Mercury Retrograde

Astrology

Mercury Retro Time Table

September 15, 2002 – October 7, 2002
January 3, 2003 – January 24, 2003
April 27, 2003 – May 21, 2003
August 29, 2003 – September 21, 2003
December 18, 2003 – January 7, 2004
April 7, 2004 – May 1, 2004
August 11, 2004 – September 3, 2004
December 1 – December 21, 2004

As we are now just coming out of the retro phase writing about cyberspace should be a whole lot easier!

Mercury

Weboteric Astrology

It represents the power of communication (even the Internet), interpretation and self-expression, intelligence and reason. Its action is to quicken and enliven whilst adding mobility and fluidity. The symbol illustrates receptivity resulting from the exaltation of spirit over matter.

I have been reading quite complex stuff about Hermes and cyberspace… but it is all put very simply in Astrology.

Seattle University: Imagination and Its Discontents – a talk by Dr. Glen Arbery

isi.org ~ PNW Faculty Seminar

Linking here because was impressed by his essay cited below, also because I added a link to his book, which has the introduction on line in a pdf file.

Across town Seattle University played host on Tuesday night to Dr. Glen Arbery of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture. Arbery, who is author of the recent ISI Books’ title Why Literature Matters, delivered a talk to a crowd of over 75 students and faculty entitled “Measure and Freedom: Imagination and its discontents.”

In the forty-five minute lecture, Arbery lamented the abysmal state of literary knowledge on standardized testing. After reading a sample passage from a recent Texas state standardized test, Arbey showed how what counts as literature today does not take stock of what is real, but instead tries to provoke the same response from its entire audience, regardless of their differences. Literature, in other words, has become tantamount to propaganda. Drawing on work by John Crowe Ransom and Allan Tate, Arbery showed how great literature comes into being by taking measure of reality, what he called “reality’s extra-textual roughness.” Similarly he said that freedom, like literature, flows not from liberation but from limitations: “a boundary is not where something stops, but where a thing begins to realize itself, where it comes into being.”

Here and Everywhere: the Icons of Global Consciousness

Dallas Institute – but penetrate the “frames” to get to:

Here and Everywhere: the Icons of Global Consciousness, by Glenn Arbery, Ph.D.

A very thorough essay with much to digest on cyberspace.

If, as we have seen, the telos and meaning of the opus of maximizing profit is to render people redundant, does this moment of the symbolic life not serve as our initiation into what I call the ‘psychological difference’, the difference between human and soul? Do we not have to acknowledge it as our psychopomp guiding us out of the anthropological or ontological fallacy dominating the present consciousness and into a new form of consciousness?

Interview with Michael Meade

Mosaic Voices — Watering the Seeds of the Future A January, 2002 three part interview with Michael Meade by Earthlight magazine.
Micheal Mead

What happens if they’re not shown the recognition of that seed?

Now, we’re back to death. William Blake said that the garden of the soul is already planted and is waiting for the water of life. Call it the water of attention. There are innate ideas, dreams, stories, buried in people. When we don’t water those seeds, culture loses ideas. It loses imagination. It loses the capacity to dream itself forward. I mean that literally.

I have a tape by Micheal Mead – which I liked a lot!

This article appeals right now because of the “to dream itself forward” idea. I am interested. This is somewhat Chardinian, somehow there is a pull — see item below on afford. I am also interested because of story. What is the difference between travel and journey: story. How does this relate to “surfing” and the cyber part of cyberspace?

Joseph Campbell and the Skywalker: Meetings with George Lucas

Pacifica Graduate Institute | Campbell & Gimbutas Library by Richard Buchen

Lucas had read The Hero with a Thousand Faces while working on the script of the first of the Star Wars movies, and had gone on to read the Masks of God and other writings. When Star Wars debuted in 1977, it followed the Hero very closely. Lucas said at an award ceremony in 1985, “It is possible that if I hadn’t run across him I’d still be writing Star Wars today.”

An Interview with James Hillman

Insight & Outlook

Hillman: Well, some reviewers has a scientistic ax to grind. To them, my book had to be either science or new age mush. It’s very hard in our adversarial society to find a third view. Take journalism, where everything is always presented as one person against another: “Now we’re going to hear the opposing view.” There is never a third view.

My book is about a third view. It says, yes, there’s genetics. Yes, there are chromosomes. Yes, there’s biology. Yes, there are environment, sociology, parenting, economics, class, and all of that. But there is something else, as well. So if you come at my book from the side of science, you see it as “new age.” If you come at the book from the side of the new age, you say it doesn’t go far enough — it’s too rational.

Another interview, this one by Scott London 1998.

James Hillman Interview: “I’m Red!”

Worldguide

This is a 1996 or so interview, very interesting in 2003!

So I see much more — I mean this sounds ridiculous for a Jungian psychologist to be talking this way — but I see the way of looking at a lot that goes on today — it would be good to put back on a pair of Marxist glasses.

Another reason for this is the Marxist idea that capitalism can only survive by its last phases, which is through war material. Producing. Having wars and producing useless goods, which are not good for the people. That’s what we’re doing. The biggest part of the budget is still the defense budget. We’ve got no enemies anywhere. And it’s still space shots. The spin-off of the trickle-down from them is so remote, but it keeps all the constituencies voting, because they’ve got a little piece of the defense industry, everywhere in the country. Look at that through Marxist glasses.

This was all said fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, the way we are — the way the country is functioning was predictable according to Marx’s view of capitalism.