Where have the Butterflies gone.

Bark

 Back when De Quincy was a Romantic young junkie the word resonance wasn't commonly used. It's from Latin for echo or resound and more recently its meaning as a vibration has reached the marketers and propagandists where it's called a virus. Through physics this echo or resound has found a home in the world of electronics, specifically radio waves where it was baptized as frequency and there it slowly pushed aside harmony. 

And whether you like it or not, as we return to Jorge Luis Borges' essay on the Nothingness of Personality you might notice a vibration stirring the spirit, a harmony soothing the soul, a resonance rhyming with balance because I at least am going to argue that the last Golden Age of our species was destroyed by the written word.

Borges was a young man when he wrote The Nothingness of Personality. He claimed Personality was a "mirage maintained by conceit, it was without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality." He also suggested that a reader absorbed very little of what was written, rarely was the reader ever in a position to challenge or debate what was written, and altogether, in my view, Borges insinuated the relationship between writer and reader was a sterile relationship where the writer, in the interest of his own success, was attempting to impress the reader either with the equivalent of tablets from on high or a ripping yarn which as a best seller could mean a second home in the Cairngorms, or somewhere. 

The meanings in resonance that incline toward balance allows for the concept of what Zarathustra called Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom, the Master of Balance if you prefer. An imbalance betrays itself as a disharmony, a frequency that produces only static on the wireless as you search for Radio Caroline, a pirate radio station out there on the North Sea that's touched your imagination and into which you want to fall.

Go ahead, ask Socrates, he'll tell you the written word creates the illusion of understanding, fosters a pretense of knowledge, destroys memory. If you don't believe me then tramp homeless, friendless, handheld deviceless and hungry across the land, and there you may ask where the hedgerows have gone, you might wander after Hedgehog, and try to remember when you last saw a Butterfly. Or not.

  

The Sky Emu, Songlines and The Everywhen

Yellow Jacket Nest and Skunk or Possum

 The Sky Emu, is a dark blob in the Milky Way that we linear English Speaking Peoples have totally castrated by giving it the incredibly dull name of The Coalsack Nebula. Sure, the Coalsack Nebula can't be seen by most of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, but South of the Equator it's very much a feature for anyone interested in Emu.

I will tell you why but as with the Trans-Pacific Partnership which was crushed in 2017 by the current resident of the White House because he didn't want to understand it, it's complicated.

The point is, The Sky Emu, depending on where it is in the sky and what shape it is will tell you what the Emu are up to. What kind of mood they're in, whether they're wandering around, nesting, laying eggs. And don't be fooled, the Emu are untrustworthy and they are dangerous. In 1932, the Australian Government authorized the military to take up arms against The Emu.

The other thing to remember, which the Australian Military overlooked as they lost their war against Emu, you don't hunt Emu when the Sky Emu tells you they're nesting. If you do, your sin becomes a ripple in the fabric of time, all the way back into the past, the Everywhen thus threatened, your food sources would be destroyed, songlines would no longer lead you to water. Shame on you, you pathetic creature!

Of course, all over our own northern hemisphere, there was a time when people would look at the sky and do a Sky Emu interpretation on it. For example in Ancient Egypt it was fairly straightforward, when in the course of a year, Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, first rose after seventy days of absence just before sunrise, usually a week or two before the end of the summer, it meant the river Nile would soon be flooding. The Greeks called Sirius the Dog Star and they accused her of being the cause of the Dog Days of Summer.

In the North we have rather abused our relationship with the earth and the heavens. We fossilized the Songlines, made chocolate chip fortune cookies out of the Everywhen, stars twinkle and we catch them when they fall for luck......Anyway, thank god the days will lengthen for a while,

 

A permeable Membrane and the fate of the Sodomites.

Dappled

When it comes to Plato, Kant, Hegel and a whole bunch of others, some of them English Speaking disciples of the Enlightenment, those of us who share the quest for a tie wearing Grail of Reason, find ourselves accusing those of the Romantic Vision, along with the Woe is me Existentialists and anyone who claims to be uniquely spiritual and/or creative, of being pit dwelling, hat wearing blobs with very little going for them.

And I say this as someone who owns a deep respect for the world as it might have been during the Paleolithic period, the several million years before the farmers messed with our lifestyle and just twelve thousand years ago turned us Neolithic, a paltry description for twenty-five thousand years of poor nutrition, shorter lives, more diseases, social stratification and conflict over land ownership.

The point is you can't touch the Romantics without submitting to an understanding of all that and the Taoist Way. "Once I was a butterfly, fluttering this way and that, then I woke up and saw that I was a man. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man." Good pothead Neolithic stuff, the dreamworld and the first rational question: "What is Real?"

For Taoists the answer came this way: both dream and awake is part of a larger unified flow. Or as Can Bobby would tell you, dream and awake for a Taoist are just "different frequencies of experience." Worth noting that if Can Bobby ever feels anything it'll be a different frequency.

 Go ahead, sneer away as you dream of an event in Bethlehem which has badly messed with calendar for two thousand years. But rest assured if you were in Western Australia thirty five thousand years ago, you'd settle down for the night and while asleep you'd left the shell and traveled to a small, often permanent, body of water you hadn't visited for years, and spotted a tree that had fallen over or a spring that had dried up, then, according to the law, there was a good chance you owned that billabong. And why on earth? Well, dream time was real. 

In the 1960's, as we beatniks were being overwhelmed by hippies, traveling while asleep was called Astral Planing, but trust me in those days justice had been well sterilized and Astral Planing didn't hold up in court even if prior to the English Invasion it had always been a custom and practice, and a god given right of the Welsh Speaking Peoples.

So we got what Can Bobby refers to as a "permeable membrane" between sleeping and waking. The Romantics embraced the permeability of that membrane. Here there's a sentiment that's sort of from Genesis. It goes something like this: 'The Children of Sodom have lost the right to Petition Fate."

They were doomed. Man, woman and child, all of them doomed. I don't know about Jesus or the Holy Spirit but an overly sensitive God the Father felt badly ignored, he had to set an example, and he'd have no mercy on them. Romantics, might have described the Sodomites, and the Gomorrahites, as stuck in the light of the sun. A light that only showed boundaries not connections.

Alcoholics have a cure, they say sorry, admit to their sin and submit to a higher power. It's very romantic and rather ironic way to deal with the higher power of alcohol.

Hoffmann's Anthem to the Romantic Vision

Local Visionary 

 The easy criticism of the Romantics dwells on the idea that they are romantic, just one big woo, a heaving breast factor and fields of daffodils.

So let's look at a German Romantic called ETA Hoffmann, who in 1816, with Napoleon far away, this time on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, published a book called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. Many might know Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, which was adapted from Alexandre Dumas' version of Hoffmann's Nutcracker. Alexandre Dumas wrote the Three Musketeers. Dumas' Nutcracker, was written in the 1840's, it was written as a children's version of Hoffmann's somewhat Gothic Nutcracker. 

Of interest, a Nutcracker, in German, is a Nussknacker. Here, the German word nusse is as vulgar a description of gonad as nut is in the English language. And we can all be fairly certain that Hoffmann knew where nusse lay on the symbolic order of meaning. And I'll tell you why.

It all started for Hoffman with sausage making. Imagine a household where a king had decided to hold a sausage feast for his friends and neighbors. Meanwhile in her kitchen the Queen had received the news and was carefully separating the lard from the meat to make sure the proportions were correct, her king didn't like his sausages too greasy, nor too dry.

As she worked a mouse emerged from under the floorboards. This mouse was Madame Mouserinks, she was the Queen of the Mice, she was large and powerful, she explained her own royal lineage and asked for a little pork fat to sample. The Human Queen obliged, and unfortunately out from under the floorboards came Madam Mouserinks' seven sons as well as numerous relatives who ate up pretty much all of the lard for the King's sausages.

You might be able to imagine the King's reaction. His Feast of Sausages was a disaster. The sausages his queen had made, were lackluster, far too dry, his business connections were most unimpressed. What had happened? It could be time to do a Henry the Eighth on the missus.

The Queen, familiar with her King's rages, explained exactly what had happened in the kitchen, it wasn't her fault. The King ordered his clockmaker to make devices that would rid his castle of mice. Madame Mouserinks and her mice were subjected to a terrible pogrom, it was an extermination which left Madam Mouserinks very distraught. She carefully plotted her revenge, she'd wait until the new child was born to the upstairs realm, she sneaked into the newborn's well appointed nursery and cast a spell on Princess Prilipat. She turned the beautiful little baby into a hideous, big headed, nutcracker faced monster who had a beard.  

The Queen discovered that the only way to break the spell was for some goodish looking boy who'd never shaved and never worn boots to crack open a Krakatuk nut and feed the nut's kernel to the grotesque Princess Prilipat. The Krakatuk was not an easy thing to crack. Many had tried, some had broken their teeth in their efforts to impress the girls and curry favor with Royalty. 

And lo, the upstairs King's clockmaker had a nephew, who as it turned out was rather good with Krakatuk nuts. He did his thing, opened the nut with his teeth, took the necessary seven steps backwards without looking. Princess Prilipat was relieved of her gruesomeness, she became a blue eyed blond with excellent prospects for a Disney Role.

But, As the clockmaker's nephew was stepping backwards he stepped on Madame Mouserinks, the Queen of the Mice, and as she died she cursed the clockmaker's nephew. She turned him into a an unpleasant looking actual nutcracker.

Not exactly Sugar Plum Fairy. She wasn't invented until 1892, when the marketers reckoned the whole Nutcracker story needed a climactic dance for a male and female lead, a curtain close, followed by a happy ever after with Christmas presents and other carnal delights, sausage stuffing and plum pudding.

Hoffmann's Nutcracker was a very different feast to the 1892 extravaganza. All very well a gal feeling sorry for a cursed nutcracker that had been given to the family as a present and had been broken by her heavy-handed brother.

In Hoffmann's Nutcracker it wasn't defeating this or that with mousetraps or curses or whatever and running off with a princess to wherever in white. Hoffmann's Marie wasn't even a princess, she was someone's sister who'd watched her brother break a nutcracker. And it was Marie's re-enriching the broken nutcracker, with her "childlike gaze" which could see the spiritual truth of a physical object, she bandaged the nutcracker's broken jaw, submitted herself to the Mouse King's blackmail, he wanted his revenge for the killing of Madame Mouserinks, his queen, he'd do anything to reduce the nutcracker to kindling. Marie would do anything to save her nutcracker.

Yes indeed, it was Marie's own radical empathy that enabled her many difficult sacrifices which returned the Nutcracker to become the person he'd once been, a clockmaker's nephew. And yes Marie's re-enriching the broken nutcracker required her to remake fairyland where the nutcracker could take her to the Kingdom of Dolls and when Marie was old enough they'd wed.

There again Hoffmann wrote an anthem to the Romantic Vision where the Nutcracker is a cursed and noble soul, where Marie is a witness to a spiritual vision and where reality is a thin veil over a magical world.