Bach to the Future

To speak about connecting with my roots is always awkward because in a sense, I have  no roots.  Or perhaps it can be said that I have many different sets of them, or that, like a banyan tree, my branches have frequently taken root in an alien soil.

So I can’t say that my second visit to Korat is about the rediscovery of my roots.  It’s not that simple.

It has been as much about planting new seeds in ground that might be fertile or stony.  As when three members of our Shounen-Thai Quartet sat in the middle of a field and started playing the slow movement of Bach’s double violin concerto amid the sights and sounds of what called itself the “Kollywood Festival” but was for all intents and purposes a temple fair without the temple.  Next to them, a street vendor sold homemade dim sum and another touted that fabulous oriental delicacy, French fries (served up in a little banana-leaf boat).  Behind them, a woman demonstrated the ancient art of weaving on a hand-loom, while in the distance a vendor hawked battery-operated light sabers.  A folk opera jangled from about 200 yards away.  Yes, it was noisy, and yet … around the Bach there was a sort of aura of stillness.  And people were stopping to listen.  And they were really concentrating on this ethereal music with its slow suspensions, its aching long notes.  So the idea that this might be the first time this piece of earth was being touched by Bach was very moving ... it brought me to tears ... the innocence and purity of the moment ... 

The quartet isn’t even going to be all here until tomorrow, when Post, our viola player, shows up with his mother.  Then they’re going to have a session with some local young musicians, exchanging ideas and being teenagers.  In the evening, they will join forces with a traditional Korat singer.  We have no clue what is going to happen, but I am sure it will be magical.

My American friends often assume that I come complete with “mysteries of the east,” but I left Thailand when I was six months old and didn’t come back until I was 7, and then only for 5 years.  I am as European as I am Asian.  Not to mention American. Indeed, I can truly say that I am a child of three continents.  In Thailand, I frequently am seen by Thais as being too much infected with the “mysteries of the west.”

As a Thai, I’m a city boy, whose childhood came with walled enclosures and imported foreign bland food.  So I never lived in a village, never ate duckbill shishkebabs, never swam naked in a muddy stream.  I’m having a lot of trouble with the local food.  And yet … there is something about this that calls to me from a past.  It can’t really be my personal past, so it must be something from the collective unconscious.  I’m connecting with a past that I might have had.  Yet it feels as real as if I had really lived it.  Like a good novel, I suppose.

Carrying the Torch

On Wednesday night, after the gorgeous strains of Mahler's Ninth died away, I have to admit that I had a lot of mortality issues.  Mahler 9 makes you think about death a lot.  Death the lover, the dancer, the cynic, the consoler, they're all present in this piece.  You have to play this piece as if it's the last thing you ever do, and during the last movement I really felt as if it might be the last thing I ever did.  And to be honest, I really did feel as if I had died.  During the reception afterwards I was virtually incoherent and the next day I was really ill and had to cancel a Rossini rehearsal.

It was only the previous day that I knew I would be using a baton last used by Leonard Bernstein to conduct the same symphony 21 years ago.  Stan Gayuski, a member of the New York chapter of the Mahler Society and (as all Mahlerians are) a little crazy, came to lunch and had it with him.  "I want you to use it for this concert," he told me.

It was an awesome artifact.  The cigarette stains alone hinted at a world that doesn't exist anymore ... a smoke-filled, largely all-male world.  I thought back to my first encounter with this symphony, when I was 13 and visiting Paris ... that was with a wheelchair-bound Otto Klemperer, who knew Mahler personally, for God's sake.  It was a concert which changed my life, the first "proper" concert I'd ever been to.

So what was it like?  Did I get possessed by the spirit of Bernstein, floating over to the Thailand Cultural Center from whatever Sheol he currently dwells in?  It is not that simple, any more than possession itself is that simple.

You all know that the Thais are Buddhists, but in a way they're not.  Buddhism in Thailand is a rich and lovingly-sculpted façade that covers a deep and potent tabernacle of animism.  Animism, the old religion that was here before Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity (all of which have left their mark) is about the essential "livingness" of all matter.  Water, air, land, rocks, buildings, and even batons have spirits.  You can talk to the wind, to trees, to animals.  And there is no question to me that waving that stick is as much about magic as anything in a J.K. Rowling novel.

Bruce Gaston, as a young student, used to hang around Bernstein quite a bit and one day, he remembers, Bernstein said to him, "If you conduct Mahler's Ninth properly, things happen."  That's because Mahler's Ninth isn't just the death-song of one death-obsessed composer, but a death-song for the entire romantic movement, for an entire century of a certain sensibility.   It is a symphony absolutely drenched in death.  Clutching that flimsy piece of cork, mingling my DNA with the DNA of a dead hero, was in a real sense an erotic encounter with death, because to a romantic sensibility, love and death are the same.  In the last movement, I understood for the first time empirically why in Shakespeare's English, "to die" had the double meaning of achieving an orgasm.

And things surely did happen.  Stan Gayuski fell into a terrible state at the end of the dress rehearsal and almost had to be carried out; he was too weak to attend the performance and could only watch it on video; it fell to Singapore conductor Adrian Tan to write a review for the Post which Stan had promised to do.  Friends of friends dropped dead or attempted suicide the next day.

The day after the concert, whose success was way beyond what I envisioned — I mustn't forget to mention that two separate ex-pats who don't know each other emailed me to say that this was the most impressive classical music event they had attended in forty years of living in Thailand — I received a vicious email spam attack.

Copies of a letter from a fake email address, purporting to be a member of our orchestra, were being circulated on the net.  The letter talked of my venality, my evil, the fact that they weren't proud of being in my orchestra because of my evil exploitation ... you get the picture.  The same thing happened to me in 2006 right after one of the biggest international successes we had managed to carry off: the premiere of my opera Ayodhya.  A massive email smear campaign.

The identity of the perpetrator of the 2006 campaign became apparent a year later when her mother accidentally invited one of my friends to join the "let's destroy Somtow" plot.   It must be said that the plot almost worked; someone was even quoted in Opera Magazine as saying that the Bangkok Opera was moribund —this before we had the most artistically successful year in our history.

The 2010 smear campaign seems to have already petered out after only a week.  Perhaps, possession of the Bernstein baton constitutes holding one of the "magical objects" that the Cambodian Prime Minister was recently using to curse our own Mr Abhisit.

The attacks were followed by a shower of blessings.  Barbara Bonney's agent contacted me and the next thing I knew, she agreed to do the soprano solo in our Mahler 4.  If Bernstein's baton was like receiving a relic of the True Cross, getting Barbara Bonney's agreement was not unlike a visitation from the Virgin Mary.  After a few days of absolutely debilitating post partum, I felt reborn.  Visiting the old city of Korat and hearing the ancient songs of the village people also was a renewing experience.  When Bruce Gaston and I played our Avatar Duet this Sunday, it was as if we were reinventing music itself.

When you do Mahler Nine, you have to start thinking beyond death.  I'm finding myself (as Schönberg said) "breathing air from another planet."  I don't know what's going to happen next, but whatever it is, it is going to stoke the old "sense of wonder" in a big way.

Hurrah for Kollywood

Yes!  I've agreed to appear at the Kollywood Festival, improvising along with the singing of an incredibly brilliant folk artist. The poster, viewable here, is beyond belief.  But you can see that I wasn't kidding in my recent twitter announcements about folk opera troupes dressing up in 18th century Viennese costumes....

My visit to Korat last week was full of suprises, not the least of which was to discover that fried duck bills were being sold as shish kebabs.  First it turns out that there is a beautiful symphony hall in Korat, and there is an entire, and possibly rather neglected, field of local music.  In particular I encountered the gorgeous singing of a woman who had learned the songs from her mother and whose folk tunes may well be lost if there is not some mechanism for their preservation.

The there were the little old ladies who gave a demonstration of folk dancing at a temple, only we had to wait for someone to finish getting cremated.

And of course there were also the ancient ruins.  Like this 1,300 year old reclining Buddha image....

Oh yeah, I woke up from an interesting dream this morning.  I dreamt that I was buying candy from the prime minister, who had taken over a booth in the food court of the Trnity Shopping Mall in Silom....

Curses! Foiled Again!

I read in the paper that the prime minister of Cambodia has put a curse on the prime minister of Thailand.  The quote, from The Nation, is a pretty strange one:  "let magic objects break your neck, may you be shot, be hit by a car, may you be shocked by electricity or [may you be shot] by misfired guns".


I for one am dying to get hold of one of those "magic objects".   They would surely be useful to have around for breaking the odd enemy neck.   And the "misfired guns" are pretty cool, too.  I suppose that to get guns to kill someone not by mistake would be a higher level of curse.


This is why I prefer to live in Asia these days.  Because despite our city-wide wireless, ubiquity of McDonalds and Starbucks, skyscrapers, and high-tech lifestyles, we still live a lot closer to the primal realities of the human condition.  


And witch doctors are certainly cheaper than psychiatrists.

A Bit of Mahler

Would like to share with my friends the finale of Mahler 9 ... not because it's the most technically polished performance of all time ... but because an incredible passion and spirituality was generated that evening.    I hope you enjoy this.  I used a baton last used by Leonard Bernstein in 1989 to conduct this same symphony, which was presented to me by Stan Gayuski of the New York Chapter of the International Mahler Society.  It was wonderful to feel so connected to the person whose interpretation of this symphony was so important to me in my youth.

Murdering Mahler

So, today, Friday, is a day without a Mahler rehearsal, but I am so physically and emotionally drained that the day is a blur.  And I fall asleep at around 8 pm.  Now, three hours later, I've woken up from another wild dream.

So in this dream, I'm a photographer and I've been assigned to take pictures of a very impressive wine glass collection in a huge contemporary-style house.  The collection is all in one room, a huge dining room (although the dining table, later on, feels kind of like a morgue table).  First, I order all the lights in the house shut off so that I can control the lighting in the dining room better.  The wineglasses are in lovely glass shelves and it's my intention to take some of the standing lamps in the room and direct them so they can pick up the richness of the wineglasses' colors and textures.

But no matter which lamps I set, the room is too dark.  There must be something wrong with the lamps.  None of the lamps is bright enough.  I call for help, for more light bulbs.  All sorts of people are coming into the room now. piling boxes of light bulbs on the table.  The dining table that is ... or is it the morgue table?

None of the bulbs is any good.  Someone says ... Look, a German bulb!  It's a small thing with a black socket and a different kind of screw that won't fit into a standard lamp.  I pick it up and Curt Ayers III, a Southern gentleman who is a member of the Orpheus Choir of Bangkok, says, "Oh, ah think ah'll take that if y'all don't mind." 

Holding the bulb in my hand I have a flashback ... I murdered someone in this very room ... a bald German gentleman.   I am tormented by guilt.  Then the dead person rears up.  His bald head bears a scar from having been stitched back together ... post autopsy, perhaps.  I start screaming, "I've murdered Mahler!"

Only as I wake up do I realize that this bald fat elderly corpse couldn't possibly be Mahler.  It's Bruckner.

***

Is Bruckner's ghost telling me I better do his Ninth symphony as well?  This call for more and more light ... is it a remembrance of Goethe's last words — "Mehr licht!" ?? 

Obviously anxiety has something to do with this dream, but is there something else?  I didn't notice any Giacometti sculptures skulking about....

Time considered as a helix of maxed-out credit cards

So, for the last few days, everyone in my house hasn't known what day it is, and it all came to horrid collision of timelines and timeframes this morning.

I'm just running off to Singapore this morning for only 24 hours, the idea being to catch the opening of "Boheme" with Nancy and to be able to have another chat with Covent Garden resident director Andrew Sinclair who has offered to do a production of Jenufa in Thailand in 2011.  While I'm there, I was going to take Jay to see the NUS music school as well as perhaps pop in to see a bunch of flayed corpses at the Body Worlds Exhibition.

So I get to the airport at the time it says on the E-ticket and I ask the counter why the plane is leaving an hour earlier now.

She says, "You missed your flight!  It was yesterday." It seems that wrong-day-itis has afflicted the entire family.

Time for a split second decision.  Should I buy a new one way ticket?  If it was just me I would have turned around and gone home.  The hotel in Singapore is already paid for but it's deeply discounted, I got it mostly on award points.  It's not like I've never seen "La Boheme" before ... I just conducted it last month and I'm doing it again in August!

But there's also this other kid travelling with me and Jay, someone from Jay's school.  His dad bought his plane ticket.  I can't really send him to Singapore alone!  So here I am, an hour late for check-in, having to decide whether to stay or go.  If I spend the extra $400 on a ticket, will my credit card become suddenly maxed out so I have to hitchhike to the opera in Singapore?  I decide to get the money from the ATM and call someone to quickly deposit more money in this account so that by the time I get to Singapore in two hours I'll have enough money for lunch.

I realize that today I'm like the protagonists of "La Boheme", rushing through life without knowing how I'll pay the next bill.  Maybe, having achieved all these supposedly big-time distinctions, it's time to settle down to a nice boring teaching job in a quiet rural conservatory.

Never!

Ravens, Flying, Past, Future, Pools, Destiny

So I had a dream so extraordinary I must share it with you in its entirety.  In fact, I remember it all vividly hours later, suggesting that it is a visitation from the collective unconscious.

***
The dream is set in the future, in a vast crumbling mansion in which I live alone, in a large attic room.  The house is mostly dark, sculpted wood.  One day, there comes a visitor from the past (that is, a time traveller.)  I spend all day preparing a special room for him, but when he arrives I am so exhausted I am already asleep.

I come downstairs and he has been sleeping, he says, on a bench.  No, no, I must show you to your room.  I take him there.  It's a room that must once have been a covered entryway or hallway.  The French doors/windows have dark wooden shutters that do not reach all the way so that a bright sunlight comes in.  I apologize that I didn't put new mosquito netting in.  He might have been bitten.  My guest doesn't mind.

I open a drawer.  It contains jade knives (like from the ancient Chinese burial sites) but they're clearly fake because there is some Chinese inscription in old characters but also something written in English on each one.  They are pale green jade.


Other draws contain knives too.  And other cutlery.  I say ""The linen must have been kept here."  (Odd thing to say because there is no linen.)  I realize that this is no bedroom; it is an anteroom to the huge dining room full of antiques and a dim chandelier.  Then I say to the visitor: "You might think this is my house from 'Jasmine Nights' - the big mansion - but it's not.  This one is the ruined house."  It's a reference to the ruined house of dreams in my novel, Jasmine Nights.  He wants to know where the big house is and I saw it's outside.

We leave the house through the opposite side from the visitor's guest room.  We're in a vast green lawn.  The house must be that way, I say, because Sukhumvit is up here.  I point to the main road and see that it is completely walled off.  You cannot see the street.  We are cut off from the world.

The main house is not where I think it is.  Instead, there is a dark forest.  "If Sukhumvit is to the north," I say, then the house must be that way, beyond the forest."

The visitor cries out in fear.  We see that the way to Sukhumvit is guided by huge rocs ... giant, black, man-eating birds.  Each one stands guard, grim-faced.  They look like crows, but in the dream we call them rocs.  They may be ravens, but they are flightless.  Their red eyes glare.  There are also human guards.  Or perhaps robots.

There is no way to get out to the real world except through the forest.  So we set out to reach the main house, or perhaps the world itself.   But inside, the forest isn't made of wood at all, it is a concrete jungle.

First we pass a courtroom where someone is sitting in judgment.  The jury and court are like zombies.  They are just going through the motions.  It is a simulacrum of justice.  The visitor and I sneak past them and soon find ourselves in a labyrinthine mess of little cobblestoned streets.  There is no sky.  There has been no sky all the time; all this is inside something.

I reach a piazza lined with rococo columns, yellowing.  There is a stone pool or trough and in it, boys are swimming, naked, each one with a brightly colored toy.  The toys are the first brightly colored things in the dream.  They look like antique machines from an era of plastic.  They are all shouting, "These toys are for us to drown ourselves with!"  and they're gleefully submerging themselves.

"No, no," I tell them.  Quickly I take one of their toys.  "You've got it wrong.  These are ancient toys from a distant time.  They were not made for children to drown with."

I show the toy, hold it up.  It's a cone-shaped fluorescent green thing with little corkscrews dangling from it.  "These toys are not for drowning, but for flying."  And instantly, it takes to the air, fluttering in the first breeze to blow through these claustrophobic streets.  The boys cheer.  "You've forgotten so much," I tell them.  "Once, when we had a sky, a toy like this could fly oh, so, so high."

I turn to the stranger from the past, because now I suddenly know who he is.  And I am about to tell him so when I wake up.









 ***
I woke up from this dream six or seven hours ago, and jotted it down.  But until a few minutes ago, when I told the whole dream to Jay, I didn't realize that I was going to say to the stranger, "You're me."

And just now, I realized that although the plastic toys could touch the sky, the ravens were flightless.  Does this mean I shouldn't be afraid of death but I should trust invention?

This dream holds the clue, creatively, to what comes next in my life.  What's past is prologue, indeed, but also the rediscovery of flight, the confrontation with the Deathbird (there was a raven on the cover of my LP of Bernstein's Mahler 9, which I had as a child.) ... going through the forest of judgment, "forging" the sword of destiny (double meaning there because the jade knives were forgeries....)  I'll have to analyse it all the way to when I sleep again, and maybe revisit its world....

Right at the Curve?

 David Giler sent me an article from the SPECTATOR, and it says that the three most significant events that define the last century in classical music are the following:

1. Mahler become a universal icon
2.The discovery of Janacek's operas in the non-Czech-speaking world
3. The rise of regional opera companies.

This is a truly extraordinary list of things, but if it is true, it puts Bangkok Opera at the top of the curve.

1. We're pioneering the first complete Mahler Cycle in Thailand.
2. We have discussed with a prominent director from Covent Garden a new production of "Jenufa" forThailand in 2011.
3. What do is practically the Platonic Ideal of the words" "rising", "regional" and, maybe, even opera company!

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Libera Me!

After just over two years of agony it is finally done.  So now I can talk about my Requiem Pro Matre Cantuum (for the mother of songs) at last.  Apart from the emotional strain of trying to create a worthy monument to one of the most important benefactors of classical music in this part of the world, there has also been an intellectual burden because in this composition I have tried to solve my personal conundrum, caused by my being caught between two worlds, two widely disparate ways of looking at the universe.

As some of you may know, I have been agonizing over the knotty question of the fusion between Thai and Western music for at least 35 years.  I've solved the problem in many different ways: in the 1970s by evolving a kind of textural polyphony, allowing the worlds to coexist without really blending, just sort of bleeding and cross-fading into one another.

In the 1980s, during my long escape into novel-writing, I formed a different view of where I should be as a composer.  It was a more Asian view because I longer believed in music as a linear progression from past through present to future.  I felt that the entirety of our musical past was physically present and there was no real need to feel connected only to the immediate past.  To be honest, this liberation came from writing music for low-budget films.  There was a freedom to experiment that I hadn't felt since being in Thailand in the late 1970s.

In the early 2000s, after returning to Thailand, I had reinvented myself as a neo-romantic.  Interestingly, many composers in Thailand, especially the academic ones who had not really actually had careers in the "real world" and who had essentially been cut off from many of the developments in the west, thought I had sold out, not realizing that the return to tonality was actually "more modern" than the post-serialism of the 70s.  But one of the things this enabled me to do was integrate melodic ideas from Thai traditional music more fully.  But eventually this wasn't enough and there was a need to use the underlying philosophies of Thai music as well.

There is a fundamental problem when we come to do this because western music is bound up in the western perception of time.  In western music, causality is therefore of the essence.  Music is about things that germinate into other things.  Ideas like development, recapitulation,  variation exist because time in western music linear.

In many kinds of Asian music, however, time is not perceived in the same way at all.  In the traditional "thao", as basic to Thai music as "sonata form" is to the classical period, the most developed, expanded variation is presented first, and then the music gradually collapses to its most rudimentary form.  In general, even in less extended formal structures, we must forget western notions that music proceeds by addition towards a climax and that each thing we hear has been built on that which went before.  We are into a more non-linear mode of temporal perception.  And the greatest performances of Thai classical music can generate a feeling of time standing absolutely still.

In my Requiem I wanted to explore all the different musical languages I've learned during my life including those I have long since abandoned, and try to find their commonality.  Thus there are movements founded completely on traditional Thai folk motifs, movements that pair serial technique with Monteverdi-like choral recitative, and movements that draw on the colors of science fiction and fantasy film music.  But the challenge was to draw these elements together into some kind of unity.

That is the reason that the composition of the last movement dragged on for almost eight months.  Of course, this movement need not have been written at all; but when I was speaking to Brother Martin about using the monumental ABAC church for this concert, and he said to me, "Don't forget the Libera Me."  This section is often left out of Requiems.  But then, the Libera Me - In Paradisum section of the requiem mass provides a wonderful progression from horror to sublimity, and it soon became clear that this massive movement could be used to bring all the disparate elements and forces of the requiem together.  The melodic element of in paradisum came to me months ago, as a simple Siamese folkloric theme that would not be out of place in an Isaan village.   I had already, in the Pie Jesu movement, used the idea that a short Thai motif that never modulated and simply repeated itself recursively without modulation could be a viable movement, and in the Sanctus I had explored the idea that I could freeze-frame a G major chord and (using western rather than Asian melodic ideas) pull it into an Asian timelessness. 

What I needed was to integrate this into the whole.  In other words, to write a music that was both in time and out of it at the same time.  My solution was a childishly simple one, but one that I was in fact stuck on for many months.  It was to create a string of timeless "bits" in which the string itself was a temporal construct but the bits were not.  I found a way to have my cake and eat it too, in other words.

Whether it works or not will have to be decided by others....

But what is clear to me is that in the libera me I have managed to cathartically free myself from much of my own musical baggage ... from the post-serialism of my youth to the constraints of linear time. 

I don't know whether this provides an entertaining glimpse into the compositional process or whether it's just a bunch of self-justifying B.S.   We will have to find out over time.

Or not-time.

Why Thai Kids Don't Know Things

I had a very disturbing conversation with Trisdee a few days ago about quantum mechanics and spacetime.  Okay, these are not exactly subjects that impact our daily lives, but the conversation led to areas that definitely DO have such an impact.

It started when I asked Trisdee what the Thai for "spacetime" was, because I was trying to formulate a way of saying something in Thai about relating the musical structure of one of my compositions to relativity.  As some of you may know, we are planning a "science through music" camp for young people and I particularly want to discuss the relationship between music and relativity.

Trisdee couldn't tell me offhand so he searched around on Thai Wikipedia and came up with the word "kala awakash".  This is Sanskrit-based neologism.  "Kala" means time, and "Awakash" means space.  But wait a minute, I said to myself.  It means "space" all right, as in "outer space", because the roots of that word mean "without air" and therefore a "vacuum" and therefore the space that lies beyond our atmosphere.   There is absolutely nothing in the word that has anything to do with the meaning of the word "space" as used in "spacetime" ... i.e. space as in the three dimensions of space, space as in Euclidean geometry.

How weird, I said.  Whenever Thai kids learn about spacetime in physics, they automatically carry in their heads an image has has been engendered by mistranslation.  Whoever created the term looked up "space" in a Thai-English dictionary and didn't bother to penetrate any deeper into the semantics of it.

I started to wonder how many other Alice-in-Wonderland images young Thai students carry in their minds, so I asked Trisdee to look up "field theory."  You guessed it.  The world for "field" used in the Thai terminology is a word that evokes an elegantly manicured lawn. 

There is a big issue at stake here.  The very first people to create physics textbooks in Thai, or any other textbooks that require wholesale creation of new terminologies, were either (a) not physicists and therefore not sensitive to the specialized usages of those words in English or (b) not good at English, and therefore content to believe the first Thai translation of each word out of context or (c) not good at English OR physics or (d) just mechanically slapping a one-for-one equivalency without being interested in English, physics, education, or anything except getting paid by the page.

However, because the Thai educational system emphasizes rote learning and extreme, nay idolatrous, worship of and obedience to one's teachers, no kid would ever raise his hand and ask, "Why does gravity come in lawns?"

I am not talking about the pernicious revisionism that permeates Thai school texts anyway (I once tried asking a dozen Thai kids who had won the second world war -- all of them thought Thailand had).  Shoring up one's national identity may require that history textbooks be written like a superhero comic, and no country is immune from that ... elementary history books in the U.S. are particularly nauseating in their cartoonification of the past ... I am prepared to admit that nations do mythologize their history and to some extent this is inevitable.

But we're not talking about history.  This is physics, i.e. hard science.  We're not even talking about the whimsical minds of physicists who have given quarks colors, strangeness, charm, and beauty.  We're talking about inappropriate translations of root concepts.

A day later I was talking to a German gentleman, Dr. Amrehn, who teaches at a Thai university.  He told me the problem is even more pervasive because when it comes to specialist vocabularies, each expert has created his own, and they spend as much time fighting over which word to use as over the subject in question.

Is it possible that there could be some kind of commission to completely rethink what is being taught here ... to find the best way to translate key ideas if needed ... to create textbooks that actually make objective sense?

Otherwise we're just going have another generation of rote-learning zombies, with all the external accoutrements of a technologically advanced society, but it'll only be skin deep.

Passing through the Window

Sometimes dreams can be quite cosmic ... seeing God and that sort of thing ... I know when I have dreams like that they are NOT acid flashbacks, because I didn't do acid in the 60s.  Or did I?  I don't remember the 60s, so I must have lived through them.

Thais believe that seeing dead people in a dream is very lucky which is why there are always lottery vendors at funerals.  But what if you see yourself dead?

In last night's dream I was a fugitive being hunted through the wilds of Alaska, I think it was during the gold rush.  I'm crawling through the snow wearing a lot of furs and one of those Russian looking hats.  Anyway I'm caught by someone, a posse I imagine.  I'm thrown into a cage on the back of train and we begin a long and epic journey through snowy, desolate terrain.  I distinctly remember being unshaven.

At some frontier outpost I manage to escape and find myself in a two-story building.  But they come after me.  There is a bloody shootout, me versus what looks like Seventh Cavalry uniforms.  It's very bloody.  My last enemy has his legs blown off and I crouch over him, but he turns himself over on one arm and shoots me between the eyes with the other.

And here's the thing, I feel myself get colder and colder and the world getting dark and it's not scary like I thought it would be.  When I look out of the window I see a woman escaping on  a white horse.  I realize that she was with me the whole time.  She is the one I have been protecting on the train journey, only I didn't see her before.

As I wake up, I continue to die, so the two sensations cross-dissolve very slowly.   So my waking moments are as dreamlike as my dream was real.

... As a committed Jungian I would point out that the woman on the white horse is clearly a representation of the anima and that the dream is clearly not about death but about survival ... transformation ... it's in fact a highly positive dream about how things are going to change this year.

I said anima, not enema!  Jeeze!