Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 32

Those wonderful Tarot aces

Tarot aces are powerful cards. Even so, I often think of them as similar to unborn children that, until birth and the unfolding of their lives are, pure potential as yet unknowable and unmanifest. In the Qabalistic Tree of Life, they are associated with Kether at the top of the tree which is also unknowable and unmanifest.

The aces represent the classic elements, Fire (Wands), Water (Cups), Air (Swords), and Earth (Disks). So, when one appears in a reading, as something unmanifest of course, you know that Fire elements are generally seen as creative and imaginative, Water as emotion and feeling, Air as intellectual and logical, and Earth as material and the body.

So, what we see at first glance is that the ace of a suit represents possibilities within the realm of its classic element that unimpeded end up as the princess of that suit. (As DuQuette says in his Thoth tarot book, we worship the ace and adore the princess.) Inasmuch as the aces are usually considered the roots/seeds of the powers of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth, the numbered–as yet to manifest cards–are contained within their aces rather than below them in some hierarchy.

As the initial potential on the Tree of Life exists within Kether (the crown or point) and is not manifest until the sephira Chokmah, the potential with an ace is not manifest prior to the two of the suit. The progression through the numbered cards is the same as the progression through the sephira of the Tree of Life. Suffice it to say, understanding the energy of each sephira as well as the paths between them, helps us understand the cards.

I agree with those who say that reading cards is primarily intended to help one develop his/her psychic abilities rather than predicting the future. Either way, I think a lot of readers have trouble with the aces because dealing with potentialities seems foggier than working with where that potential first arrived in the world we can see, hear, taste, and touch.  That is, we see potential as uncertainty rather than a direction.

I identify strongly with the classic element of Air, most especially the knight (king in most decks), and appreciate the possible futures associated with the Swords suit. Each of us, I think, has a suit of preference. We know it intuitively. The challenge for the reader is applying the intuition that comes so easily for one ace to the aces of the other three suits.

–Malcolm

You create your own reality: that idea is a hard sell

Some people say we–as individuals and groups–create our own reality. And by this, I mean the literal reality we experience rather than the more limited (but true) idea that we control how we view and react to reality.

The belief that we create the future we’re stepping into is a hard sell because, in part, nobody wants to take responsibility for fabricating a “bad things happen to good people” world for themselves. My response to that is usually, then create a reality in which bad things don’t happen.

This subject has been on my mind for a lifetime and, quite likely, many lifetimes. Since it’s a belief and not an avocation, I don’t have (or want) the kinds of credentials or resume that leading proponents of this belief such as Robert Lanza can bring to a debate. I don’t even remember when I first stumbled across the concept, though I think it was in high school. But it’s always made sense to me even though it’s never good to tell others that such things make sense to me.

I don’t want to go through life fielding questions like: “So Malcolm, what you’re saying is that if a person is killed in a terrible car accident, they created that accident?”

Yes, I am.

The idea that something like that could be true is senseless if one believes life is what it appears to be: you’re born,  you do various things, you die, and that’s all she wrote. This belief seems so flawed to me, I don’t know where to begin. But it’s the consensus, I think, even for those who devoutly believe in an afterlife.

But I think life is more complex than the idea that we only have one life so we best make the most of it.

Yes, we should make the most of it, though I think we’ll be back. And part of making the most of it is learning how to cope with the realities we create. I have no need to convince you of this, though I do think it’s worth pondering.

—Malcolm

Mother’s Day Thoughts

My mother’s life was, I hope and believe, a happy one, most especially her rich and enduring marriage, though truth be told, I was a volatile child and she might well have thought on multiple occasions that I was the fly in the ointment. To her credit, she supported my hobbies, projects, and writing, so  I suspect she had a forgiving heart, and though she never knew it, she was the primary reason I chose not to emigrate to Sweden where I would be safe from the draft and the Vietnam War and potentially never see my parents or brothers again.

I’ve always liked this picture, though I have no idea when or where it was taken. She was a farmer’s daughter. Perhaps that’s why the picture resonates with me from the family archives where it sits with others from the decade in which I was born.

Mother was born and died during times of family hardship.

Her mother died the year she was born: typhoid from contaminated water from the family’s well. Her father remarried and subsequently mother had a younger sister who was born with spina bifida and lived only six years. Mother would have been twelve, I think, when Betty Jane died. The family home was destroyed by fire when Mother was eight.

Mother died of a heart attack when she was seventy-two, a condition she hid from my brothers and me while she was looking after our bedridden eighty-three-year-old father. She wanted to keep him in the house they knew, and while this was wonderful support borne of that giving heart, it strained finances and probably shortened her life.

Among the other slings and arrows of family life with a husband and three boys who were pratical jokesters, mother learned to laugh and (I hope) take pleasure from our shennanigans. She had a habit, for example, during Sunday dinner or saving the last piece of meat on her plate for the  last bite. Since we ate this meal in the dining room, she came and went from the kitchen multiple times bringing more iced tea or Parker House rolls. While she was gone from the table, I tended to hide that last piece of meat. When she couldn’t find it, there was first confusion because she remembered leaving it there, and then a smile when she realized that some low-life person had hidden it (usually me).

Every year she placed a manger scene on the mantle, and every year, something unusual appeared in it, usually a tiger or some other critter that didn’t belong there. Her loud exclamation of surprise was they moment we were waiting for. Suffice it to say, the missing piece of meat and the tiger in the manger scene did not represent the totality of weird moments that happened around the house. She took them all in stride and that fact, above all others, is what I remember the most today thirty seven years after she left this world for a better place even though our home was usually filled with laughter.

–Malcolm

If we stick our heads in the sand, maybe the oceans won’t rise enough to drown us

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

As for climate change, what do you think? Is it an excuse for more goverwent overreach, dire predictions from environmental groups who want your donations, or the reality we all face?

Let’s suppose NASA developed a shuttle system to transport people to a distant planet that is more or less exactly like Earth was before we screwed it up. I wonder how many people would leave.

Would you?

I don’t think I would, but I suppose there would be a long line of people looking for a cheap and easy fix. That is, to leave the sinking ship.

I remember the title of a long-ago novel called Earth Abides. Personally, I think the earth will last, though most of us may not be here to see it. It’s just easier to keep doing what we’re doing. That’s my  guess. As George Stewart wrote, “Men go and come, but earth abides.”

Let’s suppose we believe Earth is bigger than the problems we have wrought, does that justify continuing to destroy it? Or, is it easier to keep destroying it and let the end come when it will?

We should be smarter than that, allowing the world to go down hill into chaos, but I wonder if we are.

What do you think?

–Malcolm

Gallimaufry for the Seventh of May

Let’s get this out of the way first. No, I did not watch the coronation. I saw Elizabeth’s, first on news reels and later on television, and didn’t have the stamina to go through the pomp and circumstance again. My wife watched it at the far end of the house. She says it went well, though since Charles I and Charles II didn’t fare as well as some English monarchs, one might have thought today’s Charles would be supersitious about the same. Apparently not.My wife continues to go to physical therapy once a week to “fix” the hand that was rendered crippled by a tech at her doctor’s office who hit a nerve while drawing blood. So far, we are paying for all this. I think the doctor’s office should be paying for all this. It appears she will need PT for some time unless there’s a miracle breakthrough. Meanwhile, her right hand isn’t vey efficient at anything.According to Gretchen A. Peck, in an article for Editor & Publisher Magazine, “While … champions for local news have been hard at work, powerful forces have been running a counteroffensive — undermining the press, impeding access and making it easier for members of the public and political class to sue news organizations.” It’s one thing to say reporters’ rights are secure; it’s another to tell that to the a cop while he’s taking you into custody or otherwise impeding your work as a reporter. We need to reaffirm the necessity of a free press.A digestive ailment has forced me to eat bananas (gag) and stop drinking coffee (yikes). By the way, plain yogurt really tastes bad.Original Cast

Every few years or so, we miss the TV shows from one network or another because the local affiliate is fighting with DISH network over money. This year, we’re missing ABC shows. That means no “Grey’s Anatomy” just as the main character more or less leaves the show.  Since we’ve been watching the show since it began in 2005, it feels like family members have been kidnapped now that we’re missing episodes. It seems like we need to sue somebody, but I guess we’d have to prove damages other than the angst of having the program missing from our weekly schedule.

On top of that, we missed this week’s episode of “Survivor” because the local station pre-empted it to cover a breaking news story. Sigh.

–Malcolm

‘The President’ by Miguel Ángel Asturias

“Neither Gabriel García Márquez nor Mario Vargas Llosa had yet been born when the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias began to write his first novel, El Señor Presidente, in December 1922. He labored on it for a decade while living in self-imposed exile in Paris, then returned home when the Great Depression left him strapped for money, only to find that his work was unpublishable because the dictator whose reign it portrayed had given way to an even more cruel and oppressive one. When he finally self-published the novel in Mexico in 1946, it was riddled with typographical errors, and a definitive edition did not appear until 1952.” – Larry Rohter in The Inventor of Magical Realism

From the Publisher

“Winner! Nobel Prize for Literature. Guatemalan diplomat and writer Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974) began this award-winning work while still a law student. It is a story of a ruthless dictator and his schemes to dispose of a political adversary in an unnamed Latin American country usually identified as Guatemala. The book has been acclaimed for portraying both a totalitarian government and its damaging psychological effects. Drawing from his experiences as a journalist writing under repressive conditions, Asturias employs such literary devices as satire to convey the government’s transgressions and surrealistic dream sequences to demonstrate the police state’s impact on the individual psyche. Asturias’s stance against all forms of injustice in Guatemala caused critics to view the author as a compassionate spokesperson for the oppressed. “My work,” Asturias promised when he accepted the Nobel Prize, “will continue to reflect the voice of the people, gathering their myths and popular beliefs and at the same time seeking to give birth to a universal consciousness of Latin American problems.”

Critics note that while living in Paris,  he was greatly influenced by the surrealists and that this led not only to the structure of his work but his influence over subsequent authors’ understanding of the role of indigenous cultures in “real life” and fiction as well as the value of mixing fantasy into an otherwise realistic work.

Wikipedia notes that, “Critics compare his fiction to that of Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and William Faulkner because of the stream-of-consciousness style he employed” while Nahum Megged writes that his protagonists are those who are in harmony with nature and the antagonists are those who are out of sync with the natural world.

I do believe that in spite of his Nobel Prize, he is often overlooked when the origins of magical realism are discussed.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell’s novels are written in the magical realism and contemporary fantasy genres. You can find them listed here.

‘They’ are coming for your grits

Rolling Fork, Mississippi, May 5, 2023, Star-Gazer News Service – While nobody knows for sure who “they” are, it was announced here today in the Mississippi Delta that “they” are coming for your grits, the sacred boiled cornmeal that defines the soul of everything holy from the from deep Texas to the outlier suburbs of the nation’s capital.

They already came for your guns, your books, and your gas stoves, but that wasn’t enough, according to Libertarian Think tanks, to subdue the remains of the South, the fall-guy region for everything “they” claim is wrong with this country. To subdue the South, “they” also needed the food that defines the South, the precious gift from the Mvskoke Nation in time out of mind.

“They” don’t precisely know what grits are, but most of “them” saw the movie “True Grit” and think that Mattie and U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn ate grits three times a day to get their courage and their resolve, the last things “they” want fueling Southern men and women in a day and time when “they” prefer differing points of view to be banned because points of view make some people uncomfortable.

Grits Commissioner Ned Pepper told reporters that grits trucks would begin “raking in grits” at every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse where grits are suspected to be stored on July 4th, 2023.

“We’re going to get your grits because the country can no longer abide a food considered ‘Coarse meal’ any more than we can abide coarse words or ideas that make anyone uncomfortable,” Pepper said.

According to informed sources at the Grit Commission Office, people, in general, are scared of grits and believe they are delivered to addicted Southerners in conjure bags after being hexed by Satan’s minions in piney woods hoodoo rituals that defy recent revisions to the Bill of Rights that allow “they/them” to interpret the country’s raison dêtre more creatively than the Founding Fathers thought possible.

“We’re going to become a homogenized hashed browns nation from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters,” they said.

–Story by Jock Stewart, Special Investigative Reporter.

‘They ‘ are coming for your grits

Rolling Fork, Mississippi, May 5, 2023, Star-Gazer News Service – While nobody knows for sure who “they” are, it was announced here today in the Mississippi Delta that “they” are coming for your grits, the sacred boiled cornmeal that defines the soul of everything holy from the from deep Texas to the outlier suburbs of the nation’s capital.

They already came for your guns, your books, and your gas stoves, but that wasn’t enough, according to Libertarian Think tanks, to subdue the remains of the South, the fall-guy region for everything “they” claim is wrong with this country. To subdue the South, “they” also needed the food that defines the South, the precious gift from the Mvskoke Nation in time out of mind.

“They” don’t precisely know what grits are, but most of “them” saw the movie “True Grit” and think that Mattie and U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn ate grits three times a day to get their courage and their resolve, the last things “they” want fueling Southern men and women in a day and time when “they” prefer differing points of view to be banned because points of view make some people uncomfortable.

Grits Commissioner Ned Pepper told reporters that grits trucks would begin “raking in grits” at every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse where grits are suspected to be stored on July 4th, 2023.

“We’re going to get your grits because the country can no longer abide a food considered ‘Coarse meal’ any more than we can abide coarse words or ideas that make anyone uncomfortable,” Pepper said.

According to informed sources at the Grit Commission Office, people, in general, are scared of grits and believe they are delivered to addicted Southerners in conjure bags after being hexed by Satan’s minions in piney woods hoodoo rituals that defy recent revisions to the Bill of Rights that allow “they/them” to interpret the country’s raison dêtre more creatively than the Founding Fathers thought possible.

“We’re going to become a homogenized hashed browns nation from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters,” they said.

–Story by Jock Stewart, Special Investigative Reporter.

Goulash for Sunday, April 30

At a time when America is divided angry, and impatient, I hold fast to a favorite quote from Lon Milo DuQuette that applies to learning magic (or anything else) requiring long-time diligence: “The magical secret to learning more than I now know is in my ability to become someone who is more than I now am.” The quote comes from his book (one of many), Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. Those of you who’ve read this blog for a while know that I swear by the Thoth Tarot, though on days when I’m not patient, I’m tempted to swear at it.I also swear at waiters who serve me ice-cold red wine. The clown who started that fad needs to be given a lifetime sentence de-stemming pinot noir grapes while wearing a blindfold. On a lighter note, I’ve been enjoying room-temperature red whine while re-reading Ruta Sepetys’ wonderful New Orleans novel Out of the Easy about a young woman (Josie) who works in a bookshop and cleans a whore house while trying to survive and save money for Smith College. In a starred review, Kirkus calls the book immensely satisfying, noting that, “There are some meaningful messages here: that love can come from the unlikeliest of sources—the rough-and-tumble brothel madam is much more supportive of Josie than her mother ever was—and that we are all in control of our own destinies if only we choose to be. With a rich and realistic setting, a compelling and entertaining first-person narration, a colorful cast of memorable characters and an intriguing storyline, this is a surefire winner.For those of you who like spy movies and series, the Guardian loves”Citadel” even though Wikipedia says that the critics’ views were mixed. The review, written by Lucy Mangan was headlined, Citadel review – this absurdly fun spy thriller is televisual crack. The subhead is: “Prime Video paid $250m for this spy caper. Is it worth it? You betcha. It’s Mission: Impossible meets The Bourne Identity – with twists, turns and Stanley Tucci. What addictive bliss.” I think it looks promising and far more interesting than “True Lies”(TV series), the weak copy of the original 1991 James Cameron film by the same name. As Mangan writes about “Citadel,” “Twists, turns, explosions, old-fashioned fisticuffs, the deployment of outrageous gadgetry from Acme’s Deus Ex Machina range, torture scenes, new locations (the Alps, London, all over the States, Paris, Spain, Iran – I may have missed a few in my delirious, glassy-eyed state), are parcelled out in one long, glorious stream. “I thought the Biden campaign knew I’m a Libertarian. And yet, they keep sending me e-mails asking if I’ve recently changed parties. No, I’ve been a Libertarian for decades. Okay, okay, maybe they remember that I worked on George McGovern’s campaign in 1972, but that was mostly about the War and the Establishment as viewed by an impressionable Tarot card reader who saw (and still sees) government as the problem.When I asked the Tarot how Biden’s campaign would go, I got this card. (But then, as Niels Bohr said, “Prediction is extremely difficult. Especially about the future.”) Here in the “five” card, we see that the Swords are finally shown they cannot prevail against fate. So it goes.

–Malcolm

PEN AMERICA: REMOVAL OF ART EXHIBIT ON FLORIDA CAMPUS SHOWS THE STATE AGAIN EXERTING CONTROL OVER FREE EXPRESSION

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

April 24, 2023(NEW YORK) – PEN America expressed disappointment today over another incident in which a Florida campus removed an art exhibit last month that explored the topic of prison abolition. PEN America said the free exchange of ideas should be “paramount” on college campuses.

The exhibit at the University of Florida was taken down, after administrators said they wanted to clarify that the art represented the views of the artist, not the university. After the exhibit was taken down, the building was vandalized with “Fuck off, fascists” written on the plywood over a shattered window. In turn, the university displayed a sign next to that graffiti saying, “This is artists’ speech, not UF speech.”

In response to the removal, PEN America’s senior manager of free expression and education Kristen Shahverdian, said: “It’s disappointing to see yet another removal of art on a Florida campus this year based on its political subject. While it is always acceptable for a university to denounce a political view that runs counter to their mission or values, it is absurd that anyone would confuse a gallery exhibit, let alone graffiti, with a university’s official positions. It is unfortunate to see university administrators order an art show taken down, without respect to artistic freedom; this is even more worrisome amid other recent art cancellations and the growing efforts to exert government control over expression state-wide. A wide range of artistic expression must be allowed on college campuses, where the free exchange of ideas is paramount.”

This kind of crap is getting really old.