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Stephen Pickering

Category: Uncategorized

  • Hey Xippy!

    Hey Xippy!,

    I lost my father on March 1st, ironically enough my birthday. It was a world turning upside down experience. We talked like ten times a day all my life. I’ve always had this phobia of dead bodies, so the day he died I didn’t think I could go into the room. But something carried me there, and it was weird, instead of being a grueling, grotesque experience, it was a spiritual experience in a positive way. I kissed him. My sister was speaking to him. He seemed “there” I almost felt I could bring him back to life if I were just a few more steps along in my spiritual journey. I don’t know how to explain it. But it did give me peace, and I’ve held together surprisingly well ever since.

    If I were Jung or Freud analyzing your dream I’d surely say your head symbolized the “Ego” and really the enemy was inside, the Ego wanting to put itself back on, wanting to “fight” Sometimes I think its the dead who are alive and the living who are dead. I don’t know where I get that thought. It just comes to me from time to time. Or at least I feel its some sort of continuum going on. Sometimes I think “How can anyone really die? What happens to their memories?” I think I’ll make this into a blog post, I write such long comments. I’m glad I ran across your topic. It’s prescient for me at this time.

    Stephen

  • One Art

    You know there’s so much good music out there, good poems, good art, you can just consume it like food. And then you think Art is like a Metaphor for the most innermost part of your being actualized. You know like dancing is a metaphor for effortless motion, and singing a metaphor for exuberance. Art kind of like points us in the direction of , “Hey, Life is over here.”

    Art is a symbol for what to do next, except no one ever does it, although they love to “entertain” the idea. And what is more no none will ever do it. The Goddess of the Ancient Temple of Sais says, “No one has yet lifted my veil.”

    Update: 12/4/11 – I remember reading recently that Joseph Campbell said that “Art is the clothing of a revelation.” Now, if I’m thinking in terms of mythos, what do the monsters of Fairy Tales and Mythologies stand for? What are they metaphors for? They seem to be metaphors for something that is blocking, disrupting the revelation.

    One Art  
    by Elizabeth Bishop 
    The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied.  It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

  • Music From the Archives – “Inanna”

    Me with my stratocastor (American)

    “Inanna” (Right Click the Link to download song for free)

    Scrounging around a stack of CDs I found in some box or other. Some of them were recordings I made 5 years ago. This is one called “Inanna” I was reading “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” at the time and it seemed everything I was writing came from a myth or Fairy Tale. Actually the lyrics here are almost a copy of a translation in that book of a poem about the Goddess “Inanna” I think of the ancient city state of Sumer. I’ll have to check that. I mean I added a few embellishes, but virtually all of it is word for word from that poem. Which doesn’t make me too proud. But the music I like. Very much consciously I was thinking of the Rolling Stones. I think I had read an interview with Keith Richards at the time talking about how he always recorded an electric and acoustic together. So I tried it, and I was like “Damn, that does sound like the Stones! Wow, one little tip can go a long way!