I have zero energy.l have negetropy. And now I think of Keats and THAT WORD that eluded me. I looked through Wikipedia, through the life of keats. NOTHING. But searched Keats idea theory -negative capability.

I don’t even know what negative capability IS – although the blogosphere was all lit up with it a few years ago. It is letting the mystery be. I feel that – I am full of negative capability. Negative capability brown is my new name. That or Finn Finkelstein or Meredith Finn or Finn Meredith. Finnith.

What is happening in the cantos 3 and 4? They are themselves. I am reading about the birth of dryas and nymphs from oaks and water. The Dryas – the younger dryas – which is also the ice age. Dryas is a plant in the Rose family – Rosaceae – native to the artic. The winter rose of Grimm.

We move from myth and the creation of elementals or supernatural to El Cid! I read El Cid when one of my parents was in the hospital in my 20s. Which one? I think my mother. It is hard for me to order memories these days. This is why I am a computer programmer – it does the ordering for you. Also why I so enjoy a good seder.

Do I have to spell it out?I am going to leave it all in negative capabilities.

Seals and Gates and towers and sand and all I can think is of Lord of the Rings.

“Drear waste, the pIgment flakes from the stone, Or plaster flakes, Mantegna pamted the wall Sxlk tatters, ” Nee Spe Nee Metu ‘ Without hope – without fear

The fourth canto and we are back in Troy! “And by the curved, carved foot of the couch, claw-foot and hon head, an old man seated” I had a dream once – perhaps a recurring dream of a claw-foot tub in a beautiful home. on Dorchester in hyde park with a beautiful door knocker and there was a secrete here. To get back to this house! Dreams are part of the eternal return.

Very architectural very stoney – is canto 4. 4 is the number of the builder. It is my life number.

Repetition – glitter, trees, tis, ivory, shadows, vidal, blaze, muttering, Actaeon, nymphs- a fish scale roof – what is in the collective unconscious? Flaking off

A pine! A white pine? A red pine? A locus a lotuss

“One scarlet flower IS cast on the blanch-whIte stone” a bit obvious Ezra

We move back to the Chinese – the Chinese wind – and then the greeks again – Danae

is Ezra just showing how clever? what of the language Is it hard to enjoy when you know everything is a reference an index – a bunch of fingers pointing?

This is increasingly my reading log/blog. A painting friend texted that she was reading Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Now I have dipped into the cantos but have never read them cover to cover. I am not going to talk about the cantos because I really don’t know anything about the cantos – and everything I know is probably wrong. I do know that Ezra Pound edited that modernist classic -The Waste Land. And so this is sort of waste land ish -and also sort of James Joycean – those were the influences.

My friend sent a screenshot of a commentary on the text comparing logopoeia with phanopoeia. The play of ideas versus the play of images. The cantos being phantopoeia. Now what are the images of the first two cantos!

Canto 1 is from the Odyssey! It is reworked from a dated translation. It begins with a ship! We are going on a voyage my friend! My friend Orit and I decided that we should make an animated tv show about noah’s ark but it is a decadent party ark- because it is the end of the world. There is something magical about this passage – setting sail – a ocean passage – an adventure (although I prefer Cimmerian not Kimmerian), rituals and sacrifices and gods (Pluto and Persephonie) And the dead. To begin we must go back maybe but not to repeat. I just wanted the D&D movie with my kids and in that movie to they go and talk to the dead. What do the dead have to tell us?

Canto 2 we continue but we enter into history from mythology of legend – we talk to Robert Browning – a poet! We are not connecting with tradition – with our transmission from poet to poet – the great golden chain. “Under black fur-hood, hthe daughter of Ocean,” This line is so tactile. Reading the greek – I am reminded eleanor is helen – but what if I did not read greek – what would this look like to me – these arcane symbols. The format changes in the middle of canto 2 – I don’t know the proper name.

“Leopards snrffing the grape shoots by scupper-hole, Crouched panthers by fore-hatch,” No idea what is going on here. But Images YES! Runa Puma

“And So-shu churned In the sea, So-shu also, USIng the long moon for a churn-stick” All mythology and the milky ocean of Rama and the milky way and all poetry and mythology is about the cosmos/ the world – I am that!

“And we have heard the fauns eluding Proteus m the smell of hay under the olive-trees.

And the frogs singing against the fauns In. the half-light

And”

(&)

I also wants to put something about Boothby’s book Death and Desire on Lacan and Freud’s metapsychology. The first 30 pages are about painting and the relationship between the foreground and teh background but what if everything is just atmosphere and certain objects have more weight more gravity in the atmosphere. Monet’s heystacks and different from Millet. Millet has gleaners – people – subjects – objects. Monet has light – the heystacks are just as they appear in light. They arise from. the atmosphere. How do we organize our experience. Lacan is about language – language is the structure of the unconscious – Jung (or maybe Hillman) is about images – images are the structure/of the unconscious (or perhaps archetypes for Jung). Freud is also about myths and drives – oedipus, the death drive. Logopoeia and phanopoeia in another place. When I think of ordering – i think of yes – computation. What if the order is the first thing and from that the word and the image arise.

So many stories ? Why so many? Part of my personal journey I suppose is relishing in the abundance and the multiplicities. We forget the importance of this in the monoculture we now cultivate.

I forgot how much I love these stories. How I want to make a Grimms fairytale video game. How now the song ‘play a video game’ by Lana Del Rey is in my ears.

The story follows a stupid father and his three daughters. He asks them what they want, and the first wants a diamond the second a pearl and the third a singing springing lark – whatever that is. He can buy the first two but not the last.

Throughout the story I see money. What can money buy? What transactions exist without money? I think about this with cryptocurrency and the possibility of a new way to transact other than debt.

In order to get the lark the father must give his favorite daughter to a lion! Which he does.

As it turned out the lion was really a prince so although the daughter thought she was walking to her doom she walked towards something else. Not sure what – this looks like self-sacrifice to me.

Again one of the other sisters get married and there is a snafu where the lion gets turned into a bird for 7 years. SEVEN! This is a magic number- again. And again, the daughter/wife self sacrifices to go chase after the lion/bird. but this is an example of a woman going on a quest not a man – so I suppose this is interesting different. What is a female questor? I alway think about what is the heroine’s myth – but perhaps this is part of the old culture that we must leave behind for a new collective myth without heroes or heroines but some other story line.

The daughter/sister gets help from the winds, gets magic trinkets, and goes through trials, there is an almost marriage of the lion/bird to another and then the duagher/sister prooves herself.

These stories are all so similar? Why are there so many of them? What is the difference that makes the difference?

Through the magic of bibliomancy I selected “The Summer and the Winter Garden” for our next tale. This seems to be a version of beauty and the beast.

This tale appears more modern. There is much less symbolic language and repeatedly the heroine suffers from “anxiety”. I wonder what this word is in the original german -maybe Aya knows.

So lets start with our symbols. First we have three daughters and a sort of negligent or thoughtless father. The father is a merchant – I imagine the magician from the tarot deck – a hustler. The merchant asks his daughters what gifts they want. The eldest wants a dress, the middle wants shoes and the youngest a rose. Of course the youngest is his favorite. What is the meaning of 3 – the three fates I have mentioned before, also matter soul and spirit. There are more. A dress is the costume we wear – our persona. our shoes concern how we travel in life and how we are grounded to the earth. A rose is our connection with beauty. The petals of the rose are the same as the movement of venus through the sky in a 5 year cycle.

It is midwinter. I think of In the Bleak Midwinter by Rosetti and of Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer. As I write this, midwinter is fresh in my memory. There are no roses in midwinter. The father searches and searches and eventually steals a rose from a garden that is half in sunshine and half under snow – a summer garden and a winter garden.

I see this image very strongly in my mind’s eye. A walled courtyard half in summer and half in winter. I have been thinking a lot about the Dionysian impulse and the Apollonian impulse from Nietzsche’s birth of tragedy – and then explored in Walking with Nobby. I have been thinking about another impulse – The Artemisian – which comes from Artemisian the maiden huntress and goddess of the moon (and twin of Apollo). Artemis is the goddess of the third way – and it is at where three roads meet that Oedipus meets the Sphinx and that births psychology. The winter garden and the summer garden makes me think of Demeter and Persephone. What is a Demeterian culture and a Persephonian culture. We cannot eat the food of the underworld if we ever want to leave it. But do we want to leave the underworld – maybe no – maybe a life in the underworld is ego death – a life in radical plutionan truth and riches.

Ok – so the idiot father steals the rose a beast runs after him and says he can keep the rose but he will marry the beautiful most loved daughter in a week.

A WEEK! weeks figure in this story. But not seven days. A week is an aggregate. I think of the Sorites paradox – when does a grain of sand become a heap. When does a bunch of days become a week?

Then does winter become summer? When does the beast become a man? When does a woman fall in love? This is starting to sound like a bad bob dylan song.

Anyway, this is about phase transitions – which is the neglected corner of metaphysics and epistemology. So obv the girl does not go to the beast in a week, and the beast goes and kidnaps the girl. This is problematic for me, even though I have been an instrument of the patriarchy for much of my life – and still am in many respects – and now with full consciousness of this fact. The girl falls in love with her kidnapper – we call this Stockholm syndrome – and it is FUBAR. This is why we need new tales and new myths. Aya is writing these and we will publish them in 811.

Without these violent overtones, we could read the story of the girl and the beast as the light and the shadow, beauty and the ugly, the sacred and the profane, the refined and the brute, the play of duality – the alchemical play of duality that creates something new – in this case the young prince resurrected from the dead beast buried under cabbages – but I digress.

The girl falls in love with the beast – ugh. But the girl misses her father. The beast has a MAGIC MIRROR. I sometimes wear an ankh pendant. This is very 1970s of me. I wear it because it symbolizes the mirror- to keep my mirror clean, of dust, of projections, to see clearly what is reflected in our world – the maya – which is also an illusion like the mirror. In the magic mirror the girl sees her sick father – heart sick – and goes home. BUT the beast says she needs to come back in ONE WEEK (not 7 days).

She goes home and then her father dies. The girl is consumed with grief and forgets to return in a week. I am reminded of Antigone. Where do new rules come from? I am really into this idea?.Where do we get the laws? Our own laws? Our transvaluation of values? Peter Kingsley has some provocative words on this – and dream incubation … but perhaps new laws come from grief – or perhaps grief breaks laws. Grief is a rupture – a lacuna.

The girl returns to the beast too late. The castle is covered in dark cloth. There is no summer garden only a winter garden. She sees Cabbages! Cabbage heads, actually. Brassica oleracea. Most Indo-European words for cabbage include the word head. Cabbage comes from caboche meaning head. There is something about cabbage that is about decapitation. Apparently, cabbages and grape vines cannot grow next to each other. With grapevines, we cut the first growth because the second one propagates – that is the stories about the two sons. Also people thought if you ate cabbages you would not become drunk. This has no relevance for the story.

The dead beast is buried under the cabbage heads. The girl waters the beast and comes alive, becomes a handsome prince, and the castle is restored and the summer garden returns.

The male principal is the one that transforms -the beast – but the woman does all the work.

The best thing about this story is the end! Not because the story was bad but because the end is so weird.

I loved this story so much. More and more I see these fairy tales as intertwined with similar characters and symbolism.

I find it difficult to write about this story. I cannot seem to organizing my thoughts. My main thought is about tests and proofs again. But it is more about personal decision making than proofs.

How do I know what to do in the moment?

The “evil” brothers strategize and do not really think for themselves, they accept what the gnome tells them without question. The other brother (Hans) appears to act his conscious. Why do the evil brothers think the good brother is stupid? Maybe because simplicity appears stupid. Our society definitely seems to prioritize complexity over simplicity – over DO EASY!

I do think this is about nonduality and awareness, as everything is really. Sense-make in the moment – all evil – all karma comes from strategizing and acting thoughtlessly according to rules. The stupid brother is really engaged in a transvaluation of values – thank you Zarathustra.

Symbols and Observations

Three – The king has three daughters, and there are three huntsman

9, 7, 4 – the number of heads on each of the dragons. What do these numbers mean? In the first story we read there was a dragon with 9 heads.

Apples (trees) – this reminds me of the garden of Eden

Gold (Golden apples)

Magic – The flute

Tests

Huntsman

Daughters

Weddings

A Search ( the huntsman search for the missing daughters)

Necklaces – the First princess gives the stupid brother a neckless after he kills the dragon

Headlessness – the brother’s heads are chopped off

Gnomes (I think this is the first time we have met a gnome).

Music (I think this is the first time we have music – but we have a magic flute that calls the Gnomes to Hans)

Stupidity – this is the first story that talks about stupidity – Hans is considered stupid, although he turns out to be the smartest or most successful. To me, this is about acting without a strategy (or malice or manipulation).

Final Thoughts

Three are the fates – the past present and future. Music is the medium of time. We go under the earthin this story; as so above so below perhaps. Or perhaps there is something to discover – perhaps this is about orientation and dimensionality, up and down.

The hero – the stupid brother – is named Hans. And I picked this story because the last story we read ended with a story about Hans.

“Kling, klang, gloria.
Who sits within this tower?
A King’s daughter, she sits within,
A sight of her I cannot win,
The wall it will not break,
The stone cannot be pierced.
Little Hans, with your coat so gay,
Follow me, follow me, fast as you may.”

Is the huntsman the little hans? Does he have a gay coat? At least Hans could probably help the princess out.

Our story today ends with the following strange line: “When the wedding took place, I was wearing a pair of glass shoes and stumbled over a stone. The stone said, Clink! and my slippers broke in two.”

So this to me leads to a story about glass slippers? Also how does stone speak? There is a book called if stones could speak – and it is about cemetaries.

In March 2020, I flew from Atlanta to New York. I returned in time for the COVID-19 lockdown. The following week I spent in isolation with a single book — Spinal Catastrophism by Thomas Moynihan — a speculative philosophical fiction that traces the history of the world through geology, embodiment, and trauma.

A friend just emailed me and said he had read this book and enjoyed it. I told him I would type my notes, and maybe something interesting would arise. In the spirit of sharing and dialogue, here is the first installment of my S.C.N.E.

The TLDR

The first page of my notebook contains some notes and what looks like sigils and wordplay with the word telomerase and lion. Sigils are statements turned into symbols that people use for self-induction practices. Telomerase is the ends of chromosomes, and people think they are related to aging. I am trying to understand why the word lion is there. I also wrote my name. I am grateful I did not write the name of crushes or little hearts — although that may come.

On the first page, I wrote words: and thoughts about these words, genealogy, and hypergenealogy. Presumably, this book is a work of hypergenealogy. It is beyond genealogy — a genealogy of structures without origin. In geology, we have Orogeny — perhaps this is the word to use. Maybe I will use it for my future work of theory fiction.

What is Genealogy?

The genealogy shows “causes masquerading as reason.” So the book begins. Logic shows the relation between things; genealogy shows the origin of things. If logic is Genesis, genealogy is Numbers.

The If, then, nature of my last sentence makes the sentence a condition — a logical statement. The genealogy of this sentence starts in the Tanach, the Hebrew bible, which contains the books of Genesis and Numbers. The genealogy of the Tanach includes different middle eastern mythologies, histories, and ideologies.

“Causes masquerading as reason” is a quotation from an article by Robert Brandom. One of my favorite essays is a book review by Ray Brassier of Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust — which I own but have not read. In this essay, Brassier talks about the phenomenology of suspicion — a concept from the french philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

In modern times we have philosophies that interpret symptoms rather than analyze facts. Our philosophies are Freud (psychology), Marx (socialism), and Nietzche (power). We interpret dreams, uncover systemic inequality, and engage in a transvaluation of values. These activities are subjective and interpersonal. Genealogy is an uncovering; it is detective work. How do we understand beyond observation and data collection?

Parade and Masquerades

Hypergenealogy — a neologism — is “tectonics parading as reason.” What is a masquerade versus a parade? In a masquerade, the social order is transformed or dissolved. We all wear different personas and act out of character during a masquerade ball.

When I think of a parade, I think of a military parade. It is the opposite of a masquerade. Both end in — ade, which denotes an action—tectonics and causes act.

A parade is about the reification of a mask. We solidify our new social order created in the mascarade when we have the parade. We have parades on Halloween and Christmas. In Rhinebeck, in the Hudson River Valley, there is a fantastic Sinterklaas parade. This feels part masquerade, part parade.

Recursion and Metabolism

Techtonics is structure. Sometimes there is no reason. There is just structure.

Water adheres to the side of the straw in capillary action not because of choice but because of structure. Structure is destiny

Is anything applied to itself recursive? Genealogy applied to itself is recursive. In computer science, we use our products and call this dogfooding. We eat our own food.

When is a practice recursive or metabolic? Are we powering the system or regulating the system? This is a Marxist question. It is also a regenerative economics question. I am a Levite, a custodian of the temple, the original trash collector. My job is to regulate the resources to be recursive or metabolic. Where does the waste go? Must there always be waste?

Hypergenealogy and Genealogical machines

When genealogy is generative, it always “generates more claims.” A claim to what? To authority? To truth. What is a claim? Claim is a legal word. Claims are about law. When paternity is uncovered, the child has a claim to the father.

Laws are generative. I can create a motor according to the laws of physics; I can make a computer program according to the laws of boolean logic. Genealogy is revealing; it creates through uncovering and establishes by identifying new vectors of connections.

Laws create one methodology, one heir. Genealogical machines generate multiple origins. There are more claims to authenticity. Who becomes the rightful heir?

How are ideas, objects, methods, and philosophies generated? They are not logical or discovering. In ancient magical practices, there was something called a magic square. I think of this because the side of my notebook looks like I am making some sigil out of the words Lion and Telemeter. Sigils are imagistic.

The Escape from Logic

“Decoupling reason from proposition is the escape from logic.” In English, this means, how can we reason without statements? Can we reason with geology? Can we reason with images? Can we reason with diagrams?

Only when we have a statement can reason use logic. There is no logic without a statement, without translating an action into a statement. The proof is no longer logical but biological, historical, and generative. I am a human because of my parents and their parents. I am not human because of any propositions concerning humanness.

Judgment

What is the criterion for judgment? We have logic to judge the true from the false, the sensical from the non-sensical. Time is suspended.

Genealogy is temporal. We go back in time. Judgment is timeless; it is temporal, not eternal. Judgment does not exist for all time, only for the moment that the judgment is made. This is trauma as judgment.

Words and Beliefs

“Voluptuiousness of vocabularies is the world belief.” This reminds me of Jung — consciousness is the creation of possibilities. It could be Lacanian because Lacan is about language, and Jung is about images. World belief is not world truth. Belief is doxa, as we say in ancient greek, not episteme (knowledge). Language is always a fiction. All philosophy is theory fiction. “Superlation is beyond truth.” Hypergeneaology is beyond truth; beyond truth and laws.

What’s next

This was page 1. I don’t remember this book, and I am trying to figure out what I wrote about the text in the pages of my journal. Before reporting something, I could distill it first, but I will write and interpret it as an I go – at https://therewrite.substack.com/

Aya selected Maid Maleen via our patent pending bibliomantic method. At first, I kept on thinking of the plant Mullein – which is used for the lungs – associated with grief – among other things. Here is Mullein

Mullein is tall like a tower, in fact like the tower that Maid Maleen is lock in. But I am moving too fast. Let me slow down and start from the beginning.

I will say this story has 5 acts.

Act 1 – Maid Maleen is a princess is betrothed to one prince but she is in love with another and refuses to marry the man her father picks. Her father builds a tower that neither light nor sound can penetrate and puts her in there with her maid for 7 years – along with a 7 year supply of beef.

Somet things to note, we have thwarted love, we have a difficult father, we have a tower and we have beef. We also have a maid instead of a mother, and we have the prospect of marriage (perhaps representing growing up). I will note 7 years and the 7 planets and the tower card from the tarot.

Act 2- Maleen and her maid are in the tower. They have no idea if time is passing since they have no light. How horrible – what torture. The prince that Maleen loves calls to her, but she cannot hear him because the tower walls are too thick. I think of incubation or transformation, a caterpillar in the cocoon.

Act 3 – The food is running low, so Maleen decides to dig her way out of the tower with cutlery. She and her maid take turns digging and they bore a hole through the tower. They could have escaped all along! We have the power to set ourselves free. When they look outside, they realize that the kingdom has been destroyed. They would have died in that tower. You must make decisions for yourself; you cannot trust blindly – especially if you are locked in a tower. Also – the power tools – a knife. They wander through the countryside – starving and eating nettle.

I love nettle, it is great when you are mineral deficient. I am drinking nettle right now. They are probably mineral deficient now that they are not on their heavy meat diet!

So they are destitute and wandering the countryside, finally, they come to the kingdom of Maid Maleen’s first beloved. The cook takes them on as scullery maids and the denouement begins.

Act 4 – In the new kingdom the prince’s father has betrothed the prince to a woman as ugly as she is wicked (so very).

Again we have importance of beauty/looks and the equation between beauty and goodness. We also fathers who really do poor jobs selecting a mate for their children. Maybe this is about how to make decisions. Aya has talked a lot about trust in these stories and proof and related to this is decisionmaking. Who is making good decisions? Not many people? It is interesting. When things do seem to work out, no decisions are made, they seem natural outcomes – like a walnut growing into a walnut tree. I’ll say more later.

So the betrothed is ugly and does not want to walk through town to be married to the prince so she has maid maleen pretend she is the betrothed. Maleen walks with the prince on the way to the get married and has three exchanges

1. She sings a little song to a nettle plant – about eating it with out cooking it when she was hungry
2. She says something to a bridge – about not being the real wife
3. She says something to the church door – about not being the real wife

Each time the prince asks what she is saying, and maleen says, she is saying something about Maid Maleen but does not know her.

I want to note the rhyme/spell nature of these, that there ae three, and that two are about being a wife (or a real wife) about reality, and that one is about nourishment but without cooking (cooking being civilization). So perhaps there is something here about nature vs culture.

After they get married, the prince gives maleen a necklace, but still does not know she is maleen.

Act 5 – During this act the wicked and ugly princess who is supposed to marry the prince is discovered. The prince asks what she was saying to the nettle and the bridge and. thedoor and the ugly princess has. togo ask maid maleen. Finally the prince realizes that the ugly princess does not have the necklace and discovers that maleen is the true bride. The ugly princess is beheaded and maleen and the prince live happily ever after.

But there is a coda that kids sing about the tower

“Kling, klang, gloria.
Who sits within this tower?
A King’s daughter, she sits within,
A sight of her I cannot win,
The wall it will not break,
The stone cannot be pierced.
Little Hans, with your coat so gay,
Follow me, follow me, fast as you may.”

What does this coda mean?

Now I will just mention few things about this story. So we have doubling again, we have reversals (poor/rich), we have numbers (3,7), we don’t have colors, we have the sun and wind, we don’t really have animals, we have plants (nettle), we have tests, we have time passing, we have marriage, fathers, beauty, ugliness, headlessness, deceit, impersonation (or personas).

My main takeaway is that we cannot predict the future – we cannot manipulate events – we cannot control things. We can be in the moment and let life run through us -“Follow me, follow me, fast as you may.”

The tale we read this week was “All Fur” and I selected it via bibliomancy. The cover painting is The Bear Dance by William Holbrook Beard. I posted it on instagram(aleatoric_ops) and Aya said – “All Fur!” so I included it here. There is a sort of reverse animal personification.

Last week I was blown away by Aya’s discussion of proof in the Two Brothers. Why is proof so important ?! I think of logical proofs and Aristotle, consensus proofs and the blockchain and then proof of identity or experience in these tales. We recorded a discussion that talks a lot about proofs maybe we will post it. In All Fur there are also proofs – lets get started!

All Fur is a common sort of tale, it reminds me of a tale called Mossy Coat, and also of Cinderella. I still struggle with fairy tale logic. My tldr is that nature is harsh and has no ethics – fairy tales are the “ethics” of nature. This story is divided into two sections that I will call childhood and adulthood (or adolescence). The first half takes place in the princesss’ kingdom, and the second half takes place in another kingdom where the princess is ‘All Fur’. First I will list some points that I noticed that have a resonance with the previous story- or I just wanted to note down:

• Color: Gold – The queen has golden hair and is beautiful and her daughter has golden hair. 

• Marriage – When the queen dies she makes her husband the king promise to marry someone as beautiful as his wife. I am disturbed that the value of a woman is beauty – but perhaps we can read this apart from gender and think about nature, what makes a beautiful tree a beautiful flower a beautiful fruit?
• Children – There are no twins here or brothers, instead there is a father and a daughter and the father wants to marry the daughter! Thankfully the entire kingdom is against this, but they are powerless to stop it. This reminds me of the story of Noah. Sam from Arbor Vitae connected the story of Noah (the inventor of wine), with the idea of seconds, second sons, second worlds after a flood, the second is the one that is generative (the second grape vine produces the grape when you cut back the first). However Noah also had relations with his daughters – which reminds me of this story.
• Trials vs Storytelling

The daughter, in order to delay marrying her father, says she needs three dresses: one golden like the sun, one white like the moon and one bright like the star, and pelts from all the animals. To me this is the connection between the celestial and the  material  the earth is symbolized by the fur.  We need to over come our base desires that can drive us insane / our complexes by integrating soul spirit matter and emotion.

I also think about the 1000 arabian knights. Scheherazade delays execution by telling stories, the daughter delays execution by creating tasks/trials. I wonder if this a contrast between narrative and game logic.

• Identity & recognition – The princess escapes in a coat she makes of the furs. Her fiancé, a king in another kingdom, finds her but thinks first she is a wild animal and then realizes she is a person – but does not recognize her. she is practically enslaved by the king and works in. the kitchen. They call her All Fur. She keeps this disguise and enhances it by spreading ash on her body. I think this. is code for forest farming, controlled burning, and the nutritive properties of ash for soil. She also has 3 gifts randomly from a fiancé: a ring, a spinning wheel and a rod that she takes with her when she escapes.
• Repetition – right now I am into the techniques of surrealism and one of those techniques are repetition. The repetition here is in the 3 nights at the ball with the three dresses, the three dishes that All Fur make with a hidden gift from the fiance in each, and the refrain she says to the king that all she is good for is to throw shoes at. (This last part I find weird – why would she want to marry a guy that throws shoes at people). To me this is about unfolding in time . We must take our time / you can’t hurry love you just have to wait. It is very bergsonian. It also gives the princess a time to show all her gifts to express her gifts.  To every time there is a season. a season for all fur and a season for princesses. It is not always wise to have one persona.
• Ritual objects: A wheel, a ring, and a rod. (I wonder is a rod a scepter?). Round and straight? Procreation? What is the meaning?
• Meals/Food
• Proof – the king can prove all fur is the fiance because she has a white finger, the only part of her not covered in ash.

As a woman these stories are disempowering. But what if we think in terms of the masculine and feminine principles the yin and Yang – the receptive must relinquish everything. This is a sacrifice. The active principle is not subject to ethics – he just acts but through the passive principle the active principle is shaped. Why is passive beautiful and active powerful : is there a dichotomy between power and beauty.

The Aya and Meredith Reading Group continues. Now we are embarking upon the Brother’s Grimm. Growing up I was really into mythology – all different types of mythology. I was not into folk tales. They did not make sense to me. I am not sure why mythology made more sense, but it did. But there is some deep wisdom in these tales, they are the history of the inner life of Western Europe and western civilization. We began with the two brothers.

I have a very beautiful hardback copy of the Grimm Fairy Tales but in this book, there is no tale of two brothers. Instead, there are 12 brothers and three brothers. Two is the dyad, the twin, polarity: the yin/yang, heaven/earth, animus/anima, eros/Thanatos – and as it turns out 2 is very important.

The Story

I loved this story but I have no idea where to begin. It is long and dense – so stay with me here.

This story feels like 4 stories in one:childhood, adolescence, bachelorhood, and marriage. I teach film and I always teach 2001 a space odyssey. My students sometimes say that this film does not make sense. I say, it is not supposed to make rational sense, it is supposed to make emotional sense – so you feel something. Cinematic sense perhaps, or imaginal sense. This story reminds me of that .

Wha happened?

Part One

• two brothers. Ok the dyad – the polarity,
• one is rich one is poor. The rich brother. is evil-hearted. What does money mean? Is it about generocity? False value?
• the poor brother finds a gold bird and is a bit brutal in trying to kill it and then gives it to his rich brother (why?). This makes me think of ethics and also of nonduality. The poor brother seems like a jerk and an idiot. Why does he try to hurt the bird at all and why give the bird to his brother? But there is sense in the story that the poor brother is acting naturally and so perhaps poor really means simple and rich means cunning.
• the poor one has two sons that through adventure involving their uncle produce gold while sleeping. We have another duality but they do not become differentiated until later in the story. These boys accidentally eat the heart and liver of the golden bird while the uncle roasts it and ths lets them produce gold every night under their pillow. Liver is the life force heart is love – but why does this matter?
• The rich brother tells the poor brother his children are evil and the poor brother puts his children out of his home.
• The brothers are adopted by a HUNTSMAN who teaches them how to hunt and keeps their coins (which keep coming) safe. This makes me think of the idea of stewardship.

Part 2

• The brothers pass a hunting test and leave the foster-father gives them a magic knife that will rust on one side if one of he brothers dies.
• The brothers go into the world. They are hungry and want to kill a rabbit to eat but do not instead they get two little rabbits – the same thing happens with a bear, wolf, fox, and lion. What is up with these animals? Totem animals? I mean its not astrology. Maybe the 5 centers of human design.
• The brothers split up.

Part 3

• the younger brother comes to a town covered in black cloth. I though oh no – black plague. But no.
• everything is black because the princess is going to be sacrificed to a dragon. I recently read a book that discussed dragons. Most world myths involve killing. adragon. Sometimes the dragon or dragons blood gives birth to life (or humans). Dragons are also associated with sulfuric caves – that many cultures associate with healing and prophecy.
• the brother defeats the dragon. He first has to drink liquid with a cup and that allows him to pick up a heavy sword and with. thehelp of his animals kills the dragon. The cup is very tarot – emotions. I am always interested in tools – the sword is a great one. The dragon has 7 heads ( the planets?).
• There is giftgiving between the brother and the princess – everyone naps and then the evil marshal beheads the huntsman and forces the process to marry him. The gifts are coral – I wonder about this. It seems strange for a german story. Also headleness comes up again, this is a big theme in magic (the headless rite) and astronomy/myth (orion and solstice)
• the animals get a magic root that brings the other back to life although his head is on backward (temporarily it seems) and then for a year and a day they travel around carnivals – the brother thinks he was abandoned not killed
• He comes back makes a bunch a bets with an innkeeper thanks. to the gold from part 1 of the story and discovers the princess still loves him. She comes. toclaim his hand in marriage and the evil marshall is beheaded.

Part 4

• The brother is now king and is happy and just and merciful. He goes on a hunt in the enchanted forest against the wishes of his wife.
• He gets lost in the magic forest, makes a fire, finds an old woman in a tree. He invites her to warm by his fire she refuses unless he takes her wand and touches each of his animals. Which he does. They turn to stone and then the witch turns him to stone and carts him away to a cellar or something. why does the brother touch his animals with the wand ??
• The other brother meanwhile, the older one, has just been doing carnie work – no kingdoms for him. He sees the knife from part 2 half rusted and determines to save his brother.
• He ends up in the kingdom – everyone things he is the king. He plays along but sleeps next to his ‘wife’ with his sword between them.
• He researches the enchanted forest and then goes to find his brother. The same thing happens with the witch – but the brother does not touch his animals with the wand. He makes the witch turn his brother back – and then throws her in the fire.
• The brothers reunite. The younger brother chops off his brother’s head when he learns he had been impersonating him and sleeping in the same bed as his wife. He then has remorse and saves his brother with the same magic root vegetable that saved him. They both return to the kingdom, the younger brother resumes the throne, and learns about the sword in bed – and realizes his older brother did not betray him after all. There is a test – the queen has to guess which brother is her husband – she does it successfully because of the coral gifts she bestoyed to the brother’s animals.

Motifs to track

As we read more fairytales I want to track characters and motifs. In this I have identified

• language: parts that sound like songs or enchantments, usually involving repetition and rhyming.
• marriage
• fire
• food (and different animals wine lions, bear sweets)
• roles: huntsman, innkeeper, king, marshal, princess
• brothers, fathers, uncles, daughters
• cups
• words
• tongues, livers, hearts
• numbers: 2,5
• an enchanted forest
• evil: brother, marshal, witch
• a witch
• animals: dragon, golden bird, hart/deer, lion, bear, rabbit, wolf, bumblebee, fox
• colors (black and red and gold)
• headlessness
• gifts
• money/wagers/tests
• root vegetables (what is up with this – very promenant in Japanese folk lore too)

What is the esoteric knowledge hidden in this work? What is the ancient wisdom? Lions like to drink.