“April is the cruelest month” — My first impulse when I hear this, is that nature becomes so beautiful so much what a fairy-tale or magical mythology looks, feels, and tastes like, that it fools you more or less into thinking you are on the right track to embark on an adventure of an everlasting kind, but then when the season ends with all its mythologically inclined and emergent sensations, so does your sense of everything magical coming into being. In this sense, Spring is the ultimate “bait and switch.” It seems to be fucking with you.
In a way it’s like going to Disneyland. All that is in front of you is delight and beauty. It blocks out the reality of this world, namely that this world is built on violence and killing, on life eating other life. So for that idyllic month and half or so, you feel like you’ve entered the Mythological dimension. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if you can see it for what it is, like a vacation so to speak and not “the real thing” as it were. The cruelty of Spring is like when a transcendently beautiful women acts as if she loves you, makes it seem like you’re the one for a month or two, and then disappears, ghosts you. You thought you were automatically eligible for this transcendent experience, without any internal work being done, without crossing the metaphorical “sword bridge” or having an authentic initiatory experience, which leaves the fulfillment of the transcendental realm always just out of reach (“Craving, lust” in Buddhism) even though it’s image is right there in front of you. Spring shows you the gift, as it were, the sublime, before you are eligible for it. If you could use it like a great piece of art to inspire you to cross the psychological threshold (yoga, meditation) then you could use it to your advantage. It’s only when we are not conscious that it becomes so cruel.
Giving yourself over to something completely, letting yourself be ‘swallowed’ by it, as it were, (symbolically, psychologically) with the faith that you are not going to be annihilated (except maybe your ego and attachment to self-image) but rather transformed, ‘reborn’ into your true hero, adventurous self: That’s the sense of the ‘belly of the whale’ motif in mythology.
Stephen Pickering
For Country Music artists, such as Sierra Ferrell above, one form of the initiatory “belly of the whale” experience is busking in the streets of Nashville. Ordeals like this do two things: force you to become better 2) force you to ask yourself whether you love doing this (the “inside out” philosophy) internally, no matter what the outside circumstance. It acts as a test or trial, which is another important motif in mythology.
The Beatles are metaphorical for the “belly of the whale” motif in mythology. I never realized it myself until I read “Anthology” and realized that they had spent almost 2.5 years in Hamburg playing 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now this isn’t literally true. They did have breaks. They definitely went home many times for breaks, but the most important aspect is that it is psychologically true. Apparently the clubs were physically below the street level, like walking down into a subway, and I do remember a compadre of theirs saying, “We’d go down there and wouldn’t come up for air for a week.” Now this obviously is not literally true. But one understands the psychological, metaphorical implication: giving yourself over to something completely. That’s the idea of the belly of the whale motif in mythology. Even the the locals of the Cavern Club in Liverpool seemed to be stunned by the transformation of the post Hamburg Beatles. That’s the central idea of the “Belly of the Whale” motif. It’s exactly analogous to the idea of the male initiatory experience: You go in one person and come out the other side with a completely transformed consciousness. All mythology, as Joseph Campbell said, is about the transformation of consciousness. Transformation of Consciousness is the goal of Mythology as well as Initiatory Experiences. They can happen involuntarily (You’re born into a certain group) or voluntarily (You have an intent to become someone new.) Regardless, the method is the same: extended periods of “submersion” in which there is “no way out.” Only under those circumstances does a crucial part of the brain “switch” and a true transformation take place.
Complete immersion is the key for tripping some kind of metaphorical “wire” in the brain whose effect is transformation of consciousness. You see this in initiatory experiences all through history all over the world. This is at least one of the metaphorical meanings of the “Belly of the Whale” motif in mythology. You’re in it all the way. You’re committed. You’ve made a decision. This is when things start to happen, and your life becomes like an adventure. This is one way of applying the metaphorical messages of myth to your real life.”
Stephen Pickering
I’d say there are two main aspects to the Belly of the Whale symbolism and they are psychologically connected although in the world express themselves in two different ways: 1) As noted above with the Beatles is the aspect of a career. The way to get to the top is complete emersion, giving yourself over to it completely, allowing yourself to be “swallowed up.” This is the appropriate attitude for a young person, say 20-30, deciding on their career. They have to know the irony that this immersion, once a decision has been made, will free them, not confine them, as long as it’s their true calling, not someone else’s.
2) Is more metaphysical in the sense primarily of acceptance. The trash compactor scene from Star Wars comes to mind. If you just take the literal, mechanical view of nature, then its all about a group of adventurers who are most certainly going to die in a horrible way. At best their chances are 50/50. But what in the deepest sense does this scene really mean? Complete and utter acceptance of the here and now, even when it is life’s most horrendous aspects, yet still trying from the ultimate depths of your soul to do what you can, even if from the outside it might seem laughable (Them trying to put up metal pole braces against an insurmountable power). But when it’s your adventure, the one you were put into this universe to go on, to go toward, to achieve, magical aide arrives. Put down Instagram and Twitter for a few days and ask the depths of your soul what it is here for.
On a lighter level, I can’t tell you how many times when I’ve lost something, that it suddenly appears the moment I truly accept that its gone. It really does feel like magic. I really wish I had documented all the times. My only problem with acceptance is that I can’t seem to willfully bring it on. Many times even when I believe I’ve accepted something it’ll still be “gnawing” or nagging me in the back of my mind. Intent does help, but seems some other thing in my mind has to happen in order for true acceptance to really be the state I’m in.
Update 6/13/20: I realized as I was watching a lot of music production videos on Youtube, and as their algorithm keeps bringing you more, I realized that the amount of content I could watch on this subject is nearly endless. And then I realized, that’s it! You keep at something non-stop until you break through to another level. The irony is its your laser-like focus on one subject that opens up the entire world to you.
Now, I would say there is at least one caveat: whatever that subject is, I think it needs to be your true soul’s calling. In other words, if your only reason for doing it is to get rich and famous, it still might work, but there’s something lost in translation. And the whole process will not be fun. If it is your true soul’s calling, then it will be feeding you the whole way in terms of inspiration, joy, and fulfillment, even in this so-called “Belly of the Whale” period in which you are not getting outside attention or rewards. I’d say that’s the test for your true calling: If you feel emotional reward from the act itself, then that’s it. Stephen King and writing is the first thing that comes to mind when I think of this analogy. Especially if you want to be a writer, go watch some of his speeches and interviews on Youtube. He mentions this aspect as being primary.
Update 6/13/21 —— Here’s a thought I had this evening about the matter: “The more you get into something (into the “belly” so to speak), the more your world expands.”
One reason for this is because there is a huge market for uniqueness. People don’t tune into the Olympics for average performances, nor do they to movies, books, music, and even business itself. They are looking for the “hero” in these things for a lot of different reasons, but among them it inspires them to awaken their own dormant desire to break out themselves. And everyone has the capability to do it.
It’s paradoxical, like the line from the Peter Gabriel song, “You gotta get in to get out.” It may not seem like it if you are swimming in circles and or places of what I’d call “striving for mediocrity” or “striving to fit into the local group” because those folks there are programmed in a certain way. And if you are a young person thinking in terms of a career by “getting into” you’ve got to move to a place where they produce uniqueness (LA, NY, Nashville, London) instead of merely consume it (most other cities you can think of.)
Update 8/15/21 — It’s just occurred to me why this metaphor, if it can be interpreted and practically applied to one’s particular situation, works in real life: Our brains are built for resistance first and foremost especially to foreign or unknown stimuli. That old saying “Shoot first and ask questions later” comes to mind.
Last night after a rain storm I was walking down the steps of my deck and, scaring me, out ran an opossum who had been sheltering under there, streaking into the forest. He wasn’t asking questions first. That instinct was hard wired into him, just as my startled emotion and tense reaction to the occurrence was. This is just the way of nature. This behavior was “selected for” simply by fact that the creatures who inherited it tended to live as opposed to the ones who were wired to be inquisitive and congenial right out of the gate.
I remember Shad Helmstetter said about “Self-Talk, “Repetition is a powerful argument” when he was explaining how the practice would eventually effect and change your emotions and behavior. I also remember reading Ogilvy on Advertising when I was running a small store in the nineties, and he wrote something to the effect of “The first time you see an ad it angers you. The tenth time you see it you’re pulling your check book out to buy it.”
This may be a negative way of putting it, but the brain is also hard wired for submission in the face of what it perceives as an insurmountable power, (again, this behavior was selected for at some point along the line) and repetition is perceived as an insurmountable power that one either submits to or is crushed by. I think of those folks who learn a new language by living in the origin country for instance or even how we learn our first language. There’s no thinking or ‘work’ involved (at least as far as I can remember) and yet there it is, seemingly by magic one day you are effortlessly doing a very complicated and hard thing, fluently speaking a language. That’s because, metaphorical of the “Belly of the Whale” motif, you were inundated by it with no relief, with “no way out” so to speak, and so the adaptation instincts were triggered which turned off the resistance and the shields came down. Biologically speaking (I know it takes the romance out of it!) positive hormones were released rewarding the new behavior of acceptance and assimilation.
The human brain evolved to keep us safe, not happy—it will resist your efforts to walk your own path because creativity challenges the certainty it craves. ????
“The Quality of God is that he doesn’t know what he is doing. He’s just sheer will.”
Joseph Campbell/Meister Eckhart
Here’s another way of looking at it. At first blush you might think, “God doesn’t know what he’s doing? WTF? That’s an insult! That’s blasphemous! But here, “God” is symbolic of of your soul’s or your consciousness’s true adventure. What it’s really saying is that “God” has submersed himself (“Belly of the Whale” / Symbolic meaning of “Baptism”) completely into his will, into what he wants to do, into what he wants to achieve. His will becomes his whole consciousness. He is completely submerged 100%, 24 x 7 into what he wants to do, not because it will gain him money, prestige, power, or fame, but because it is what he wants to do in and of itself. And the bouquet of that is the actual consciousness of “Knowing what you are doing.” There is no consciousness or “knowingness” without “being” first. As in the famous Sanskrit “Sat, Chith, Ananda” “Being, Consciousness, Bliss.”
People are conflicted. The soul is not conflicted. But peoples’ personalities are because the outside world is saying one thing and their inside world is saying another. The irony is when you follow your soul, it may not be immediate, there probably will be a lot of resistance in the form or trials and maybe even a long form of subjective suffering (being in the belly of a whale) but that is only an “initiatory experience” to see whether your soul is worthy (It may not be. You may need to go through a few more incarnations.)
But if it is, you can simultaneously absorb the infinite sorrow of the world and its infinite bliss. You become an arrow that pierces the heart simultaneously with sorrow and bliss, simultaneously with death and ‘Vita Nuova.’
10/06/24 Update: When I re-read this post today, a couple things occurred to me. The first:
1) This is why persistence works!
The body physically adapts to outside stressors, building muscle as you workout, for instance, or even at the cellular level in response to some drug, especially chronic usage, one can actually see through a microscope, the number of receptors on the cell’s surface change (tolerance in medical terms), to adapt and keep the cell regulated. Of course this is all automatic, involuntary. And the same goes for the brain and or “the mind.”
2) The metaphor of “magical aid” that comes up time and time again in Myth and Fairy Tale is metaphorical of the body’s (and by extension, nature, “the universe” if you will) physical adaptation, that happens automatically, that is like your “other self,” coming to your aide giving you powers you never knew existed until they are there.
Why is it hard to change someone's mind ?
Here's neuroscientist Rachelle Summers explaining in detail the concepts behind this ?
I’m having a blast. It’s really fun. I don’t know why… But it’s just been a joy.
Conan O’Brien Jan. 12, 2020, “Nikki Glaser” 1:12
Why were you trying to find my extension? I have a friend who’s opening up a new restaurant in Soho and I was hoping you’d go with me. What? Do you want to go out with me tonight? Why? Because it would be fun, and you seem cool.
30 Rock S1 E11 4:39
“Did you ever imagine that your podcast would be…like where its at right now is crazy, man.” Joe Rogan: “No, there’s no way I could have imagined it. I wouldn’t have believed it.” Tom Segura: “It’s so nuts.” Joe Rogan: “It’s just…yeah, I just thought it was fun to do.”
Let me ask you something, why do you do what you do? I don’t know. The only time I really feel alive is when I’m singing
Jennifer Hudson’s character in ‘Sandy Wexler’ [-1:55:54].
Johnny Cash is not cast in amber, this is the guy before he was canonized, when he was just a musician, when he had runway in front of him and was less worried about getting it right than just doing it. Yup, when done right music is here and then gone, you had to be there, that’s one of the reasons live is such a big deal these days.
“And one does it not to be good for you, but just because you dig it. Because at last you find yourself in the center, the eternal now, in which past and future drop away, in which divisions created by words drop away.” — [YouTube Link]
Alan Watts
Something I do for like no reason besides the fact that it was just like for fun………Mmmm mmmm, I mean because making music is messing around. [Youtube Interview Link]
Billie Eilish
You’ve got to find something that you love to do in an of itself that could also become a career. I would even go a step further: the actual doing of it and navigating all of its challenges (like an adventure) actually gives you more pleasure, feeds your soul even more, or if you want to get unromantically scientific about it, releases even more dopamine, than all the other possible accoutrements it could give you (money, fame, sex, adoration). That’s a big ask. But I think it’s the key to not only giving yourself the best shot at not only the accoutrements, but producing work that is worthy of them. In another words, work that gives more value to the audience (and keep in mind, especially in today’s world this could literally be anything: arts, business, science, etc.) than the money and attention they are giving to it. This is the key fundamental law of business: B = V + D. Business equals Value plus Distribution. But it’s an equation that can be applied to any career. And thanks to the internet, or more robustly “technology” the definition of what a career can be (“Youtube Star”) has grown at least by an order of magnitude over what it was when I graduated from college in 1989, maybe two.
This one makes me think of like the bodies’ organs, the intelligence of life itself which is below the pre-frontal cortex consciousness, but which has this ability to do, if you take it all the down to the quantum level, perhaps an infinite number of processes per second and seemingly without effort. This “without-effort” motif really makes me think a lot of the sub-conscious and especially of dreams. Especially in vivid adventurous dreams you are doing and experiencing so much, maybe 10 or 100x or what you have done even in your most amazing real-life adventures, yet your consciousness seems transported there without effort. If you think of fairy-tales and mythology in general this seems a very common and central motif.
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Update: April 1, 2021: On the whole this poem is metaphorically about what happens to a civilization and the psychology of the individuals within it, when the underpinning rug of it’s spiritual belief system is ripped out from under it, when there is no fundamental myth supporting it. The “cradle” of the soul is rocked. The mythologies of the past aren’t speaking to us anymore because everyone knows they aren’t literally true, and this creates a chasm in the psyche which gives birth to a monster. And we are that monster with our blank and pitiless gazes because this earthquake in the soul turns us metaphorically into “the hollow men, the stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw.”
Update: 8/15/20: I still feel as vexed by this poem as the rough beast feels vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. Which leads me to the main point of this update: Who’s rocking cradle had the power to wake up twenty centuries of stony sleep? Was this Jesus in the manger?
Some rough beast, a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Maybe the biggest question of this poem is why is the thing slouching? It’s a huge monster with a lion body. We think of lion bodies as being fierce, muscular, solar king-like, even devine in their beautiful symmetry (“What immortal hand or eye/ dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”) not slouchy! Lions are proud. People who slouch are ashamed and or dejected with being. For someone about to become Jesus 2.0, the next savior of the world, he’s not too excited about taking the job, that’s for sure!
And why go back to the original place? London, Paris, or New York would seem a more appropriate place for a new savior of this day and age to be born. With going back to the Levant, I sense its a metaphor that the ideals of the pagan West, namely that of the ideal of the individual, which is what the sense of the Grail romances, the pagan myths and fairy-tales, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment are all about, have now been thoroughly overthrown, for the ideals of the Levant which are that of the group. If you’ve ever experienced a mob mentality break out, you definitely have seen gazes that are blank, pitiless, and soulless. That’s the equivalent of falling to all three temptations of the Buddha (Lust, Fear, Social Duty) in one fell swoop.
But why use “the Sun” as a simile? That definitely catches your attention. The sun is usually a metaphor and simile used for bright and hopeful sentiments. But not if your walking across the desert, right? Also, if you think of the sun only in its scientific definition, if you leave out the romance, mythological dimension of life, and only understand it as a function of physics, groveling as it were before shear fact, then the sun is indeed dead, a ruthless fireball fusing hydrogen into helium, that cares not a wit about life.
Some part of us knows something is wrong, but….
We are vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.
Say what? Here’s my shot: A “rocking” cradle suggests instability, an unknowingness in an instinctual way, of whose side the MOTHER is on. Is she Athena or Circe? Does she want to kill us or for us to be the savior of the universe? Or in a way, as only Greek Mythology can intimate, be both? Or in another sense, the ground of our own being, of life’s being. Is it an inherently good thing, evil thing, or indifferent? I.e. “Something that should not have been,” as Schopenhauer suggests. Is nature, this thing that our consciousness rests on, inherently nasty, disgusting, and evil? If one has that sense, you will certainly be vexed to nightmare all the way back to birth.
This is when it gets exciting, the adventure. Because this is the entire sense of the burning point what is uniquely you that wants, that must be expressed, that has never been expressed before. Becoming imminent, and yet in a gesture to the East, most likely spontaneously, as the eminence of transcendence, completely without ego.
I pulled into Kroger’s tonight, and what I felt was a good poetic line seemed to flash into me —like so many do that don’t necessarily have a direct meaning consciously, but feel like they came from another place and I am just the receiver and feel like they are pointing towards something that is deep and true.
Normally I’d put the line in Notes like I’ve done hundreds if not thousands of times before and that’d be the last I’d see of it. Today I said, “Screw it, let’s post it.” And there from my car, from my Chrome browser on my iPhone 7+ I opened up my WordPress, created a new post and typed in the line. After I hit save, another line came to me that I added, and while I was in the store a third.
We’ll see how this experiment goes, but my point is, something keeps calling me toward this way of doing things in “real time” as the phrase goes.
Here’s another example with music. A few months ago, I had a somber tune (sweet sad) come to my head on a Saturday night about like this one, and right here in front of this iMac I propped my iPhone, opened up Garageband and recorded it, knowing it would be my next single.
But then a case of the “perfections” came in, and I still haven’t published it. I feel now like I should have gotten it out there, if not that night, for sure within the next week, even if it had a bracket of (Demo) beside it on Spotify. Now so many months later, the tune has sort of lost its “spark” inside of me, and even if I could lay down a technically better performance from taking my time, it would have lost its emotional spark that getting it at the moment or close to the moment would give.
Of course ten years ago, much less twenty or thirty, this would have been a ludicrous approach, but as an example, I was just listening to Rick Beato talking about the B-Side Police single “Murder by Numbers” and as much as I love Synchronicity. I would just absolutely love as much a sort of “B-Side” album of the band recording the whole album live in the same mode of “Murder by Numbers” — mistakes and all.
The great Carver Mead said “Listen to the Technology.” My gut is telling me that the technology, offering itself like this with its focus on immediacy, is telling us to publish, even in the formal arts of poetry and music, with the same immediacy that social media does.
