the desire to float in a bubble

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: "I'll go take a hot bath."

I meditate in the bath. The water needs to be very hot, so hot you can barely stand putting your foot in it. Then you lower yourself, inch by inch, till the water's up to your neck.

I remember the ceiling over every bathtub I've stretched out in. I remember the texture of the ceilings and the cracks and the colors and the damp spots and the light fixtures. I remember the tubs, too: the antique griffin-legged tubs, and the modern coffin-shaped tubs, and the fancy pink marble tubs overlooking indoor lily ponds, and I remember the shapes and sizes of the water taps and the different sorts of soap holders.

I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath.

taken from: The Bell Jar, by: Sylvia Plath

oh what a tangled tapestry we weave

Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, ... If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
--Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49, Chapter 1

Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
-- Thomas Pynchon's Proverbs for Paranoids: Collected from Gravity's Rainbow, V237, 241, 251, 262, & 292

Pictured: The Lady and the Unicorn, tapestry, ca: 1490
Worthy of mention: Unicorn Mythology with regard to maidens

Temporary Generational Amnesia

I've always marveled at what I call temporary generational amnesia. A condition wherein people who absolutely hated their parents, society, and the world at age 20 reflect upon their parents, society, and the world at age 50 and believe that contemporary society, the current world, and their children (which they shaped) pale in comparison to the glory that was the world as it was when they were 20. It's always really unnerved me.

Then today I read this quote from Thomas Pynchon and temporary generational amnesia is all so clear:

Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandpaernts. We produce and attend musicval comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.
--V., Chapter Seven, Part I

link: Selected Quotations by Thomas Pynchon

GEMINI (May 21-June 20):

In his poem, "The Two Trees," William Butler Yeats says that one tree is holy and grows within the heart. Its branches and trembling flowers thrive on joy. The changing colors of its fruit please the stars, and its leaves give the waves their melody. The second tree has broken boughs and blackened leaves and is full of "the ravens of unresting thought." I bring this to your attention, Gemini, because in the coming week it really is up to you and your free will which of these two trees you spend most of your time with. The astrological configurations have nothing to say on that matter.

link: free will astrology
The Two Trees

Dr. Freud's couch

I've secretly always wanted this couch for my very own. I also secretly wish I could find an anaylist who has replicated one.

The New York Times writes:

"One of the most famous pieces of furniture in the world, Freud's couch, above, was where his patients reclined as their psyches were probed. It was not, however, a fainting couch or a chaise longue, like your Victorian antique. The couch where the likes of the composer Gustav Mahler and the American poet H. D. were treated was a decidedly more homespun affair hidden beneath a slipcover: a plump muslin-covered underbody with an integral sausagelike roll at one end, a large detached cushion for back support and two low fabric-covered platforms.

That analytic couch is still a feature of the cozy antiquities-strewn study at the Freud Museum at 20 Maresfield Gardens in London, a handsome brick mansion where the psychoanalyst lived from 1938 until his death a year later; it remained the home of his daughter Anna, a child psychoanalyst, until 1982. (Photographs and information are at freud.org.uk.)

The couch wasn't, however, upholstered in a kilim, which is a Middle Eastern rug with no soft pile. Then as now the couch — said to have been a gift to Freud from a patient around 1890 — was draped with a velvet-textured late-19th-century Qashqai Shekarlu wool carpet colored red and blue and patterned with flowers and diamond medallions. It was piled with soft cushions in moody shades of red, gold and green; a Persian carpet hung on the wall behind.
Freud would sit in a green velvet chair at the head of the couch while patients would recline, supported in a semi-upright position by the cushions..."

every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end

Tav, the final letter of the Hebrew Alpeph Beit signifies endings but suggests there is more to come. Rabbi Michael Munk tells us that "Kabbalistic literature teaches that the Aleph Beit - representing all Divine forces - does not culminate with the Tav but turns around to unite again with the Aleph." Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, says "Their end is embedded in their beginning and their beginning in their end."

Tav also initiates one of the most crucial terms in kabbalistic practice, tikkun. Tikkun means "to repair" or "to redeem." In the 1500's Rabbi Isaac Luria taught the ultimate task of each person is to contribute to the meaning of a shattered universe, unifying sparks of holiness through perceiving the inherent sacredness of all things. He taught that we uplift and redeem the fallen sparks of holiness that are hidden in "husks" within every thing, by means of our prayers, our deepened awareness, an dour acts of loving-kindness.

Contemporary Rabbi David Cooper writes, "Our opportunities to raise sparks are boundless. The choices we make for our activities, the interactions we have with our family, friends, neighbors, business associates, and even strangers, the way we spend our leisure time, the books we read, the television we watch, the way we relate to food, everything in our daily life presents sparks locked in husks awaiting relase."

By releasing these sparks we prepare the way for the redemption of the world. Thus Tav and tikkun show us that the path to the end of all things, is also the path to the beginning.

a midsummer night

Press close, bare-bosomed Night!
Press close, magnetic,nourishing Night!
Night of south winds!
Night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding Night!
Mad, naked, Summer Night!

- Walt Whitman