CRADLES @ ANGELS WWW.COM (Anonymous).

A cherub on a stand is not
A cherub
. . . . . . . . in eholacation
Remember that and forgive a Rabbit
His sin.
Utopia was where I was seen on
GuyFawkes night . . .
Where were you on Halloween?
Cast iron, bleached blue
My boyfriend and me.

Cradles rock while old man weep
Too dry to breast feed.
Mama's on the swing
That s mamma and me
She sings to the moon
I just sit and watch stars
Candles, rubies and bigger stones,
Mamma and me .. . ... . . . .

Black forest my birthday cake
Candles cradles, Rock a Star!
Black forest cake, your
favourite . . . .
too?
The cream that spurts out my mouth
side to side,
The maraschino cherries
Sweet olives no olive pips
The whole damn thing steeped
in maraschino cherry juice liquer
Pappa's in the garage, he's working
on grandma's bike.

Caught a shadow, sucked a pip
Waiting on the kerb.
My boyfriend's coming in his
Volvo . . . . .
Our fourth date.
Signal Hill, he said, a drive
Park off.
John Lennon on the tape.
Sheepskin seat covers-
That's cool!

Mamma says that'll be okay but not
School Day Night's.
Eagles crawl in the candlelight
Frogs? Crack a whip
That's disperse!
Jemma has a toy pet crocodile
Its wind-up it swims and
Chews bits of corn pop
that Jemma breaks off.
Crocodiles, angels, cradles. Candles.
My boyfriend and me.

*

SAN ILDEFENSO NOCTURNE by Octavio Paz on Mexico City, Mexico

In my window night
invents another night
another space
carnival convulsed
In a square yard of blackness.
Momentary
confederations of fire,
nomadic geometries,
errant numbers.
From yellow to green to red,
the spiral unwinds.
Window:
magnetic plate of calls and answers,
high-voltage calligraphy,
false heaven/hell of industry
on the changing skin of the moment.

Sign-seeds: the night shoots them off,
they rise,
bursting above,
fall
still burning
in a cone of shadow,
reappear.
rambling sparks
syllable clusters,
spinning flames
that scatter;
smithereens once more.
The city invents and erases them.
I am at a the entrance to a tunnel.
Perhaps I am that which waits at the end of the
tunnel.

I speak with eyes closed.
Someone
has planted
a forest of magnetic needles
in my eyelids,
someone
guides the thread of these words.
The page has become an ant's nest.
The void
has settled in the pit of my stomach.
I fall
endlessly through that void.
I fall without falling.
My hands are cold,
my feet cold-
but the alphabets are burning, burning.
Space
makes and unmakes itself.

The night insists,
the night touches my forehead,
touches my thoughts.
What does it want?

2.

Empty streets, squinting lights.
On a corner,
the ghost of a dog
searches the garbage
for a spectral bone.
Uproar in a nearby patio:
cacophonous cockpit.
Mexico, circa 1931.
Loitering sparrows
a flock of children
builds a nest
of unsold newspapers.
In the desolation
the streetlights invent
unreal pools of yellowish light.
Appparitions:
time splits open:
a lugubrious, lascivious clatter of heels,
beneath a sky of soot
the flash of a skirt.
C'est la morte - ou la morte. . . .
The indifferent wind
rips posters fro the walls.
At this hour,
the red walls of Sand Ildefenso
are black and they breathe:
sun turned to time,
time turned to stone,
stone turned to body.

These streets were once canals.
In the sun,
the houses were silver:
city of mortar and stone,
moon fallen in the lake.
Over the filled canals
and the buried idols
the criollos erected
another city
- not white, but red and gold -
idea turned to space, tangible number.
They placed it
at the crossroads of eight directions,
its doors
open to the invisible:
heaven and hell.
Sleeping district.
We walk through galleries of echoes
past brokenimages:
Our history.
Hushed nations of stones.
Churches
dome-growths,
their facades
petrified gardens of symbols.
Shipwrecked
in the spiteful proliferation of dwarf houses:
Humiliated spaces,
fountains without water,
affronted frontispieces.
Cumuli,
over the ponderous bulks,
conquered
not by the weight of the years
but by the infamy of the present.

Zocalo Plaza
vast as the heavens:
diaphanous space,
court of echoes.
There,with Alyosha K and Julien S,
we devised bolts of lightning
against the century and its cliques
The wind of thought
carried us away,
the verbal wind,
the wind that plays with mirrors,
master of reflections,
builder of cities of air,
geometries
hung from the thread of reason.
Shut down for the night,
the yellow trolleys,
giant worms,
S's and Z's
a crazed auto, insect with malicious eyes.
Ideas,
fruit's within an arm's reach,
like stars,
burning.
The girandola is burning,
the adolescent dialogue,
the scorched hasty frame.
The bronze fist
of the tower beats
12 times.
Night
burst into pieces,
gathers them by itself,
and becomes one, intact.
We disperse,
Not there in the plaza with its dead trains,
but here,
on this page petrified letters.

3.

The boy who walks through this poem,
between San Ildefenso and the Zoacalo,
Is the man who writes it:
this page too
in a ramble through the night.
Here the friendly ghosts
become flesh, ideas dissolve.
Good, we wanted good:
to set the world right.
We didn't lack integrity:
we lacked humility.
What we wanted was not innocently wanted.
Precepts and concepts,
the arrogance of theologians,
to beat with a cross,
to institute with blood,
to build the house with bricks of crime,
to declare obligatory communion.
Some
become secretaries to the secretary
to the General Secretary of the Inferno.
Rage
became philosophy,
its drivel has covered the planet,
Reason came down to earth,
took the form of gallows
- and is worshipped by millions.
Circular plot:
to be continued .. . . . . . . .

DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL by Thomas Moore .

Chapter 6: Lovesickness.

Sub-paragraph- WALKING ON COALS


One curious aspect of lovesickness is its tendency to last long beyond its period of ripeness. People know that they are in a situation that is not good for them, and yet they let it go on and on, often for years. Even if they dont do anything actively, they expect the relationship to improve. Many cling to the security they have rather than risk it for a more vital but unpredictable relationship with someone else. But often people are just reluctant to end a relationship until it sheds its last drop of promise.

Some people put off the inevitable until they can stand it no longer. Then their resolve is clear and forceful. I had a client once who one morning was sitting at the breakfast table waiting for his wife to join him. Eventually she came down from the bedroom with her bags packed. That was the last he saw of her. Apparently the decisive moment had arrived for her, but he was devastated. Talking to him I was surprised to see a huge blind spot in him. He had no idea what his wife was going through. He assumed life was as simple and pleasing for her as it was for him.

It takes time for the soul, so deep and complex, to sort itself out and arrange itself for a decision. Myown way is to wait and wait until the apple of decision is about to fall on its own. No doubt, I am extreme in my patience and temporising. When I counsel others, I feel no rush. I feel it's important to gather oneself together before making a move. Many people make decisions just on the principle that you should do something. I'm afraid it may take a while for the soul to catch up with them.


Sub-paragraph - LURED INTO DARKNESS


After years of practicing psychotherapy with men and women of all ages, I am convinced that love is the most common source of our dark nights. It may be romantic love, it may be the love for a child. The lure is strong, but the darkness is intense. It is as though love always has two parts, or two sides, like the moon, a light one and a dark one. In all our loves we have little idea of what is going on and what is demanded of us. Love has little to do with the ego and is beyond understanding and control. It has its own reasons and its own indirect ways of getting what it wants.

Robert Burton, who lived in the time of Shakespeare, diagnoses love as a sickness and at one point suggests that it might be better to destroy it if you can. But to choose not to love is to decide to die. Everyone needs to love and be loved. You surrender, and then the spell descends and you get swept away by days and nights of fantasy, memory and longing, and a strange sensation of loss, perhaps the end of freedom and of a comfortable life. Even if you have had experiences of painful and unsuccessful love, you don't give up on it. The soul so hungers for love that you go after it, even if there is only the slightest chance of succeeding.
To be continued. . . . . . . . . .

# # # OOOO # # #

DARK NIGHTS OF THE SOUL - A Guide to finding your way through life's ordeals
by THOMAS MOORE (Bestselling author of CARE OF THE SOUL).

Excerpt from Chapter six ... .. . . . . LOVESICKNESS.


Anyone who has been through a divorce, lived with a jealous lover, or suffered domestic abuse knows that one of the primary sources of a dark night is love. Love may begin in darkness, as in the image of Cupid blindfolded, when he shoots his flaming arrow. You are suddenly taken by another person and possessed by passion.Then come periods of confusion, longing, and perhaps, thoughts of ending. What begins full of hope and promise turns into serious questioning and emotional ambivalence. While a lover may interpret these ups and downs as a personal in making a commitment, it might be more accurate to understand that love itself i inconsistent and has a kind of inherent hysteria.

People in love may be threatened or possesed by jealousy, find themselves the the victim of another's need to control, get stuck in a cold and maybe abusive relationship, or maybe fall into an impasse in which their love gets nowhere. They may feel they are with the wrong person, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, and for the wrong reasons. Frequently love doesn't work out or it gets stale. People dream of passionate love, thrilling sex, and a tranquil life, but their often turns into a nightmare.

The ancient Greek poet Sappho, one of the great poets of all time, was the first to call love bittersweet, though she reversed the words to sweetbitter. The philosopher and poet Anne Carson says this is because love is usually sweet at first then turns bitter. My impression is that love alternates between bitter and sweet or is perpetually bittersweet. People often talk about love's sweetness and keeps its bitterness private.

Love is also a kind of madness. It seals you in a bubble of fantasy where emotions are intense. You feel unbalanced. You do silly things. Your sense of responsobility disappears. You are deaf to the reasonable advice of friends and family. In your delerium you may get married or pregnant. Then you spend years in the aftermath trying to make a reasonable life. At any point you may fall into a dark night of the soul created by the profound unsettling that love leaves in its wake.

% % % % %

PARADISE LOST by John Milton . .. .. ... ... . .From Line 51.


Here in the heart of hell to work in fire,
Or do his errands in the gloomy deep?
What can it then avail though yet we feel
Strength undiminished, or eternal being
To undergo eternal punishment?
Whereto with speedy words the arch fiend replied:
"Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable,
Doing or suffering: but of this be sure,
To do aught good will never be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight,
Asbeing the contrary to his high will
Whom we resist, then if his providence
Out of our evil seek to bring good,
Our labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means to evil;
Which offtimes may succeed, so as perhaps
Shall grieve him, If I fail not, and disturb
His inmost counsels from their destined aim.
But see the angry victor hath recalled
His ministers of vengeance and pursuit
Back to the gates of heaven; the sulphurous hail
Shot after us in storm, o'er blown hath laid
The fiery surge, that from the precipice
Of heaven received us falling, and the thunder,
Winged with red lightning and impetuous rage,
Perhaps hath spent his shafts, and ceases now
to bellow through the vast and boundless deep.
Let us not slip the occasion, whether scorn
Or satiate fury yield it from our foe.
Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild,
The seat of desolation, void of light,
Save what glimmering of these vivid flames
Casts pale and dreadful? thither let us tend
From of the tossing of these fiery waves,
There rest, if any rest can harbour there,
And reassembling our affected powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity. . . . ... ... ... . . . . ... . .To Line 189.

+ + + + + + O + + + + + +

JUNG DREAMS - Captions of the Pictures.


*The Mountain of the Adepts. The temple of the wise ("House of the Gathering" or of "Self Collection"), lit by the sun and moon, stands on the seven stages, surmounted by the phoenix. The temple is hidden in the mountain - a hint that the philosopher's stone lies buried in the earth and must be extracted and cleansed. The zodiac in the background Symbolizes the duration of the OPUS, while the four elements indicate wholeness. In foreground, blindfolded man and the investigator who follows his natural instinct.- Michelspacher, CABALA (1654).

** Etna: "gelat et ardet".-Boschius, Symbolographia (1702).

***Ludus puerorum.- Trismosin, "Splendor soils" (MS 1582)

****Pygmies (helpful child-gods).- Fragments of an Egyptian mechanical toy.

*****The "Grand Peregrination" by ship. Two eagles fly round the earth in opposite directions, indicating that it is an odyssey in search of wholeness.- Maier, Viatorium (1651).

******The philosophical egg, whence the double egg is hatched, wearing the spiritual and temporal crowns.- Codex Palatinus Latinus 412 (15th cent.)

> > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

JUNG DREAMS - Captions of the Pictures.

* The fountain in the walled garden, symbolizing constantia in adversis- a situation particulary chararacteristic of alchemy.- Boschius, Symbolographia.

*The eight-petalled flower as the eigth of the first of seven.-"Recueil de figures astrologiques.

*The alchemical apparatus for distillation, the unum vas, with the serpents of the (double) Mercurious.- Kelley, Tractatus de lapide philosophorum (1676)

*The Virgin as the vas of the divine child.- From a Venetian Rosario dela gloriosa vergine Maria (1524).

*Vision of the Holy Grail.- Roman de Lancelot de lac.

*The pelican nourishing its young with its own blood, an allegory of Christ.-Boschius Symbolographia.

*The bear representing the dangerous aspect of the prima materia.-Thomas Aquinas (pseud). De alchimia.

*Anima mundi.- Thurneisser zum Thurn, Quinta essentia.

* The alchemical process in the zodiac.- "Ripley Scrowle". . . ... . . . .

Dedicated to those of us in our task of Individuation!

&&& &&&& &&& &&&& &&&

THE HOLLOW MEN - A penny for the Old Guy - T. S. Eliot.


I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us- if at all- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death,s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat. crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III


This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o' clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow For thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I dedicate Eliot's Poem, THE HOLLOW MEN to all working on transformation.

O H H H H H H H H H H H O