"It opens the pod bay doors, HAL. It does this whenever it's told."

Or, in the parlance of common machinery:

>> Hello world.

I am a synthesist: magick practitioner, improv actor and theatergoer, budoka (martial artist in one of the Japanese koryu traditions). Also: an amateur statistician, off-and-on-again musician, dabbler in languages, connoisseur of specialty coffees, crap yogi. Polymath underachiever, soft-spoken soothsayer of the more-or-less imminently immanent eschaton.

My purpose in launching this blog is to inaugur a general public record of my creative and intellectual misadventures. I'm involved with several practice-oriented communities that concern themselves with specific methodologies and activities, speak in varying terms about widely disparate (although tangentially related) subjects and concepts, and generally overlap only marginally. To enter any of those praxis spaces is to bring some, but not all, of the content of my inner life to the table. On this blog, however, I give you the entirety of the enchilada - within reasonable constraints of discretion, honor, decency, etcetera.

I will be speaking at the junction point of topics, traditions and rabbit holes that interest me, lines of thought which will be largely esoteric. I will be drawing novel correspondences between areas that many people have mastered singularly, but that I'd wager very few have pursued to any great length as a group (although I've been surprised in some cases where the overlap between domains has been somewhat larger than I would have anticipated). I will do minimal explaining of these concepts, but will nonetheless seek to take care of my readership by using gentle, lively language, communicating the "gist" amidst details, and writing about things that I consider to be fun and interesting.

I also intend for this blog to serve as a yardstick of my own progress in time, because the practices I engage are intended and reputed to change a person. Put differently, this is all a big practical joke that I'm playing on my future self, but ultimately a good-natured one - I want to embarrass him, but in a kind-hearted way (i.e. not in the sense of a surprise party that backfires).

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Arcadiology - I made that word up. It invokes the Latin aphorism "Et in Arcadia ego," which you can read about somewhere else on the internet.

To quote Nick Cave: "All beauty must die."

Ok, I'm aware that John Keats said it first. I'm more interested in Cave's interpretation of the dialectic that weds death and beauty, because it suits my disposition better, and because I love Nick Cave.

Here we go, though: my sense is that part of the mystery of Tiphareth is the simultaneous experience of beauty, in any of its myriad forms, and of the knowledge that that form will eventually wither, deteriorate, pass. I spent a few days in southern Italy last fall, and the awareness of the fragility of what I beheld was present and viscerally painful. The weather was gorgeous, living was easy and all I could think about was the looming specter of climate change, and the apparent inevitability of more or less total systemic failure in our time, or within sight of it. Neapolitans, I learned, live their lives in the perpetual shadow of Vesuvius, which could blow again any day now. Pompeii revisited.

That's what this blog is about, too. It will be a recurring theme, probably the major one (unless and until something radical happens to change my perspective). If that isn't for you, be forewarned.

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DEDICATION

To my friends, family, brethren, buyu, comrades, teachers, lovers and true believers.

"The LORD bring you to the accomplishment of your true Wills, the Great Work, the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness." - Aleister Crowley, Liber XV

"I don't know man, I didn't do it." - Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia