16 December 2003: Taboo

On Saturday morning my monitor died. No, not the lizard. I don’t even own a lizard. I mean the monitor that was hooked up to my computer to make it useful for something other than producing a faint humming sound. My monitor was an ancient, second-hand CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) dinosaur that took up much of the surface of my desk and weighed about 100 pounds. I’d had it for years. The clarity of the picture it gave was amazing, right up until Saturday, when suddenly there was no picture at all.

They don’t make monitors like that anymore. Getting it repaired would have taken a whole lot of time and probably almost as much money as a new monitor, and it might not even have been repairable. So I went to yoga and when I got home I walked over to my local Macintosh store and bought one of those newfangled flat-screen monitors. The screen is the same size as the screen on my old monitor, but this new monitor only weighs about 5 pounds. It takes up so little space that I can now draw comfortably at my desk, or write longhand, or do those other things that people traditonally do on the surfaces of desks. I can even pick the monitor up, move it out of the way, and set up my lightboard, if I ever do another nondigital illustration project.

But the picture sucks.

Yep. Turns out this flat-screen monitor, supposedly one of the best available models, just doesn’t give as good a picture as the old CRTs. see, the little dots that make up the picture on the CRT monitors glowed with such intensity that they gave the illusion of blurring together into one solid picture, with smooth lines and curves. But on the flat-screen, the dots don’t glow as much, unless I turn the Brightness so far up that it bleaches out all the color and makes everything illegible. At a good level of Brightness and Contrast, the dots, if one looks very closely, can be seen as distinct dots, separated from one another by an extremely fine grid. The result is a picture with very poor line quality. It looks low-res. Small font sizes are hard to read. Edges look pixilated and jaggedy. Feh. Not looking forward to trying to adapt my obsessively detail-oriented style of Photoshop work to this thing.

On the other hand, whatever gave the old CRT monitor its beautiful luminosity would probably also have given me brain cancer eventually.

More search terms from my referrer logs:

• nasrudin lamp

• fire monkey shot

• landmark forum dangerous

• statue of liberty sambuca

• clowns porn

• how am i supposed to hallucinate

• training a monkey by whipping them

That last one rather distressed me. My site frequented by monkey abusers? This is almost as bad as those pederast clowns. In case that misguided soul who is considering whipping a monkey (and I pray that it’s only at the “considering” stage) returns to this site again, or in case any other monkey abusers or potential monkey abusers find their way here, let me make my position on this issue clear once and for all, with this public service announcement:

Do not whip your monkey! Do not attempt to train monkeys by inflicting any sort of pain or injury upon them! It is cruel, wrong, hateful, uncool, and not terribly effective, and they tend to retaliate by flinging feces at you, which would serve you right, you big meanie.

If you must, it’s okay to spank your monkey on occasion, as long as you do it in private and not too hard. If it starts making unhappy shrieking noises, it’s probably best to stop.

Sunday night was the fifth session of the Initiations lab. Zap has indeed dropped out of the lab. But our numbers, and the gender balance, have been somewhat restored by the addition of two new women to the group. It’s peculiar having new people come in a quarter of a way through the lab. When the lab started, I could see the difference between those whose movements were genuinely emerging from a connection and commitment to the forces we were working with, and those who just moved well because they had a lot of theatre and movement training. The new people appear very much to be of the latter sort, and the way they stand out as such served as a dramatic illustration of how much everyone has learned in four sessions. That is, watching them miss the point (by just playacting and falling back on the movement skills they’re already good at) provided a contrast that enabled me to recognize that no one else in the group was regularly falling into that sort of habit anymore.

Note to Self: Pay attention to the difference between embodying the force I’m connecting to, and embodying my reactions to that force. Strive to shift the balance toward the former.

This is the first lab in which I feel like a paratheatrical black belt (black belt level, as I’ve witnessed and experienced it in aikido, is where one has integrated the basic form deeply enough that one can begin to discover the levels of work that the form was designed to access).

In a standard group polarity ritual, one half of the room is dedicated to one force, and the other half to another force that could be construed as a polar opposite of the first force (e.g., Masculine and Feminine, or Death and Birth). In this lab, we’ve been doing an interesting variation that lends itself well to the chaotic grace of this unusually large group: instead of suggesting a polarity to work with, Sherpa will suggest three polarities, and each person silently chooses for themselves which one he or she will be doing. Further, each person chooses which side of the room is which for them. So one person could be doing Death on the north side of the room, and Birth on the south, while another person is doing Birth on the north and Death on the south, and yet another is doing, say, Order on the north and Chaos on the south.

A marvellous little interaction developed between Salamander and I this time. That’s one of the goals of this work: uncontrived asocial interactions that emerge spontaneously from the participants’ commitment to staying true to the forces being worked with – i.e., not people interacting as social entities, but people interacting in their capacity as the vessels of interacting forces. Which actually describes nearly all human interaction – but in these labs we do it intentionally, and thus get a choice about which forces we’re serving... which is, in my view, one of the primary goals of sorcery, or magic, or the Work, or whatever it is you prefer to call it.

Anyway, Salamander and I both chose the polarity of Nourishing/Toxic. Salamander designated the north side of the rooom as Nourishing and the south as Toxic, and I went with the opposite designations. on the south side of the room, Salamander was going through and agonized dance of Toxicity, like he was trying to cough up an incredibly vast resevoir of Toxin from within him. I was doing my Nourishing dance, an arms-open happy humming sort of thing in which I was drawing immensely healthy and satisfying Nourishment from everything around me. Salamander approached me, and suddenly we were face to face, and I was drawing warm life-giving Nourishment from the Toxicity he was exuding. The energy of the space was Toxic to him, and Nourishing to me, so he gave it to me. And then, a short time later, we met on the other side of the room and did the exact same interaction with the roles reversed.

Another ritual: small area of light in an otherwise darkened room. The area of light is designated as the Known; the rest of the room is the Unknown. Everyone starts out standing on the border between light and darkness, facing into the light. None of my experiences in this ritual seem worth recounting right now, but I’m noting the setup here because it’s a good ritual setup and I want to remember it for later.

The big initiatic experience of the night followed the same pattern as my other more initiatic experiences in ths lab so far. That is, it involved entering increased freedom at the price of shedding some measure of vanity or self-importance (in chronicling my lab experiences, I’m tending to use the term vanity to mean not “liking how one looks in the mirror,” but rather the sin of Pride, the whole shtick that made Lucifer fall from Nirvana and fuels most human evil – the thing that Castaneda terms “self-importance”).

A core polarity is beginning to be revealed here: Freedom/Vanity.

Sunday’s big experience of this came from a ritual exercise that was very specifically intended to address the Freedom/Vanity issue. In this exercise, Sherpa instructed us to explore our Movement Taboos. Wow! What liberating fun, being in a room with 13 or 14 other people, all of us running around making all the movements and gestures we’d be most embarassed to be seen making!

Here were some of mine:

Throwing screaming, whining tantrums (As a kid, I used to scream my head off when I got hurt – not so much because of the pain, which I actually had a fairly high tolerance for, as out of rage at the injustice of the universe, plus an entirely mistaken and unjustified certainty that those adults charged with my care didn’t love or even like me, and would only tend my wounds if I were so loud that it was impossible for them to ignore me. On the threshold of puberty I realized how pathetic and infantile this was, embarked on a harsh but effective program of teaching myself to “take it like a man,” and for a long time afterwards cringed in embarassment at the memory of my childhood histrionics.)

The squirming motions of a small child who has to piss really bad and is desperately trying not to wet his pants. (I had many uncomfortable opportunities to practice these motions as a small child, plus a few embarassing pants-wetting incidents. The funny thing is that as far as I can recall, none of this discomfort stemmed from my being prevented or in any way discouraged from simply going and using the toilet. My parents’ house had a perfectly functional, unscary, indoor bathroom, conveniently located within easy walking distance of the other rooms. I don’t remember even the meanest of my Kindergarten teachers ever denying a kid permission to run off to the bathroom, which was just down the hall. But for some reason, I operated on this unspoken assumption that it was best to put off going to the bathroom for as long as possible. I don’t know where this notion came from. I was a strange kid. Like the previous item, this one’s a taboo of the “I can’t believe I used to do that” sort.)

A rapid, stomping walk, head down, shoulders hunched – a walk both angry and defensive (This was how I walked until I started practicing aikido – another ghost of movements past.)

Flinching, cringing“victim” body language

Various convulsive, twitching, repetitive spastic motions, especially of the head and neck (I’m prone to these – autism or some related thing – but I keep them fairly small and mild, so that they’re just a part of my general quirkiness. There have been times – especially when I was doing too much cannabis, and when I was doing speed – that these movements have gotten more extreme, and gone from being quirky to having the sort of spastic village idiot quality that can severely impact one’s mating and employment opportunities. So this one was sort of a “ghost of movements past” one also, but mostly it was about “what I really don’t want to turn into, and could turn into if I lived the wrong way.”)

Campy, stereotypically “gay” or “effeminate” body language - mincing walk, limp-wristed hand-flapping (From the glimpses I caught of what the others were doing, variations of this came up for all of the males in the group – and this is far, far from being a sexist or homophobic bunch of people, compared with the vast majority of humans. Ah, the joys of insidious enculturation!)

Deeply scratching my butt-crack (Felt great!)

Deeply picking my nose (I’ve got horribly sensitive sinuses, so I often have to blow my nose or scratch it in public – but that’s very different from really picking it. I mean, even in private, I don’t shove my fingertips up in there. So it was quite an adventure. Got more than half the length of my index finger up one nostril. I didn’t eat any boogers, though.)

Oy, I’ve written the whole morning away. Time to eat (not boogers) and do some homework.

"True freedom is to have no vanity."  - Beppo, in Turturro's Illuminata