauty. More comfortable and at home with the ugly than with the beautiful. Contrast this with what's come from the Catholic-based nations, especially those south of the Alps: Titian, Veronese, Michelangelo, Caravaggio (OK, a dodgy character....). The gods speak through the splendour of lovingly-created human forms, the splendour of silks and satins, the radiance of youthful flesh - and sometimes the flesh of the ancient and decrepit.

Actually, I sometimes land too much at the feet of Christianism. It's a trend that started way before Jesus Christ turned up on the scene, and in which Christianity is merely one player. An essay by D.H.Lawrence, called 'Puritanism and the Arts', much of which I find to be excellent, covers some aspects of this theme. He writes of the growth of the 'spiritual-mental' consciousness at the expense of the instinctive-intuitive consciousness, a process which Lawrence articulates both clearly and with passion. It's worth quoting a little from this essay of his. "The dread of the instincts included the dread of intuitional awareness. 'Beauty is a snare' - 'Beauty is but skin-deep' - 'Handsome is as handsome does' - 'Looks don't count' - 'Don't judge by appearances' - if we only realised it, there are thousands of these vile proverbs which have been dinned into us for over two hundred years. They are all of them false." And "This is the real pivot of bourgeois consciousness in all countries: fear and hate of the instinctive, intuitional procreative body in man or woman. But of course this fear and hate had to take on a righteous appearance, so it became moral, said that the instincts, intuitions ..... were evil, and promised a reward for their suppression....." Lawrence doesn't say so, but maybe we're back with Luther: suppress, have faith, and your reward shall be in heaven.

What is true for visual art in general applies to Tarot in particular: Tarot is, put one way, an attempt to communicate the workings of consciousness and the universe through the medium of image. Dark, mysterious, lunar, sensuous, embodied, feminine: these are a few of the adjectives which come to mind if I consider what appeals to, and therefore works for, me in the realm of Tarot today. It is no accident that most of the Tarot decks which speak to me are creations of artists from non-Protestant cultures. Some of the 'dark' and 'gothic' decks I have discovered have a particular resonance. OK, they might be a bit obsessed with bats, dragons, and fairy-like half-human female creatures with long fingernails and streaks of blood across their forehead; I can live with that.

Best of all, in my view, are the Tarots by Luis Royo, in particular his 'Dark Tarot'. Read about this deck and words like 'primal', 'empowering', 'confronting', and 'darkly beautiful' turn up.

Royo hails from Spain, and his art work literally could not be created by anybody from north of the Alps (and Pyrenees). If Titian were alive today, he would paint like Royo, I imagine. He is a true artist, with a remarkable grasp of how to communicate through the medium of the human body, especially the female form. If you are averse to depictions of scantily-clad warrior nymphs who sometimes fail to tick any politically-correct boxes, stay away from the art and Tarot of Luis Royo. But while a few of his paintings and drawings come close to being mere pin-ups, many capture real mythical and archetypal themes. They are meditations on the relationship of basic dualities: sun and moon, beauty and ugliness, sweetness and terror, dark and light, feminine and masculine, beauty and beast. Royo is an alchemist for our age.

Some of Royo's cards are also, by the way, achingly beautiful, such as the magnificent 'Judgement' card accompanying this post. And, interestingly (to me), the Royo Dark Tarot seems to have more female than male enthusiasts, despite some of its images, which the tedious and deluded Protestant mindset will undoubtedly condemn as 'sexist'. Maybe some males are intimidated, I don't know.

That's it for now. There may be more on the dark tarots in future. Or maybe not. I'm not sure where I'm going at the moment, with this blog or anything else.... if anywhere at all. New voices wanting to be heard, but how......?

Images: The Judgement card.        Top: Waite-Smith Tarot
                                                    Centre: Gothic Tarot
                                                    Bottom: Royo Dark Tarot