Touching stories

Had a friend who stopped to rescue a dog on a busy highway, okay the name was Buford Hwy, but the other details have been ever so slightly changed to protect the ordinary (that'd be me.)  He was hit by a car and sent to a local hospital with a broken, uh, elbow. Jan Cox had me give this person a message when I visited him in the hospital. The message: This better teach you not to be a do-gooder.  That was the gist.  And an expansion of this message, which of course was not what I delivered at the time: the ordinary can be so nice. Being ordinary was not what Jan Cox was about.

Time frames

Don't really know where the word abracadabra came from, but I have to wonder if the word is not the sterile remnant of a once lively trick: say you are trying to convey how circular and unilluminating the mechanical mind must be, on the level of words.

Art can offer a longer time frame than words. Say you are trying to convey the message, in the statue of Romulus and Remus, nursing on a wolf.The children are still totally meshed with the physical world. That is their strength, but they will go on to found a city. The wolf cannot know how different these pups are, ---but the wolf pack that builds a city, an empire, is a quantitative difference which becomes a qualitative difference.
If the stoic knowing in the face of that female wolf could be put into words, the words would quickly become drained of their usefulness. As a sculpture some remnant of the mystery is still extant: how the future can unfold in totally unpredictable ways.

But to progress words have their own value. Jan Cox once described them as fast food. The trick of the word 'abracadabra' is that it may have originated in an attempt to make words look at words. May once have really been a magic word: the first time it was uttered it lit the mechanicalness of verbalizing because it was a word withOUT a meaning. As a word the first time it was used, abracadabra showed the thinness of the ice that mechanical language is. To succeed at showing the hollowness of man's rational speech IS magic. This first, functional, phase, was very brief. As such must be. The glimpse of magic the word provided quickly became the impotent word: magic. With use abracadabra become the opposite of it's original import.

Life (words, that is) is brief. Art--not so much.

Mysticism of a planet

It sometimes occurs to me to change the name of this blog. American mysticism turns out to mean native American to some --those hunters and garnerers who owned the woods because they were home in the woods. Actually my original idea was a bow to Gurdjieff who pointed to the United States as the flatland. I meant to refer to the European phase as Gurdjieffs and then Jan Cox as the American.  But I probably won't change the name.
The idea of the crystal radio came to my attention, an early option anyone could set up if they had a certain crystal and a fine wire. The crystal setup worked best from a high altitude, so children climbed into trees to test their knowledge of physics by making the crystal radio transmit.  The wire tip had to be very fine, the idea was a point contact that worked, allowing radio wave transmission, and the wire had to be fine because it literally had to touch a particular electron.
That kind of fineness is like the attention we struggle to attain and keep-- that is one picture.  The struggle for a precise but next to nonexistent touch, which resulted, when successful,  in words or music. Perhaps if the transmission is successful, there IS a silky background of forest and figure  behind the flatlander words.

This is not a clue

For my own sense of propriety I would like to amend the phrase in the
previous post, where I say, "whatever else I may have learned." It
should read 'unlearned.'

What's the date today?

Oh, right, September 11, that rings a bell. That's the day when something unexpected happened. Doesn't really matter what that something was, compared to the lessons to be observed about when the unexpected happens. Because the habitual total routine machinery of life is a big reason people can go on thinking they know something, when in fact they are clueless. 
But in a blog about Jan Cox, really, what jumps to mind is the incident I recall where he said to the group of people he had allowed to stay around, "if you leave the group, I will not again think of you." (words to that effect.) One person hearing this,  thought, wow, that's cold.
How wrong I was, and whatever I later learned, one thing is this (and contra the many statements you will hear on the media today about never forgetting) you can only remember by not thinking of something.

Take 89

What if the man speaking is actually, not a deliberator, not a conveyer of information, but what if, the man speaking is -- a car without brakes. What if this applies to any person with their mouth moving: they are a car without brakes. Any man. In such a scene then, would reality be----piles of wrecks blocking highways. Yet the brakeless cars venture onto the roads, unaware of swerving, hoods mingling, screeching and metallic mixing sounds all around. A man may look down and wonder, why is there blood on my shirt. The ordinary do not grasp the reality of their situation.

And in this scenario, what is the role of a real teacher, someone who can actually see the wreckage, which is in plain sight? Does he teach the principles of brakes for cars? Not if he is a real teacher. Speaking is driving without brakes and this applies to all.

The real philosoher, say a Gurdjieff, or a Jan Cox, uses words with caution, never doubting the lack of brakes, but chosing their roadway, their speed, aware of the importance of geographical features like hills in the path. They know the purpose of words is not to convey knowledge. Their use of words reveal a precision unknown to the ordinary, since the words of a real teacher reflect the teachers awareness of the reality of gravity. What to the ordinary sounds vague and disconnected may actually be the precision necessary to thread a path through the wreckage of the road, or the cunning necessary to halt a vehicle without brakes. Anything the ordinary hear is hampered by their own inability to evaluate their surroundings.

You Can Touch Tape

Watergate plus 30 is a nice review of the Watergate affair which changed the course of American history. Only thing though, it failed to mention the name of the one person who started it all and who can be said, if you glimpse the logic of Jan Cox, a logic based on an extraordinary perspective, --who can be said to be the only one in the whole Watergate affair whose contribution was not just dreams. Yes, those dreams that define our world, were the whole Watergate review film, and the name of the person without whom the whole affair would still be raveled, that person's name was not even mentioned. I refer to the guard that discovered tape over the locks of a door in a hotel. Frank Wills. Not a murmur of his name in this documentary about Watergate, though you can touch tape. Not so constitutional crises.