THE PATRIARCHY IS OVER

 

the red squirrel outside my window

Lying in bed this morning after waking, I felt like I had a penetrating insight into the nature of God, and by now it's gone. I did not write it down and it went away. I've seen a news report recently saying brain science is discovering the brain is a microcosm of the universe. It sounds outrageous, but how could it be otherwise? A galaxy is a moving spiral. Planets go around one of the galaxy's stars, all of them spinning like cosmic tops. Though we're unconscious of the spiral motion going on all the time, we see it in cigarette smoke rising from an ashtray. It is in water swirling down the drain. North of the equator it turns to the right. South of the equator it turns to the left. Water flows in spirals in rivers, creeks, pipes, wherever it flows. An old tree in the forest dead for a very long time is a vertical column that is a spiral. Our bones have spiral grain. It is water flow that creates our bodies, meaning to me that we are the same as water running in a river, composed of spirals to the tips of our hair. Since everything in the universe is in motion, this tells me the universe is in motion too. A spiral motion the way galaxies flow in spirals, like planets twirl through space in spirals around a moving star, itself in a spiral. I suspect this explains, too, why spirals figure so much in ancient art. We live in spirals and we are spirals, though at our mentally developed level it is too subtle for us to notice. There was a time I was reading in a self-help art book, finding myself totally uninterested. One thing I found in the early part of the book, the only part I read, an exercise to make a spontaneous drawing every day for a period of time. I used colored markers. All I ever drew were spirals. I said, Why only spirals? Because spirals happened. I tried to go against it and drew some rectangles and squares by intent. Next day a spiral. I told myself to draw a profile of a face. I drew a spiral. I stopped doing it after more than a month because I only drew spirals. I wondered if it was telling me I was passing into a new stage in inner growth, like grow into this. I tried to find psychological or spiritual meaning in making spirals every day, not interested in drawing anything else. I found none. Learned not to question so much.

In the last several days or few weeks I've been focusing on the silliness of drawing conclusions. Everything is in motion and every non-thing is in motion. A momentum carries us through time and keeps everything in the flow. Sometimes it seems futile to me to paint still images. A stopped moment, like a photograph, a thousandth of a second in ongoing time. Continuous motion is the nature of life. How does a still image deal with that? Or even how does a moving picture do it? Dance and music perhaps honor the continuous motion that is time. It's by earth's motion in the solar system that we measure time. Time is a measuring tape we use attempting with a finger to outline a square on the surface of a river. That's about how well our minds are able to "grasp" reality, the reality that is in motion, that, like water, when the flow is stopped it makes a powerful lake that will break  violently through the force holding it back. Like in Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, building a wall to suppress the feminine, the feminine goes insane, breaks down the wall and the whole house. This continent and the South American continent had a lot of people living on them for 13,000 years. White man came with white man's insane belief system of superiority over all living beings and in a few hundred years has destroyed both continents. The Amazon rain forest will be desert probably before the end of this century, as most likely the western half of USA will be desert, too, if not the whole continent. This was done in attempts to stop the perpetual motion of life itself. The "primitive" (meaning first, not stupid) people who lived tribally lived in continual presence of the spirit of life, honored its laws, observed its subtle energies. White man comes along like a legion of army ants and destroys everything, even unto self. It has been the nature of civilization all along to deny the feminine, Grandmother Earth.

 

 

 

We've just completed 6,000 years of patriarchy, before which was 6,000 years of matriarchy. My feeling sees the Adam and Eve story a mythological (I don't mean false) story of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. As we humans have done all along when a new belief system takes hold, genocide breaks loose against the people living in the old way. I'd guess about everything from the matriarchy was destroyed with the genocide. Goddess figurines have been found in Turkey among Neolithic ruins. The Old Testament genocides were over the change from the Age of Taurus, Baal the Bull, to the Age of Aries, the sacrifice of sheep. Next, Pisces the fish, the symbol of the Christ. The Christians did their very best to eliminate the Hebrews of the Age of Aries. We are moving now into the Age of Aquarius. Our belief systems are changing fast going into this new Age. How did the song go? Peace, love and understanding. It's about time. Aquarius is taking us into the time of masculine and feminine in balance. This is what women's liberation is about, bringing us collectively into balance. In my personal assessment, women will be actively engaged in everything. The wrinkles are not yet ironed out. We have a large number of women artists at least the equal of the men. Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Agnes Martin in visual art. Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov, all three with recently released collected poems. And they're not the only ones. It was a gradual change from the time of George Eliot writing under a man's name to Jane Austin to Gertrude Stein to Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, to now when there are as many successful women writers as men. This is the balance of Aquarius. Like white men are freaking all over the country around an enword president, hate boiling to the surface again. Boys are taught from birth to dismiss women. It is male culture from the core outward to dismiss women. Patriarchy. It has only been a little over a century that women have been allowed educations and careers. In times when men were largely educated, at least to some degree, the women were not educated at all. It follows that educated men as well as uneducated men would feel superior to women, add to it white man's need to be superior to all else and justification by the great patriarchal text, the Bible, women didn't stand a chance in white man world. It's the same in Asian, African, Middle Eastern.

 

 

 

The whole world is going through at least a century-long upheaval brought on by new cosmologies, belief systems, the old ones disproven, disregarded, done. Elizabeth Warren has the best mind of anyone in our government. I don't want her for president. Republicans would nail her to the cross. They have only contempt for intelligence and they hate it in a woman even worse than they hate it in an enword. USA is the cutting edge of the ship of civilization in this time of putting aside discriminations based in collective judgment for a very long time. The wars over the last century have been burning off the hate generated by traditions all over the earth breaking down and changing, traditional cultures everywhere fading away as the old people die out. Hate radio and tv in America is bringing the hate among us to the surface, alas, very dangerously. But hate is by nature dangerous. I heard Laurens van der Post say in an interview, "Evil is always in a hurry." It resonated when I heard it. Over the last few years I feel like I have found my flow and am happily flowing with it. Somebody comes along in a hurry and it rattles me. I get in a hurry and it feels like I jumped my track. I'd come to distrust hurry in others and self by the time I heard van der Post's interview. I felt like he was someone who had found his own flow. The prophecies say that after this time of war we're in, a thousand years of peace is next, after which comes another period of burning off hate, then hate will be gone from the earth and it will be peace ever after. This is why I call myself an apocaloptimist, meaning I see everything going to shit, then by surprise everything turns out all right. Makes a good story. A thousand years ahead we'll look back at this time as something like the medieval period seems to us now. And the history of this time won't be anywhere near accurate. The issue I had with history all the way through school was it gave no importance to the everyday lives of people living in the time who were not very well off. Possibly, this is the role of art as history, to cover the life spirit history bypasses.

 

 

 

 

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