News Notes and Queries
Up to now, this website has been a blog in the sense that my most recent post has made up the front page and stayed there until the next most recent post. These cumulative posts are still all present on the site (to the right, see the vertical column). For those who want to skip these notes and go directly to the most recent post, it is the Valedictory Address. Either access it in the righthand column or click immediately on:
I will now regularly update the home page with news, feelers, and outreach:
My psychic group meets on Wednesday nights in Manset when I am in Maine. Please inquire if interested.
Lindy and I will Hawaii the first two weeks of February 2012 (Kauai 2-1 – 2-7, Oahu 2-7 – 2-10, Maui2- 10 – 2-15) if anyone there would like to make touch.
New, Current, and Forthcoming Publications
The Bardo of Waking Life, 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration, and New Moon are now in e-book format and available. For The Bardo of Waking Life, I corrected typos and added a note indicating where the gap in the book takes place during our trip to Europe (http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2010/03/trip-journal/).
For 2013, I corrected typos and wrote a different conclusion to my Introduction on the 2012 cosmic shift.
For New Moon, I removed the entire last section (“The Alchemical Wedding”), restoring the book to its original form. I also returned the names of many of the people to what they actually were, fixed a confusion of narrative version early in the book, and added a note to cover sections omitted in the “Teen Tour” chapter (in the print version too, as part of the transition from Salty and Sandy, my high-school novel, to New Moon). I also added an Afterword explaining all these changes and related issues; it is available on this website: http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2011/04/afterword-to-e-book-version-of-new-moon/.
The one book which I am substantially rewriting for e-book format (as well as a small print version) is Out of Babylon: Ghosts of Grossinger’s. I have restored most of the material removed from its original manuscript and placed in New Moon (“The Alchemical Wedding,” as per above), I have rewritten some sections from the North Atlantic Books history on this website and placed them in the appropriate spots (replacing anecdotal snippets and lists), and I have generally edited and changed the weaker parts of the book. I have always thought that Out of Babylon was a promising novel in a Faulknerian tradition (even if nonfiction), but it was unfinished and flawed. The e-book opportunity has given me at shot at fixing that. I am presently looking for proofreaders and feedback on the draft, so write me if you are interested and willing.
I am now working on the following new book, to be published in mid-2012 in three volumes. I am glad to share a Word file of the current draft with anyone who asks me for it until six months before publication:
Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness:
The Convergence of Physical, Philosophical, Psychological, Psychospiritual, and Psychic Views
Table of Contents
Volume One
Movement One
The Neuroscience, Evolution, and Ontology of Consciousness
Introduction
Chapter One: What the Fuck is This?
Chapter Two: The Scientific View of Reality and Consciousness
Chapter Three: What Is Reality (or What Is Consciousness)?
Chapter Four: Degrees of Consciousness: Protoconsciousness, Preconsciousness, and the Freudian Unconscious
Chapter Five: Systemic Consciousness: Nonconsciousness and the Loss of Consciousness
Chapter Six: Qualia or Zombies?
Chapter Seven: Consciousness as an Emergent Phenomenon: The Psycholinguistics and Phylogenesis of Meaning
Chapter Eight: The Quantum Brain
Chapter Nine: Ontology and Cosmology of Consciousness
Chapter Ten: Mind, Matter, and Spirit
Volume Two
Movement Two
Introduction
Chapter One: Theosophy and the Hermetic Tradition
Chapter Two: Psychic Tools
Chapter Three: We Are Already Psychic
Chapter Four: The Seven Planes of Consciousness: Human Home Energy
Chapter Five: The Seven Planes of Consciousness: Frequencies Above the Range of Ordinary Experience
Chapter Six: The Seven Planes of Consciousness: Tuning Outside the Axis of Human Home Energy
Chapter Seven: Surfing the Operation of the Real
Chapter Eight: Focusing on What Is Happening
Chapter Nine: Buddhism and Theosophy: A Comparison
Volume Three
Movement Three
The Crisis and Future of Consciousness
Introduction
Chapter One: Demonic Entities and Their Symbols of Transformation
Chapter Two: Fear Has an Intelligence
Chapter Three: How Did Evil Get into the Universe?
Chapter Four: One Encounter, One Chance
Chapter Five: Roses, Guns, and Scapula Bones
Chapter Six: Family Constellations and the Karmic Seed
Chapter Seven: The Cosmic Eternity System
Chapter Eight: We Are In Existence
Hyperlinks
End Notes
Updated Features on this Site
I am starting a second list of recently read books as an addendum under http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2010/03/my-favorite-novels-and-other-fictions-and-narratives/. You need to go to the righthand column for this under Life, as I can’t get WordPress to underline–it’s above my rudimentary skill level. Here is the first one:
2011 on
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson
This book caught me totally off-guard, which is the best way to take in an extraordinary work of literature. I knew nothing about it—no opinions, no press, no reputation, no hearsay. It was one of several unabridged CDs I procured randomly for car listening—pass on to someone else if you don’t like it. From the title and a brief scan of the jacket description, I made a guess as to what it would be; I was going to treat it as a genre page-turner with maybe a bit of depth. After the opening pages, I had no reason to change my prejudice, though I felt that it was brilliantly executed; it reminded me a little of Beckett in its dark but pure view into existence from a ravaged body, at the same time far more graphic and medical than anything the author of Malloy and Malone Dies attempted. Its gruesomeness led me to consider it one of the books that I would listen to on my own rather than share with my wife, as I didn’t think she’d want to go through the long opening graphic scenes involving a car accident, medical evacuation, and tissue-by-tissue account of the victim’s treatment. Yet she happened to catch three minutes when I wanted to finish my band (for easy relocation) before changing to our shared book, and she was hooked. We listened to the next band and, before our errand was done (and since I myself was only on CD3 out of 16), I went back to 1, and we proceeded to spend the next two and a half months savoring this novel.
From the moment in Chapter III when Marianne Engle, a seeming schizophrenic from another ward in the hospital, finds the narrator after having sneaked into his room and tells him, “You’ve been burned again. This is the third time….,” the book changes radically. It adds a layer, and then another, and then another. It is no longer just an existential novel (though it is) about a venal pornographer much of whose body (including his penis) has been burned off in a car accident; it is a grand and complex epic of reincarnation and eternity, including a near impossible retelling of Dante’s Inferno inside its own narrative while alternately becoming a traditional Japanese fairytale and an Icelandic edda—each leap fully realized and complete. Finally The Gargoyle is as explicitly and brazenly about love as the only survival, the only bridge between life and death as Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey.
None of this should work; yet it does. It is wildly ambitious, daring, compassionate, imaginative, hilariously funny, and starkly sobering.
The book’s brilliance mainly lies in its language, tone, and discrimination of detail. Everything in the plot has been done before, of course. I find strands of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Max Ehrlich, T. H. White, Yukio Mishima, even James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov (the former in the use of multiple languages and etymologies, the latter in the self-witnessing voice of obsession). Davidson’s word choice is continually surprising and original, and he’s not afraid to take the most risky leap of faith, and he’s just about never makes a false step.
Irony and witty nihilism are set against wonder, grace and prayer; wry sarcasm is set against indomitable epiphanies and acts of courage, selfless sacrifice, and atonement. In that sense the narrator’s muddle of antithetical emotions and belief systems fuels a suspense that becomes a window through which the darkest and bleakest visions pass alongside visions worthy of Meister Eckhart (who is also a character in the story and under whose epigraph The Gargoyle was written).
The Guide to Cinema is regularly updated with new films: http://www.richardgrossinger.com/2010/03/a-guide-to-cinema/ See righthand column for this under Life.
Here are the most recent films added in 2011:
Biutiful, directed by Alejándro González Iñárratu (2010). Alejándro González Iñárratu opened and closed his film Biutiful in a snowy forest of bare trees. The main character Uxbal, played by Javier Bardem, is approached by a young man. When we see the scene for the first time, we do not know who these people are or what is transpiring between them. In fact Uxbal has just died, and the young man who approaches him resembles the father he never met. In flight from Franco a generation earlier, Uxbal’s father left his wife (and Spain) and arrived in Mexico, only to die there three weeks later at the age of twenty of pneumonia. His embalmed body, shipped back to Barcelona and buried, was exhumed for cremation as part of a cemetery relocation within the time-span of the film. Uxbal gets to see him a second time as a mummy.
The story considers the weight of a life in the context of the the memory of the dead by the living, as well as vice versa: how the dead will recognize each other without their bodies.
Biutiful did not actually open in the forest. The scene was preceded by a brief anomaly a flash-forward from just before Uxbal’s death when he gave his daughter, a girl of about ten, his own mother’s ring. Afterwards he pleaded with her to stare at his face and promise not to forget him. The actual request occurs in the the body of the film’s narrative, not in its prologue, which has only the hands, father’s and daughter’s, and the ring changing fingers. He did not make a similar request of his son Matteo, a boy of about six at the time.
Just before Uxbal’s death, the terminally ill father visits his son, finds him sobbing on the bed and, though ordinarily gruff, comforts him. Matteo has been punished and denied a trip with his sister and mother (Uxbal’s estranged wife) to see the snowy woods of the Pyrenees.
So the young man at the beginning of Biutiful is not—or not only— Uxbal’s father frozen at twenty but his son, Matteo, grown up. But how does Uxbal recognize Matteo when he last saw him at six? How does he know that the youth that so resembles his father is not his father?
Matteo’s unique and timeless signal is the forest and snow, a phantom enegetic reality made of symbols, symbols that Uxbal will forever identify with Matteo because they represent an absence the needs to be filled—an unfulfilled trip to the Pyrneees. A very beautiful brown-and-white owl is lying dead on the snow, its feathers rustling in the breeze. As Matteo approaches, he says the exact words he will say (or had already said) at six, “Do you know that when owls die they spit a hairball out of their beak?”
Uxbal completes the encrypted exchange by saying that the sound of the ocean scared him as a child because he was afraid of the bottom of the sea and the things that live there.
It is not a real dead owl either.
The Fighter, directed by David O. Russell (2010). This movie is a lot about Reality, but it is neither Reality TV nor Cinema Verite. Mark Wahlberg, Christian Baile, Melissa Leo, Amy Adams, and crew reconstruct the extended families of Lowell, Mass. boxer half-brothers Dicky Ecklund and Mickey Ward. They do this onsite in Lowell with the “originals” present as models and to help reenact historical reality on the spot (and to be in the film as extras). The different layers of the real and the acted meld brilliantly to produce something that is beyond real (and certainly beyond the illusion reality of Reality TV and lives on websites) and also beyond just acting, though it is consummate acting. It is a gem, a perfect piece of complex art working at many levels–as classic and Shakespearean as it is avant-garde and Warholian. It also has that exquisite, irreplaceable texture of lower-class Eastern Massachusetts that permeates Good Will Hunting, Outside Providence, The Town, and numerous other Matt Damon/Ben Affleck dramas. Adams does a picture-perfect University of Rhode Island dropout bar skank with a heart of fire (and gold). Various actresses play the chorus of Ecklund/Ward sisters (and they are legion) as if this were Sophocles or Euripides. Leo captures the the fighters’ fierce, narcissistic, vulgar, outrageous but devoted mother—my favorite scene is her duet with Baile/Ecklund, reenacting together the BeeGees’ “I Started a Dream” to defuse tension in a car.
White Irish Drinkers, directed by John Gray (2010). The year is 1975, the setting is Brooklyn. The moment that I knew this was going to be a special film was when the family’s younger son Brian, a college-age teenager not in college, gets together with his three long-time neighborhood buddies, one of whom has enrolled in college for computers, and the attention focuses on a particular girl (Leslie Murphy) at the bar. Brian, played brilliantly by Nick Thurston, likes her but felt ignored by her in high school, so he isn’t one of the guys going over to hang with or hit on her. Instead he goes to the bar’s outside-facing store-front window and, in the steam on the inside of the glass, slowly paints an astonishingly accurate portrait of her. One by one, people start to notice, and eventually the whole bar is watching as the camera focuses on her stunned abashed face in the center. The second most remarkable moment is Thurston’s and Murphy’s one love scene, which begins with them running naked in the graveyard and ends with one of the best simulations of passionate fucking in cinema history (at least my history of viewing). But it doesn’t quite end there. It ends with her looking at his paintings and trying to explain to him that he’s got something special, and then walking out abruptly before she can fall in love. The evolution of interactions between Thurston and Geoff Wigdor (who plays his brother Danny) is also powerful, culminating with each of their admissions of what the other means to him. They both play it just right, articulation bursting out of (mostly) inarticulateness (like early Brando). Karen Allen has grown from the teen siren in The Wanderers to the mother and trapped in White Irish Drinkers, but she brings that same fresh spirit to her role. The life of this film is the heart of its characters and the fact that they all have good hearts, even the nastiest or most banal of them. The dialogue, rhythm, pacing, and sound track are also pretty much without a false step.
The Future, directed by Miranda July (2011). As Miranda’s father, I can say that she seems to have been born with a sense of how to move in and out of time, and also how to stop time. That’s why the movie Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeves and Jane Alexander became so special to her in adolescence; it awoke her innate power over time. This is a film in which all different slices of time and reality intersection and fuse in a symphony that is completely real and also a parable. A local LA man interviewed by Miranda for a piece on Pennysaver vendors ends up playing himself in the film, and not only playing his real-life role as seller of a $3 hair-drier but the voice of the Moon, which is totally involved in the stopping of time. The movie’s cat also speaks in Miranda’s voice both inside and outside of time. Miranda has also imbedded the cat and herself twice (herself as the cat’s voice and as the lead actress, and the cat as the cat we (her parents) had before we were married and well before she was born, and herself as our unborn child speaking in the voice of a cat, giving us needed advice from outside of time). But I don’t mean to imply that this is all tricks and aliases and symbols; it is completely a film of the heart adorned with brilliantly intuited metaphysics. I also pick up echoes of Prelude to a Kiss (which Miranda saw but didn’t remember when making The Future) and The Fantastics (which she never saw but which played the role of the The Future for us, her parents).
Source Code, directed by Duncan Jones (2011). This is an intricate, perfectly structured labyrinth of time travel qua alternate realities. A continuous eight-minute loop of reality from a dead man’s brain is re-run inside another dead man’s brain in such a way that the second man’s consciousness is restored (though he has no idea how the hell he got inside a commuter train entering Chicago and as a different person from how he was last aware of himself flying a helicopter around Khyber Pass, Afghanistan). According to the technology’s Dr. Frankenstein-like inventor, alternate source codes are created through “quantum mechanics and parabolic calculus.” Needless to say, actual science is nowhere close to such an application, but this is a cautionary tale.
The practical goal of the particular “source code” insertion (we eventually find out) is to prevent a second terrorist bombing, the first explosion having just occurred, resulting in the death of the man carrying the “code,” whose extracted memory traces have just been implanted in a new carrier’s brain—the eight-minute track that always ends with the blast. The memory transplantee, a trained soldier, has been sent in to sort through the virtual landscape and find the perpetrator, but his brain is running someone else’s recording.
Once inside the code, he can alter “hard” objects—cell phones, guns, his train ticket, the people around him—but none of these realities are “real,” not even the capsule in which he gets debriefed before and after each eight-minute mission, not even the explosion that does occur at the end of each segment (returning him to his “capsule” and setting the terms for his next reinsertion until he can finger the perp). They are memories, already past and complete. The capsule is his brain’s adaptation to its situation, its compensation for not having a body or moving in an actual external environment; it is a projection of reality across the brain itself, using projections from reality into itself. The landscape and events of the mission may have been transferred into his brain from another brain, but they are recreated by binding, cross-cueing, and dialogue in his brain.
But how is our own “real reality” different from an appearance archived in our brain? Source Code simply takes this notion to its natural conclusion.
Initially the point of the assignment is not to stop the original attack, which can’t be stopped because it has already happened, but to get information in order to prevent another, more serious bombing.
The reason that the mission can be run countless times (in the sense of playing a different episode with the same characters and props) is that each of the people within the eight-minute memory track has independent existence and free will, while the “source code” can be reinstalled and run as many times as necessary to find the bad guy.
By the end of the story we understand that each playback has its own ongoing energy basis and integrity and cannot be violated or expunged. The pilot, involuntarily enlisted, decides finally to buy into an alternate reality; he breaks ranks and takes independent action in order to save his new “self” and the girl seated across from him (both of whom are already dead in the original source code). He literally escapes into the archive of his own brain, which becomes reality.
The Tree of Life, directed by Terence Malick (2011). Three Quick Things:
- The experience of childhood was proposed and shot from within a form resembling the actual sensation and phenomenology of existence on this planet, so was a stark and ecstatic rendering of a psychospiritual fact without ever calling attention to it.
- That family experience was set against the mystery of the cosmic frame in which it arises and into which it vanishes, which was offered not as a metaphor but an explicit and evident thing beyond our ken, but not beyond hermetic intimation and intuition: “As Above, So Below.”
- Like Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Malick concluded in the only way either of them could have, by breaking with the space-time continuum and letting everything happen at once such that each moment is eternal and a manifestation of the one unity truth.
Family
My Wife: Lindy Hough had a new collection of selected poems come out in the spring of 2011. It is her first book since 1976 and is called Wild Horses, Wild Dreams. Check it out:
It also has a video trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PG3FF3Mysw
My Daughter: Miranda July’s new movie is The Future: http://thefuturethefuture.com/.
My Son: Robin Grossinger is writing a book on tNapa County for University of California Press publication in spring 2012:Napa Valley Historical Ecology Atlas.
My Son-in-Law: Mike Mills’ new movie is Beginners: http://www.focusfeatures.com/profile/mike_mills
Travel Considerations:
These are places that Lindy and I would like to go in the next few years. We won’t get to all of them but hopefully some. Trips are challenging for us (as per the journals on this website), and we’d be interested in any local contacts, hopefully ones leading to readings, talks, or time with local writers, artists, psychospiritual practitioners, etc., or just friends and/or readers. Please write me.
Main list: Turkey, Greece, Ireland, Croatia.
Secondary list: Scandinavia, Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, Portugal, Jamaica (for reggae)