intro

[Jonathan Arnold]

I have found this forum and I am wondering if it will help me with my explorations and seeking.

I first discovered Thomas Moore through his book The Soul of Sex. I was brought up as a religious Jew and never had a chance to explore my own sexuality in a free way. I am married now with a few kids and I struggle with feeling that I have missed out on exploring what I really want in a romantic and intimate relationship. I found the Soul of Sex very helpful in deepening the struggle and deliteralizing the desires to help find workable solutions and states of mind.

I also struggle very much with a sense of intergration and identity. On the one hand I am considered by my community to be a Rabbi and I am the director of a nonprofit which counts among its goals religious ones. On the other hand I have lost a lot of my faith in the absolute truth of my religion and I feel a lot of anger at God for what I have experienced in my childhood and for being stuck in my current life. Moore's work has helped me as I seek.

As you can see from how I write I see this work as a dark struggle rather than a special search of personal meaning. I am curious as to how participating in this forum will change my struggle.

You can see more about my struggle expressed in poetry at http://poemhunter.com/jonathan-arnold/

Thank you,
Jonathan

[Jonathan Arnold]

Hi Stephanie,

I am glad you found the poems meaningful and beautiful. I am myself torn by the lack of poetry in my life currently. In the past, distant past, poetry was all-meaningful to me and I would invest of myself and my being in to the reading and writing of poems. And then with the demise of the sense of well-being and the respect and intergration of the sacred in my life I moved away from that experience. These four poems that I have written are among the only poems that I have looked at over the last few years.

In a way your post was interesting to me. The part of Moore that I least relate to is the usage of myths to explain and experience life. I find it esoteric and too full of nuances and meaning that I cannot relate to the basic experience of life.

But I can relate to your sense of myth within poetry. The poem, The Lady of Shallot by Tennyson struck me a little while ago as the tragedy of my life. The Lady of Shallot has a mission to create beautiful art but she is required to seperate herself so completely from the normal life of others that she mush only weave the scenes she sees in the mirror. She cannot look directly at life and when she does she dies.

I feel in my own life this overwhelming sense of mission as Frank Herbert writes in Dune "terrible purpose". This misson drives me to create beauty and strength in the lives of others and successfully build a unique and special nonprofit. But in my own life is pain and the scarring of personal dis-intergration and the inability to enjoy the "normal" basic joys of life.

If I stop and breathe and let the sacred in and learn to care for my-self and soul I feel the hope that I can escape that curse.

Take care,
Jonathan

[Jonathan Arnold]

Dear Stephanie,

I read the myth of the handless maiden and my heart jumps at the image of the futile gesture of saving the baby with the stumps of hands and then the hands becoming complete.

Yet the language and style you use is like the patterns of shadows and light created by the branches and leaves of a tree late afternoon. The magic alternatively penetrating and then becoming obscured by concepts and styles of vision unknown to me.

I am here to travel and am curious and open to the results of such exploration and the gifts that my encounter with you has to offer despite the gulf of understanding that is between us. I am patient and willing to allow the meanings and visions to reach me slowly :) My longing for sacredness and meaning can transcend the natural difficulty I have for mystical or obscure writing. It seems to me that the vessel you are carrying is overflowing with insight and wisdom and yet for me to assimilate one or two concepts explained well touches me deeper than a tsunami (to use Castro's term :) of unattainability.

thank you.

Jonathan

[Jonathan Arnold]

Stephanie,

That wondrous aching mystical emotionally overpowering indecipherable feeling of poetry that lodged in my soul as I dealt with pain is called again to life as I read your words. That spirit lives in you and I am honored to have met you. Maybe I will see more one day but I now I at least can feel that spirit.

Thank you
Jonathan

[Castrology]

Sorry for the brevity, but Moore too has a book called Dark Eros that you might want to check out. He keeps it dark and de Sade. However, should you want to read Hillman, I suggest a starting place (if you haven't already) as Healing Fiction.

Stephanie~your tsunami of passion is a "terrible purpose" that spills beauty on many shores.

Moore again later, y'all

Castro

[Jonathan Arnold]

Casto,

I have been interested in getting a copy of Dark Eros and I think I will act on your suggestion. I don't know if I should want to read Hillman but I am open to finding out if I will want to read it. :)

Thank you

Jonathan

[Castrology]

J-dog,

Perhaps moore to the point with Hillman, he has some articles: Pink Madness—or why does Aphrodite drive men crazy with pronograhy; The Masturbation Inhibition (a bit old school erudition). Also Ginette Paris' book Pagan Meditations, for some goog stuff on the goddess herself. Baby's saying, "do something else!"

peace,

ac

[Castrology]

I could send you Hillman articles should you want sometime within the next three weeks. Work and kids and family have my hands now. No harm in having the materials should you want to cook something up that appears to be cooking already, and for some time its been simmering, slow cooking, and now for a bit really heating up. This Castro character heats up EVERYTHING he eats with chili peppers or hot sauce. Don't take his word for what is or is not spicy. These things you have to taste for yourself.

Peace,

Castro

[Jonathan Arnold]

Thanks Castro would appreciate getting a taste although I am not so in to the hot peppers I can give it a try when I am forewarned.

Jonathan

[Castrology]

Yesssssssssssssssss (black snake), the terror of beauty, its overwhelming capacity to arrest, bringing everything on the edges to a crashing halt, just barely tolerable to us. I'm glad you're on the parenthetical side of think, like the open parenthesis (parent-thesis?) of e.e. cummings at the poem's end. Your purr-missives are quite affectionate and embracing. When I come upon your play I say, "mmm, brace yourself, Andy, here comes the world viewed through Stephoscopes—and quite the vision-(Bachelard)-airy too. Like the sight of an E-gal(e)'s four-fold vision at play, winging the currents from sky high to fierce-taloned grasps that take our breath away (gasps), all the while sensing the currents down below.

The tsunami is nothing more than that 'oceanic feeling' I get in your play, and as the beauty rolls up to the edges, of what's shored (our terra firma structures that we dwell in, our "terra-bull purpose" teasing teleologically), I get the tsunami as "a big wave," a shout out from the rollicking depths, to our habituated selves that re-side in ordinal habilitation (a support grope for our re-habilitation of soul), to our mortal coil (black snake), to our poesis of our persons.

the critters are stirring and love the smooches. and ideas are brewing for the seasonal changes (like chili peppers are seasonal for my foods?)

abrasos y besos,

A Castro