Here’s one of the poems I enjoy dragging out of the back of my head when autumn has firmly taken hold. Last year’s cord of wood has seasoned well through the generous summer we had on Vashon, so I’ll probably make the year’s first fire in the fireplace tomorrow night.

Question: I don’t see exactly what path to follow and what aim to have in view.

Gurdjieff: A path isn’t necessary. It is only necessary that you obtain results in yourself. Collect, accumulate the results of the struggle. You will need them for continuing.

You must accumulate; you have batteries in you in which you must accumulate this substance, like electricity. This substance only can be accumulated by struggle. Therefore, create a struggle between your head and your animal.

Continue your struggle, but without waiting for results. Accumulate the results of the process of struggle. When we struggle interior with thought, feeling and body, that gives a substance in the place where it belongs.

We have no interest today in knowing where that place is. Accumulate. It is this that is lacking in you. You are young. You haven’t experience. You are empty. Continue the struggle accidentally begun. So that if you say that you are not satisfied, that proves you are on the right road. But you must not stop.

You know better than I what struggle. For example, whatever your body likes, whatever you have the habit of giving it, don’t give it anymore. The important thing is to have a continual process of struggle, because you need the substance that struggle will give you.

From Views for the Real World: Early Talks of Gurdjieff

Today’s post? Anything but verbiage.

So I made a music mix while Mercury stationed in Scorpio and triggered a ping pong of sonic impressions which I tracked, mixed and recorded.

I like the Renaissance approach to creativity. In addition to my work as an astrologer I like to publish, paint and I’ve recently finished a teleplay with my writing partner, Noble Smith. Having worked as a DJ decades ago in Hawai’i, I’ve never lost my love of a good segue and so I mix tape too.

A note about the collection of tunes below. I avoid most anything that’s considered pop, not that I dislike pop music but simply because there’s so much of it that’s not good. Too, unless a songwriter is really gifted, like Aimee Mann or Elvis Costello, I get bored with confessional writing as I’m not that interested in hearing people’s stories about love calamities or the Rolex and weed they just purchased.

That leaves electronic and ambient music as my primary placeholders. But I also love jazz (50 and 60s especially or really old jazz, like early Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong). I’ve a penchant for soul music from the 70s and I also enjoy pounding modern dance music that knows how to swing and not just thump. So expect all of that.

Anyway, I said I’d do anything but compose words today and here I am five paragraphs deep. Jesus.

Enjoy!

 
Illustration by Max Ernst.

Artist Valerie Hegart creates art that unwittingly channels the Pluto in Capricorn transit/meme. This is like a series of pages from Shiva’s playbook.

Somehow both patriotism and horror are palpable in Hegarty’s works, which she mutilates and brings to new life in a recent exhibition, titled, “Altered States.”

Rémi Gaillard is a guy who lost his job as a shoe salesman and then decided to transform the big question mark in his life (as in “What to do next?”) by spreading that question mark all over the world as a culture jammer, (as in people scratching their heads while watching him and asking “What the fuck?) Read the entire article here.

“You think your mind is in your head, but where is it? No one knows. So our practice is to be with everything. When you include everything, that is the real self.”
–Shunryu Suzuki

Art work: Joseph Cornell, Cassiopeia (verso),1960