Saturday, April 18, 2009

Mostly About Kabbalah

Something appears to be up with this computer. I think I am approching the time when I need to change my virus protection. Who's idea was it for computers to have viruses anyways?
Most of my time since I got the letter about Remodernism has been concerned with writing outlines for my English exam. I am going to have to answer three out of the six questions I have been given and I am writing outlines to give me an idea of what happened. So far I've planned out most of them or have an idea of what I'm going to do with half of them. After that I will be looking for a summer job, so I have money to go to Revel and buy books. My parents have me on 20 dollars every two weeks, which is a bit less then what I used to have. 20 dollars per week. Apparently Allen Ginsberg had 15 dollars a month when he was at University. He also was obsessed with Neal Cassady, who wasn't interested in Allen in that way though apparently they did have sex. I feel like a kindred spirit to Ginsberg in many ways, and I'm hoping to learn from his mistakes so I don't make them. It's very easy for me to fall head over heals in love with someone, it has happened before. So far I haven't been overwhelmingly obsessed with someone.
I'm starting to wonder how much of my life I should put down in my fiction. For awhile I thought this may be a bad idea, but I think that it would be a nice place to start. I don't want to be one of those writers who just rewrites his own life into fiction. I think I can do that, but most of my story ideas are leaning towards historical-occult fiction with various esoteric Judeo-Christian overtones. I'm thinking about looking into this sort of thing, I've been toying with studying Kabbalah for a long time now, ever since I read Promethea, and will be doing it in the fall since I am defenetly taking the Kaballah course. I'm probubly one of the few people who didn't get into Kabbalah through Madonna these days. To be honest, if your going to get into Kabbalah then it would probubly best to get into it from a comic book written by a British man who hasen't shaved since the Thatcher administration, studies the Western esoteric tradition and once saw a fictional character he invented in a bar then a pop singer from the 80s with a coffee table book about sex or something like that. Or you should at least learn it from an old Jewish guy. Also, selling Kabbalah water for $2000 dollars is probubly the stupidist thing I've heard off since, well bottled water. Water should be free and should not have anything to do with ancient mystic paths unless it is a metaphor for something, like rebirth or something.
Basically, what I know about Kabbalah is that it is supposed to be an "operating program for the human soul." Besides the Promethea comic book, most of what I know is from a podcast on the know defunct, Out There. Out There is a pretty good podcast if you want an introduction into the world of occultism, conspiracy theories, fringe science and weird stuff like that. Some of the episodes freaked me out, such as the one about 9/11 truth and another on 2012, but others such as Kabbalah and the episode on James Shelby Downard that proved to be very interesting. It's really something of a crap shoot on the affect, but either way alot of the stuff I hear on this will probubly worm it's way into my writing. I'd like to do a conspiracy novel based on the writings of James Shelby Downard at some point, but were talking about Kabbalah. Basically, it's very complex, has a cool tree thing and will give it's practitioner the gift of Prophecy, which is something that sounds pretty cool. If memory serves, then to practice Kaballah one must get involved with making humanity better while studying alot of ancient texts, specifically the Bible but you can use it on anyting according to the person who read it. I imagine that the Orthodox Jews would say, no you can only use the Bible, but I imagine that you could use the Bible as a sort of basic text and everything else can be a sort of spring off of that. It works too, because apparently people who study English Literature do much better if they're familiar with the Bible, because it's the basis of Western Literature. I can connect the Bible to all of the books I'm reading now for instance. The Brothers Karamazov, easy. Dostotevsky's work is fundamentally Christian. What's Bred In The Bone, deals a lot with Christianity's affect on the main character at the moment, and it also has an angel (The Lesser Zadkiel) and a daimon who's name I forget, who are working on said character's biography. Also, I wrote an essay recently about Allen Ginsberg that compared him to an ancient Hebrew Prophet, only with more homoeroticism. Not sure how Jews would take to most of this, but I'm sure they can admit that Christians are really just unclean slightly-pagan Jews, mainly since most Christians aren't going to kill the Jews for saying that and because it is basically true. I'm comfortable with being a bad pseudo-Jew myself, I may even work on becoming more Jewish one day.
Well, that is all for my musings today. I'm going to talk with a friend of mine now.

2 comments:

Jason said...

Hi Dylan,

I think you definitely ought to consider writing kabbalistic fiction for a living. There's just not enough good stuff around! If you ask me, one of the problems with "spiritual" literature is it's often too focused on the spiritual ideas and so completely flunks on the character development.

Take Paulo Coelho for example. He covers some interesting ground in his books but his characters are so two dimensional. Don't even get me started on James Redfield.

Then again these guys sell millions of books so what do I know about writing a best seller. :)

Please keep your creative spirit alive and don't be too proud to take a day job to keep you afloat.

Dylan said...

Thanks Jason. I'll keep that in mind. Thank you for reading my blog.