BIROCO.COM ~ A way to look at things

Book review

AUGUST 26, 2010

I've put up a review of Richard J Smith's Fathoming the Cosmos on the Yijing Dao site.

I recently read, while it was still sunny in the garden and not pouring down of rain constantly, Mahesh Bhatt's 'A Taste of Life' about the last days of U.G. Krishnamurti. Quite a moving book. Bhatt, a Bollywood mogul (he wrote Jism), followed U.G. for thirty years and can often be seen having shouting matches with him in some of the early videos when U.G. was still on top form, such as this one I linked to before: This is a Dog Barking. Here's a video of Bhatt reading from the book. There's a number of videos on YouTube of U.G. in his dying days, saying he will just 'rot like a garden slug', and Bhatt can be seen scribbling the diary that his book is formed from in some of them. To the end U.G. told his followers that he was not an enlightened man and they were damned fools for following him. But of course that was never the point, it was just hanging out with a charismatic guy who saw through it all and so realised the rest were spouting bollocks. Recommended read for those who are interested in U.G.

Sunday, but a typical day for me

JUNE 14, 2010

I woke up at 4:14pm, cursed that I'd left it so late to rouse myself from a dream or dreams of some woman and then some other woman. The sunlight was already working its way around the side of the house and lighting up the closed curtains, like a great lolloping friendly creature wanting me to come and play with it. Having no idea what time it was, no clock or watch in the bedroom, hearing chopping on a chopping board in an upstairs kitchen, I estimated I'd still have some good hours sitting in the garden reading and drinking tea. But I did not think it was already past four, I thought possibly it was three. But it didn't matter. Washing, habitual thoughts made their accustomed entreaty, persuading me or wishing to persuade me, that this shall not be a good day, for surely this is just another day with the same old longings. But these days I have little more to do than raise a surprised eyebrow in the face of such thoughts, that they should still try it on with me, and off they scuttle and run like a timid stranger cat caught exploring the house through the open back door.

Tea in the pot, washed and dressed, cushion on the garden chair and a quick approving look at percentage of cloud to open sky, before pouring. Birdseed feeder down two inches, a greater spotted woodpecker in the sycamore, pale yellow foxglove producing a fine spire of flowers. I am that. And so to work, what I call my work, sitting there till nightfall reading, with about ten pots of tea and a break to fry up tofu, broccoli, garlic, cold rice and peas with pepper sauce, invented on the spur from what was there, not been out to the shops for days. As twilight darkens, I turn on the bathroom light to illuminate my chair a little more, before deciding to bake a loaf, and I shall make it an onion, sage from the garden, and caraway seed loaf. And this, more or less, is a typical day for me, before the night inside calls to me with a tinge of interest, mostly just sitting and letting time pass, peacefully, every so often merging into the unchanging, eternal, but otherwise featureless self, before renewing a past enthusiasm for prose poetry, taking down Lu Xun's Wild Grass and reading a few, a thought to paint, and then a thought not to paint. And the loaf is out of the oven and smells gorgeous and looks gorgeous, and still there are hours yet before the dawn with no people and the night with no people roll up the scroll of my today and I retire once more and the dirty paws of next door's cat bound onto the bed from the open window and curl up with me there, no alarm set and no plans for tomorrow.

Dragon and tiger

JUNE 8, 2010

I've put up an article I had in the last issue of 'Kindred Spirit' magazine: The Power of the Dragon's Yang and the Tiger's Yin.

I haven't written a great deal lately, mostly sitting in the garden reading, growing tomatoes, and watching the birds and cats. A period of retreat and great lack of money (that helps retreat).

I came across a very interesting 6-part video of my old friend Hakim Bey talking about Communities of Resistance.

You might also find this UG video amusing: This is a Dog Barking. What a great guru: 'Instead of throwing that shit down, it is coming out of your mouth … You are not even listening to me, only shitting.' Also Part 2 and Part 3. I do like UG.

My apologies to those who check out this journal far more regularly than I write it. I spend more time crossing words out than writing them at present. But it's okay, I have understood something. No words for it. Later maybe. I have rhubarb to stew.

Never ignore the butterflies

APRIL 5, 2010

Today a person came via Google to this page from Guatemala City on the following search:

remember this: what's meant to be will always find a way no matter what. time tells all. act on good impulses. follow your heart. don't quit. never ignore the butterflies and live with no regrets.

Much like a butterfly, they didn't stay very long, but it was quite a colourful fluttering in. I would only add to this advice by saying: Everything is meant to be, otherwise it wouldn't be. Time only tells fibs. You can't help acting on any impulse good or bad and you can't even know whether it's good or bad until it's done and even then you may change your mind later when you see what comes from it. You cannot help but follow your heart but in the meantime it's better to follow your shoes and try not to get shit on em than dawdle wanting to know what your heart wants, you may as well wonder what your nose wants, since what you want and what happens ain't necessarily the same thing so generally it's best to want what happens it cuts out the middleman. Quitting is freeing up time for something more productive and what makes you think it's down to you anyway, as a kid I read on the back of a matchbox 'A quitter never wins and a winner never quits' those were the days when they had little mottoes like that on the back of Bryant & May's England's Glory matches and I adopted it as my own even writing it in a school essay god sometimes I wished I could have quit fucked the whole thing up the arse dumped it and fucked off but oh no I wasn't a quitter was I I was a winner wasn't I I had to see it through generally speaking my perseverance has been inability to quit so actually the advice to never quit is bollocks because if I could have quit I would have done but, and this is probably my good fortune, I wasn't able to I was genetically wired never to quit to go on and on and on like a hunted stag through mile after mile of bogland and then when I'd reached my aim I'd sit down absolutely shagged and say to myself well that was a complete bunch of toss why the fuck did I persevere with that and so you see it all comes down probably to what I read on the back of a matchbox when I was ten Bryant & May have a lot to answer for with that little bit of conditioning but sometimes it did work out and my inability to quit saw me right and said here's your plate of beans and fried onions mate you deserve it come back to this soup kitchen any time you like an sit on a wonky cracked chair with these other fuckups and hear about Jesus in little pamphlets he'll put you right son look at Mavis clearing up those peas off that grubby table she was a non-believer look at her now she's dusting out the vestry never goes hungry for best Cornwall butter fudge that's it son don't you quit on us don't you quit on our gorgeous planet it'd be a sin against the Lord come back here anytime to fill your belly. So that's what I have to say about not quitting. As for butterflies, I think I can honestly say I've never ignored a butterfly in my entire life, and as for regrets, loads, but where are they now, flushed, saying have no regrets is like saying never shit.

Nothing and nobody

MARCH 27, 2010

Came across this video of Tony Parsons addressing a questioner from the audience. A wonderfully uncompromising expression of the inexpressible message.

Harmen Mesker recently stirred up a hornet's nest with his Ten Laws of Proper Yijing Practice Explained. There is a heated discussion of his law #2, 'Moving lines do not move', in the comments on the Clarity blog.

Ziran and wuwei

MARCH 7, 2010

As people know, the subtitle of this site as a whole is 'The art of doing nothing', with the two characters for wuwei, 'not doing' or 'doing nothing', being reproduced on the front page. Sometimes people who know I have practised wuwei for many years ask me the reasonable question about how anything ever gets done if I 'do nothing'. I always answer: 'Spontaneously.' However, I rarely point out that actually natural spontaneity is in Daoist philosophy known as ziran, which could be translated as 'doing-itselfness'. It is the positive principle directly contrasting the negative wuwei.

In addition, I might note that actually there are two ways of acting when one follows Yijing as opposed to Daoist philosophy: 'before heaven' (xiantian) and 'after heaven' (houtian). Acting before heaven is acting spontaneously (ziran), acting after heaven is waiting until the time is ripe (awaiting a sign). Acting spontaneously is obviously best, but if one feels the need to act but has not acted then clearly one will need some way of assessing the right time and right way to act, and that's why people consult oracles. However, I would say it is better not to feel the need to act, to remain in wuwei until ziran determines it. As it says in chapters 37 and 48 of the Daodejing: 'Do nothing, and there is nothing not done.' But if one is caught up in the need to act then there's not much one can do about it until a greater naturalness comes about; neither wuwei nor ziran can be forced, rather they come out of perfect clarity in the moment. Perfect clarity means there is nothing to wonder about, there is only ever one response. Paradoxically complete freedom means not having choice to dwell upon. Everything is already decided. This means no personal volition, naturally. People often worry about that idea, but I would say: Who needs it?

How many people with the same name does it take to invent an I Ching cube?

MARCH 3, 2010

In my article on I Ching patents I wrote about the quirky inventions of Khigh Alx Dhiegh, which include several different I Ching cubes. Mr Dhiegh was born Kenneth Dickerson in 1910 (d. 1991) and was an actor well known for playing the Red Chinese agent Wo Fat in 'Hawaii Five-O'. Curious here is that there is a guy on the web advertising a very expensive I Ching Cube with a book (probably a pamphlet – or perhaps it's just a pamphlet and no cube), apparently for picking lottery numbers but with precious little in the way of explanation about what he is actually selling, who goes by the name of Ken Dickkersun/, with the forward slash being part of his name. This other Ken explains on his about page:

You may notice some different spellings of Ken's last name. As a person who is guided by intuition and inner guidance, Ken changed his last name from Dickerson to Dickkerson many years ago. In 1998, Ken became very ill. He was guided to again change the spelling of his last name from Dickkerson to Dickkersun and place the forward slash mark after his name to indicate an upward rise. Ken's health and well-being began to immediately improve. He is happy to report that he is now feeling great, so now continues to sign his name as Kenneth Dickkersun/.

I haven't seen Mr Dickkersun/'s I Ching Cube product, so I can't say whether he is trading on a dead man's name and ideas, but I can't help thinking that the above reflects the desperation of a man on the run from an angry ghost. Slight name changes do appear to outfox your average avenging spirit. So far as I can make out the product is a way of getting a yes or no answer by chance:

Using the Cube with the Yes / No system led me to a further discovery. I didn't know it at the time, but I had made a quantum leap, which resulted in writing a new book which I call the I CHING CUBE BOOK a bold approach to opening a door that has been closed for thousands of years. The I CHING CUBE BOOK gives you a definite Yes or No answer, then goes on to explain the reason why in plain, down-to-earth, easy-to-understand language.

I would have thought tossing a coin was good enough for 'a definite Yes or No answer', with the explanation for the reason why being 'just because', but if you have $50 burning a hole in your pocket to find out a presumably more sophisticated and accurate method of getting yes or no answers then do let me know what it is. Alternatively, send me $40 and I'll tell you a great way of saving ten dollars.

Maybe by love I mean companionship that isn’t boring

MARCH 1, 2010

[Preface: This is an assemblage of fragments compiled from letters I've written over the past couple of months.]

I think I stopped being afraid when I realised there was something undignified about it.

One thing about open-air mazes, like the one at Hampton Court, is when you look up at the blue sky. It's the same blue sky as before you entered the maze. I remember thinking, looking up past the tall hedge walls to the blueness, I am not lost. Last night in bed I reached out my hand and touched the wall in the dark, and for a while I couldn't remember which wall it was, what room I was in, it could have been my childhood bedroom, it could have been a bedsit in my twenties, and the most marvellous thing about it was that it didn't matter. It was the same wall the same dark, and, come to that, I had to strain hard even to remember my childhood wall, my twenties wall, more than anything it was just a slightly cold and smooth wall, and I wasn't anyone I could remember, and this was fine.

When I sense I am being fitted in a box or defined or judged I just throw it all away, even if it's a person, I throw them away, and take the regret if there is any. If I come to take back anything, like looking around the ruins of your burned house and finding some charred object that suddenly means more than anything, then that is the luck of the draw. I thrive on rejecting and destroying, I find it preferable to fitting in or being as others think or suggest I should be. I am 'Tough luck!' to those who think I should be something or I should have this view or that. I don't tolerate mistakes that impinge on my sense of freedom, I would rather be alone than have judgmental friends.

If others misunderstand the way you live your life then that is only a reflection of how far you have gone into unknown territory. Too late for me, I am going the way I am going. Desires as such are just tinkering about on the edges, I want the active core of the volcano. Chaos has begun, it is too late to stop it. I don't think I have ever wanted to stop it. I'm sure there will be many desires fulfilled, but it seems too small to be bothered by them. I am actively becoming dangerous, I don't think I should stop now, do you?

Read as metaphor, if the taste is too strong. My only concession to the reasonable concerns of others.

I feel I ought to be more interested in desire than I currently am, though I don't see that lack of a certain sparkle as a bad thing, I even think it may be the fulfillment of previous desire. Or maybe I am just a disappointed man taking resignation and acceptance because they are forced upon me, and have not so much succeeded in conquering desire in a spiritual sense but am in the process of giving up on it as a bad friend. In one mood I can feel lessened by my lack of desire, in another mood I can feel like I am succeeding in something at last. Are a series of wants good enough to champion as some key to how to live life?

As for other significant desires, there are a long series of wilted blooms along my path, and I am rarely sure whether they wilted because I didn't nourish them enough or because they weren't for me and their wilting was more about finding that out and eliminating it to become more concentrated in what was not wilting. But clearly if you don't nourish something enough it is a way in itself of realising it is not something you want enough. Sometimes even the desire to write is only hanging on by a thread, when it seems pointless and akin to writing a book in a dream. But so far I have always got beyond that feeling, and, indeed, that feeling seems to be to an extent a subject matter for the writing, so that's okay.

I don't know, my desires are massive and yet diffuse, so it seems sometimes there is nothing there, since the nature of my desire is to be engulfed in the void or to pass through wormholes into other dimensions, and there is also, I think, somewhat of a desire to be possessionless, to require nothing of the world. Once I had a strong desire to live in a van travelling from pagan fire to pagan fire, hopefully with some like-minded woman, since sitting around a fire watching the sparks rise with pagan types drumming and things is very post-apocalyptic and one easily forgets everything of any other world, but I have not actively pursued it apart from occasional visits to such places, I have not even learnt how to drive. Sometimes I look at friends who seem to 'have their life together', who do all sorts of interesting things, and wonder why am I not doing that? And yet, since such feelings do not make me feel so good I return to what I know and learn to value that again, for all it seems sparse, cut-off, lonely, and … yet it is me, and in the end I feel sure it must bear fruit, and if it doesn't, well death is just around the corner anyhow. That sort of feeling. Sounds stark, but it is actually an existentialist desire to be self-contained. Now and again I try to do what others do, the syndrome of seeing people and having a good time, and for a while it feels what I should be doing, but then I accomplish very little and it seems quite empty after a while, or perhaps I am not fully admitted into it or don't allow myself to be. I always feel I have other fish to fry and I wander off on my own again. I don't know whether this is a response to a lifetime of apparent disappointment or actually finding my feet in my own terrain. I suspect a bit of both. But you can only go where the calling seems to lead you, and if it is all wilting blooms where the people and parties are you tend to develop a preference for wilderness and solitude.

All the gurus that might have been worth visiting in faraway places are dead now and I don't rule out that I may be the faraway place for some people in the future, which is an irony I appreciate.

I don't tie myself to any previous agenda, and desire is often that, a previous agenda. To be really free I suspect desire needs to be downplayed as any kind of be-all and end-all.

It's funny to me how a solitude expressed in writing can seem a greater and sometimes starker solitude than the solitude right before me in the moment. Maybe it's something to do with concentration, all in one place, and also concentrating on it to the exclusion of other things.

It's strange, really, to think that everyone you know and also places could look very different to some other perceiving mechanism. Well, obviously to animals and insects it must do, but to another human being. Maybe our evolution will make us less fixated on one particular view of what we are looking at, maybe we will perceive fields of energy more than we do now, maybe the world will become much more plastic.

We do like the illusion of feeling we know how something 'is', so we probably go to extra lengths to fix things that way and do not allow them to move. But it is a big question what we are actually perceiving most of the time. The familiar, such as this room now, is a convenience. It could be some kind of holding place on a trip to the stars, it is only familiarity that tells me it is a house in England on planet Earth, and other ideas of what it is are just too fantastic to be true, yet drill down to the subatomic level, which we must accept is there, then its familiarity is only an idea. I think we are very scared as a species to lose our familiarity with the world.

With a long book work, it does take me quite a while to see what the thing is. People sometimes find this hard to believe, that I don't know what I've written, but really I'm just handing the words on as fast as they come to me, I don't have a chance to really think about what it is until later. I just trust the process and don't think about it while writing, because this is how I want to create, but I do suspect it has a narrative integrity and wholeness (especially when taken with other things I've written) that I just wouldn't know how to deliberately place there, and if I tried it would be clunky and unimpressive.

I had a fragment of a dream the other night, being in the nose-cone of a rocket, like a Saturn V, getting ready for liftoff, looking out at the rain and thinking this is the last rain I'll ever see (I wasn't coming back).

I don't have to even intend for there to be a connection between separate parts of an assemblage for there to be one.

'Holding out' in the sense I meant it [in The Exorcist of Revolution] is a refusal to conform, it's a strategy against, in other words you're living in a state of continuing resistance. Holding out also means surviving against the odds, by holding out you don't buckle under, you keep conformity at arm's length and endure the difficulties that will naturally bring, and while at first it is a kind of urban survivalism after a while it becomes a way of thriving, since you inevitably meet others also in this kind of underground for all it can be quite a loner thing. A state of living on the edge and allowing no-one else to define how you should live, and if you have to pass through phases of life where you appear to have to conform, it is always kept as an appearance disguising an inner refusal that serves you and you alone. You could be the devil incarnate but it would never show unless you wanted it to.

As one grows older the rebellion doesn't have to fade, I think it can get more dangerous, in that one finds more how words can really be used. Sometimes, to get that power, you have to hold out for decades. It's a tough stance, but for some people there's no other choice so may as well embrace it as not.

I relinquish the duty of recognising Babalon, and if that means a whole world ends, then so be it. The implications of a magical act extend beyond the personal.

I feel one should always excuse oneself for explaining anything in detail, even when asked, as it excuses in advance any stifling of yawns in the other person. I have found that in general people who ask to know something don't really want to know, so I rarely go into detail about anything. I don't have a great deal of faith in the average person's attention span. This is why I write books, they can put it down when they've had enough and return to it later. I hate bores who recount things without end, and I wouldn't like to become one, so if I even approach that I excuse myself, since I can't always know what the level of interest is in the person asking. The English character often uses politeness not out of concern for the other person, but in a disguised self-deprecatory manner to avoid having
to waste breath on morons.

I am sort of a chameleon now changing his backdrop. I have remembered who I am, as it were, and am just in that, since nothing else is needed or calls quite so much. I think I forget just for the hell of it, to experience something that is not me. It is a way of writing fiction by accurately reporting everything that goes through your mind through a myriad of delusions. I saw a friend I hadn't seen for a while and I asked him what's he's up to these days, and he replied: 'I'm between failures.' Which I thought was very witty. I could say, 'I'm between delusions.'

Probably bitterness clings only when we don't utterly ignore it.

It was always interesting talking to Lionel on the phone, because he had a grandfather clock with a loud tick-tock and it chimed the quarter hours and the half-hours, and the hour, I got such a sensation of time drifting lazily by in his place, like a slow floating down a river.

Godard I notice deals with repeating themes from different angles in his films. Pinget, who employs varied recurrence, composition and decomposition, in his writing, wrote something interesting as a formula to define his procedure: 'Nothing is ever said, since it can be said otherwise.'

A piece of writing is solely what one concentrates on, but other things were also happening.

Watching the foxes run by in the hail outside my window in the middle of the night. I opened the window to hear it, thought it was rain, then couldn't decide if it was rain or snow but it didn't sound like snow, then I realised it was hail.

Perhaps the only problem is thinking there's a problem. I constantly watch the nature of the passing moment, how it changes, how it runs this way and that, how it impacts on me in feelings that, crudely, can be characterised as good or bad or indifferent (that's also bad, I think). I'm a bit wary of sitting down to write in a way because the mood characterises it, and yet it may not be me, just something shed again. Yet I suppose it must capture something, maybe there is a constancy between the poles, the kind of channel that water finds when it must move. Unpredictable, and yet conforming to exact law, only unpredictable looked at with the unknowing mind.

I find identities crumble fast, so fast sometimes it is hardly worth investing in them. Yet we are seen in certain ways by others, given more definite form than perhaps we give ourselves. I am like next door's cat who comes in to sleep a lot of the time, lately.

Energy into cooking and reading, today, mostly, and lying down next to the cat as I often think he has the right idea.

I become aware how the past is not fixed at all, even at the time it was a jumble of impressions, depending on mood. Just as now I sometimes have warm loving feelings towards that woman I mentioned, and think all is right in the world, I also have less than warm feelings, like a vibration between betrothal and betrayal (just two words apart from each other I noticed in my dictionary), and how can I know what is a real impression, and probably it is neither.

It is something to do with feeling stuck, yet even that feeling can transmute into seeing my space as hard-won and a marvellous headquarters for everything I want to do.

Distillation always yields a small quantity of pure substance from a large quantity of impure, I saw that regularly enough in chemistry. Still mulling over these matters, but clarity itself must be a pure impulse, tight, not spread out, distilled down from a vast landscape of mixed-up ideas. Can one prompt it? Or is it enough to know it 'must' be going on. Maybe I already have clarity if I separate out the aspects that look elsewhere for it, for instance. I have sat enough times with everything right with the world, with no greater additions externally to make it so, and in that there is a wonderful anticipation of all good things coming.

You mention Jean Seberg. There is an example of an image and a reality being so different. A beautiful woman, but a sad life, eventually ending in suicide. The contrast is full of reality, yet illusions too. We have so many images of the ideal that we want to protect them from harm, but all we can do is have a certain stance, like a Samurai, a certain discipline, and try our best not to drift, since we wouldn't drift if it really mattered, battlefield mattered, so why don't we be as solid and driftless in ordinary everyday matters.

Enduring intensity again. Intensity in a way is utterly useless, self-made, but perhaps we want to feel heartbroken, perhaps we want to have tears, perhaps we want it all to feel real and as if it matters (when we suspect it isn't real and doesn't matter). Sometimes I really believe I know what I am talking about, in tune with something, but in a glance out of the window at a sound it can disappear. But that's the way of things.

Self-sabotage is probably the demon I find most difficult to control. It seems one has an insurmountable legacy of the past that accounts for it, yet, in lighter moods, one can see the story of one's life in a far more complete and pleasing way, self-sabotage always makes use of isolated broken fragments of experience that withhold knowledge of the whole.

Maybe by love I mean companionship that isn't boring.

I often feel closest to something when giving up a desire, but another part of me argues, why should I give up the desire? In practice, desire gives us up.

An ice-cream van parks outside playing its jolly tune, engine turning over, waiting for the unenthusiasm of a cold day to have second thoughts. Then it is gone, like a landed butterfly just as you get out of your chair to have a look, a moment's silence before its strangely reassuring tune in a distant street, looking for its next settling place.

Steven Jesse Bernstein

FEBRUARY 17, 2010

Steven Jesse Bernstein is one of my favourite writers, so I was overjoyed to come across this rare footage of him on YouTube singing his song 'Reason to Live'. Not the Jesse of the Prison album but very moving, considering he killed himself a year and a half later by stabbing himself three times in the throat (see this great video Jacob Mills made of 'This Clouded Heart' for classic Bernstein material).