9 January 2004: Pieces

The Lovely Loopy Luscious Lexicat wrote to me yesterday and said:

Hey: what do you mean by vanity when you write? It is not at all clear to me.

Good question.

In doing the sort of work I’m doing here, I’ve found it useful to avoid attachment to preconceptions. I’m exploring, experiencing, experimenting. Making an ongoing inquiry. This is, after all, a lab.

There is a phenomenon that I am exploring. It is easier to talk and write about my explorations if I give this phenomenon a name. I chose the name Vanity because, in this lab, the first manifestations of the phenomenon that I became aware of consisted of a set of mental and emotional behaviors in myself that I regarded as being similar to behaviors described in many works of literature, art, and philosophy from many cultures. The writers who have best described these behaviors have tended to refer to them by such terms as pride, vanity, and self-importance. Of the traditional terms, Vanity was the one that most appealed to my aesthetic, and seemed most suited to my purposes – partly because it was open to a broad range of interpretations, and thus would allow my inquiry as broad a scope as I was likely to need.

For the duration of the lab, my working definition of Vanity is intentionally tautological: Vanity is that which I am exploring in my inquiry into Vanity. This isn’t very useful for purposes of you and I having a conversation about Vanity as a concept, but it’s the most useful possible definition in the context of ritual exploration.

As you well know, dearest Lexy-loo, I have the maddening habit of using spatial metaphors to talk about spiritual concepts. Here’s one now: Vanity is the territory that I am exploring. I know what “Vanity” means only in the same sense that Lewis and Clark knew, at the beginning of their famous expedition, what “the territory west of the Mississippi” meant.

When I woke up Tuesday morning, my sickness had abated from “flu-type feverish thingy” (I think that’s the proper medical term) to “bad cold.” I went to an early-afternoon yoga class and managed all of the poses that didn’t involve standing on one foot (the congestion in my head has been throwing my balance off).

Tuesday evening was session twelve of the Initiations lab. I was still far from being at full energy, especially since my congestion made it hard to get enough air into my lungs. I also found that the sinus and throat congestion inhibited vocalization.

Sherpa encouraged us all to work on finding ways to deepen our no-form. He placed heavy emphasis on no-form in the early stages of the evening, and suggested that we explore Personal Polarities that related in some way to no-form and to any resistances we had around no-form. That fit nicely into my ongoing exploration of Vanity. For surely the attachment to Selfhood, the resistance to dissolving into the Void, the resistance to being Nothing, is the deepest, most primal root of all Vanity?

[At this point in my writing of this entry, I launched into a lengthy digression on Lucifer, Vanity, sin, the Abyss, Daath, pi, the yin/yang symbol, the Great Work, zen, Shub-Niggurath, oceans, Choronzon, Inanna, being and non-being, Finnegan’s Wake, and the nature of the Self. Three hours and 14 paragraphs later, I realized that I was trying to explain a Mystery that by its nature could not be described in human language. Apparently, my recent initiatic experiences have quite literally taught me more than I can say. I deleted the entire thing and went to bed. So it goes.]

I went with the Personal Polarity of Vanity/Annhilation-of-the-Self-in-No-Form. I mean, why fuck around? And it did indeed get me to a whole new depth of no-form. The first thing that comes to mind to describe it is Dr. Manhattan’s description, in Watchmen, of his own disintegration: The light is taking me to pieces.

I felt like my consciousness had no fixed location, like I was a formless fog of vague awareness diffused around the room. And on the Vanity side, I was a Self, a discrete unit of consciouness with a fixed location and a body, flexing my hands and moving my spine, looking around, feeling very much like “Ha! Here I am! This is me, I exist, and outside of me is all that stuff that is not me.”

The group rituals in this session worked with the trinity of Victim/Persecutor/Savior. This is, I think, the fourth lab I’ve been in in which we’ve worked with this trinity. It’s a deep, rich, edgy trinity, carrying a hefty charge for just about everyone. It consistently produces a boiling stew of intense group interaction.

The ritual was constructed the same way as the Creation/Destruction/Nourishing trinity ritual described in my first entry of January 3rd: each person heads to either the Victim corner, the Persecutor corner, or the Savior corner, and begins developing his or her relationship with the source in question (i.e., Victim, Persecutor, or Savior). Then all the people in a given corner develop whatever sort of group connection best serves that corner’s source. Then people head out into the zone of interaction in the center.

First, we did a preperatory ritual in which we all got to go around and visit each corner, exploring each of the three sources. Then, when it was time to do the big interactive ritual, Sherpa instructed us to choose the corner where our experience in the preperatory ritual had been the most surprising. That was the Savior corner, for me. I really didn’t want to be on the Savior team. I wanted to be on the Victim team this time. This was partly because in the other three labs in which I’d participated in this ritual, I’d been either a Savior or a Persecutor, while I’d never tried the Victim role before. More than that, it was because the Victim role seemed to fit with the whole Inanna myth I’ve become so intrigued by.

(Unlike other killed and resurrected gods, Inanna falls squarely into the Victim category because she gains nothing from her death, for herself or anyone else. Odin sacrifices himself in order to gain wisdom and power that can only be gained that way, so he’s a Shaman rather than a Victim. Christ allows himself to be sacrificed for the salvation of humanity, so he’s a Savior. Inanna, on the other hand, is just trying to visit her sister Erishkigal, Goddess of the Underworld, to cheer her up. After voluntarily undergoing her ritual stripping and abasement (which is required of her by the Gatekeepers on Erishkigal’s orders) Inanna is summarily butchered by Erishkigal, simply because Erishkigal is in a foul mood. Getting her sister out of that foul mood is all that Inanna was trying to do in the first place, the whole reason she put up with all that hassle at the gates. But it doesn’t work. Erishkigal kills Inanna before she can even say hello, and isn’t even cheered up by doing it. At the end of the story, when Inanna is resurrected through another god’s intervention, Erishkigal is still in a foul mood, and Inanna doesn’t even get her stuff back.)

But much as I wanted to play on the Victim team this time, I knew that it wouldn’t be the honest choice, since the preperatory ritual had plainly shown me that the Savior corner had the most to teach me. And of course, the reason for this was obvious: the Savior role is the one most loaded with Vanity for me. There’s plenty of room for Vanity in the Persecutor and Victim roles as well, of course – but they’re not as loaded for me, personally, these days, simply because I’ve already done a lot of that work (I did a bunch of it in the Crux lab). The Victim corner would have been a cop-out for me, because at this point in my work, I could have done it without Vanity. It would have allowed me, for the duration of the ritual, to duck out of my commitment to exploring Vanity.

The Savior role, on the other hand, proved to be a motherlode of Vanity. The biggest challenge was staying true to the Savior source. I kept finding that I had drifted off course and turned into a Persecutor of Persecutors, which is what happens to most would-be Saviors in the everyday world (e.g., cops, terrorists, man-hating feminists, and so on). The only way to maintain integrity as Savior was to stop forming intentions to save, and instead to just focus completely on letting the source move me. To drop the Vanity of wanting to impose my will, and instead to just pray and dance.

Wednesday I still felt like I had a bad cold. Lots of upper respiratory congestion. Voice still hoarse, throat very irritated, coughing and sneezing up entire shoggoths.

Had another good aikido class. The new Fitness Director, whose job is to manage all of us instructors, came to try out my class, and had a great time. Very cool. First Fitness Director we’ve had who’s actually got on the mat to find out what it is I do. She’s about a decade younger than me. Now that that generation is out of college, I’ve been meeting more of them, and I think most of the ones I’ve met are shaping up to be very pleasant grownups. Much sweeter temperaments than most of my generation. I’m that sweet now, but I sure wasn’t a decade ago.

Yesterday morning my appetite was back, and I felt a lot better – except for my upper respiratory stuff, especially the sinuses, which were worse. At that point, I recognized (from far too much past experience) that my virus was now gone, but that it had left me with a sinus infection. I hate sinus infections. I get them almost every year, whenever I get sick. Called my loathesome Corporate Medical Entity to see if I was still covered. I was. The chronically slothful bookkeeping/payroll guy at my old job had made up for all those late paychecks by being just as slow about shutting off my benefits.

The loathesome Corporate Medical Entity is also slow, a bloated and complacent beast. They just told me that I won’t get my antibiotics until tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’ve still got shoggoths in my nose.

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Y, did yoga, and had a good meeting with the Fitness Director about the new class I’m developing.

Today I had lunch with Sherpa, and we talked about the ritual performance piece that will be developing out of the rich material unearthed in the Initiations lab. There are four more sessions of the lab to go. Then a week or so off, and then those of us who will be involved in the performance piece (about a dozen of us) will resume meeting on the same schedule, through February and early March. And then we’ll perform.

Off to shower and get some exercise.

My decade as a full-time college student starts in six days.