The Eides of September 2013

I love the summer. But it passes inevitably much too quickly. I remember those marvellous days of youth when the summer stretched before us as something endless and virtually eternal, and the sadness when we first had to return to school – one that mercifully lasted only a few days at best. For lack of a better designation, the ‘British summer’ is already long over – ending with the Lughnasadh at the start of August but in which the midsummer is actually the middle of the summer. I remember once a marvellous May Day in which Richard and I enjoyed an unforgettable Hampton Heath in glorious and abandoned heat. By contrast, the ‘American summer’ has of today but a week yet to run. I have never been able to understand the differences between the two summer reckonings and how they have come to be what they are. But whatever it is, the summer is a perfectly fabulous time, and this one has been nothing less. I adore the summer.

For the Volcanalia this year, we walked with our beloved La Stef to the Pettaquamscutt. Normally I try to remember to bring along a coin to offer to the river, but as often is the case, I forgot. On such an occasion, I look instead on the beach for an appropriate moonstone. Finding a suitable one this time, I then found a small shell in which to place it and then a much larger mollusc shell in which to place both. We placed my offering into the river, and the current carried it almost instantaneously up against the leg of a young girl upon which her mother grabbed it out of the river to keep and completely oblivious of us. We could only laugh among ourselves. A few days later for the Volturnalia, Richard and I crossed the river to the rock outcropping on the other side – an area that I suspect to have been a Native American sacred place. Once back again on the right bank, I made another offering to the Pettaquamscutt – and again with a moonstone, a small containing shell for it and finally a much larger clam shell in which to place them that I found protruding from the sand bank. I washed the larger shell in a tidal pool and then placed it into the ocean near the mouth of the river. But once again, a man with his son on this occasion walked by and almost immediately pulled my floating offering out of the waters – again completely unaware of us standing right there. And again we laughed. It does not matter of course. An offering once offered is an offering made; the gods decide what is to become of it.

We are now in San Francisco and more than comfortably ensconced in Rosalie’s Golden Gateway Center townhouse bedroom which she has insisted on having us use. From the bedroom, there is a glassed-in balcony with a view of the Bay Bridge and Coit Tower and in which I have been working on my chapter on Buddhist mysticism and now on Muslim mysticism. My latest paragraph for this last is as follows:

“For the Westerner to understand Islam, an account is required of the Koran, Sharia and the malignant nature of the Abrahamic ‘God’. But in our world of today, a mindfulness of the Jihadist faction of the Muslim world is also mandatory. In the West, we like to affirm the milder and more balanced sentiments of the vast majority of Muslims, and this may on the vernacular level be true to a large extent. But at the same time, we ought not forget that much of that Muslim majority is tribal, unexperienced with democracy, and virtually medieval when it comes to female empowerment, homosexual freedoms and liberal choice. But also at the same time, we are obligated to understand that the ‘one-percent’ elite of the West is a mirror function of the Jihadist Islamicists, that the majority of the West is intimidated and manipulated in the same manner as the majority of the Muslim world is by the madrassa-sponsored terrorists. Like Islam, the capitalist West seeks to dominate the world and, if it could have its way, would insure the conversion of everyone to its ideology and way of life. While the West’s great potential lies in its artistic and technological creations, discoveries and innovations – an outstanding and absolutely remarkable achievement by any account, it remains subservient and increasingly dwarfed by the military-corporate cancer that has ravaged, among others, the original American dream of our Founding Fathers. If the ‘mystic eye’ that we are here concerned with in this book can sense the pulsating/radiating/’aurating’ beauty of places like Land’s End in San Francisco and beyond as well as of our planet as a whole and as well as of our cosmos as a whole, the mystic as both an individual and as a collective/social entity wishes and seeks to bring that cosmic aesthetic aura down to inform and color and predominate the local and immediate. This ultimately is the gist of the pagan’s ‘drawing down the moon' - bringing the beauty of the 'out there' to the here and now of our occasional sorry world.”

More than ever, I am currently reminded in the City by the Bay of an observation I first made during the first ASR conference I attended in downtown Los Angeles. There are three ‘classes’ of Western or at least American society: the haves, the servers and the have-nots. The lines of demarcation between these are indeterminate and fuzzy. As a conference attendee with a reduced rate for the hotel venue, I was for the moment at least one of the haves. We were served by the hotel receptionists, room service, cleaners, waiters, etc. – a social segment swollen in general by the office workers in the fascinating postmodern structures around us. But also in between these last were the homeless, the have-nots. San Francisco is presently experiencing a frenzied luxury apartment building spree which could be reminiscent of the former tower-construction enterprise of ancient Babylon. Concurrent with this is a proliferation of street people that sadly but no less truly constitute what is probably seen as a blight of social vermin. It is a strange and even horrifying mix. And yet the heady Gold Rush spirit lives on in this uniquely beautiful geographic peninsula.

Christopher’s wedding rehearsal dinner at the St. Francis Yacht Club is tonight, Rowan and Russell’s 30th Anniversary celebration at the Silicon Valley Hotel is tomorrow night, and my birthday party at Rosalie’s is the day after. It is incredibly full and relentless, but it has been a wonderful, wonderful summer.