I find myself thinking about "The Trial" near the end of Pink Floyd's "The Wall".

The prisoner who now stands before you
Was caught red-handed showing feelings
Showing feelings of an almost human nature:
This will not do.

I used to think that, in the movie's metaphor, higher or thicker walls would have made a perpetual dictatorship a real possibility.

Now, I haven't entirely abandoned that thought, but it has become rather more evident to me how the risk of this approach is that when one does get brought 'to trial,' and the walls torn down, there is just that much more rubble to sift through, evidence of the extent to which one had pretenses which one failed to live up to.

Rather mentally tormenting, that, when one is a control freak to the extent that I myself am.

I've built a wall or two lately that I don't think has worked out in my favor.

So I think I'll take it down its most public façade myself before the court starts picking over it.

* * *

On a related but rather random note, some music trivia for you:

1) The :wumpscut: song "Crucified Division" has samples from "Hey You" by Pink Floyd in it. Very blatant samples, in fact, if you're familiar with both songs. Seems kind of appropriate though, inasmuch as the theme of disposable lives I think is shared by both the :wumpscut: song and several of the songs on the Floyd album.

2) The 'Worm' references on Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and the parasite references in so much of the music I've done as Mourning After Pill are not unrelated.

Speaking of which: curiously my interest in making another album has mysteriously increased of late. Finding time for that should be interesting. I have no projections whatsoever at the moment though.

Warning: cryptic pseudo-Jungian rambling ahead, of primary relevance to other creative-minded, self-analyzing types. If that isn't an area of interest or understanding for you, move along. Thanks.

Thanks to a comment I made on sirstompsalot's journal, an amusing thought came to me re: creative inspiration.

In my play, "An Experiment in Malice", the assumption is that hell has 'departments' whose demons set out to mess with peoples' lives in various ways according to the department's specialization.

So what happens if you have demons from different 'departments' competing over the same person?

** is extremely amused at the moment by the vision of sirstompsalot being followed around by a super-hot black-haired heels-and-pinstripes demoness and a super-hot blond fetish-gear-wearing demoness who are bickering in an exceedingly catty manner with one another over the work vs. play balance of his life. Cause y'know, that really helps the ol' thought process. Fortunately sirstompsalot's brilliant occultist friend knows that, if such demons get into 'romantic altercations' with a human, they lose their powers and become human themselves, and thus she devises an innovative solution to the psychic cat-fight that sirstompsalot is sure to find most satisfactory. **

Yeah, that should keep me amused for the rest of the day.

There are several people to whom I've mentioned something or other about the myth of Inanna's descent to the underworld. Since it came up again just recently, I finally decided to post something about it.

I had trouble finding an easy-to-read website that had all the information I considered most pertinent, so instead I'll provide this: The following account of the myth is an excerpt from Sylvia Brinton Perera's "Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women," except for the comments in italics which are my own interjections and clarifications:

* * *

In the Sumerian poem Inanna decides to go into the underworld; she "set her heart from the highest heaven on earth's deepest ground," "abandoned heaven, abandoned earth - to the Netherworld she descended." As a precaution, she instructs Ninshubur, her trusted female executive, to appeal to the father gods for help in securing her release if she does not return within three days.

At the first gate to the Netherworld, Inanna is stopped and asked to declare herself. The gatekeeper informs Ereshkigal, queen of the Great Below, that Inanna, "Queen of Heaven, of the place where the sun rises," asks for admission to the "land of no return"... Ereshkigal becomes furious, and insists that the upper-world goddess be treated according to the laws and rites for anyone entering her kingdom - that she be brought "naked and bowed low."

Somes stories of how Ereshkigal became queen of the underworld are similar to the Greek Persephone/Hades myth, i.e. she was swallowed by the ground/abducted/etc.

The gatekeeper follows orders. He removes one piece of Inanna's magnificent regalia at each of the seven gates.

The rational atheists amongst you are likely to find the following entry extremely boring and an example of an awful lot of thought, worry and energy being put into a process which, in your worldview, does nothing. I, however, am not you, so here's what's on my mind:

I had a freakishly vivid dream last night. In this dream, a friend - arbitrarily known henceforth as Edward (not his real name) - and I were at his workplace, which in the dream was some sort of industrial building. We had conspired to blow the place up in order to get back at one of Edward's co-workers who was in the same industrial profession. It was Edward's idea but I was the one setting up materials and pouring gasoline and so forth.

Once everything was set up, we both ran off. Outside the building it was rush hour, which made it hard to get anywhere fast. Still, we ran a fair distance away from the building and looked back to watch it explode. Unfortunately, a) the explosion was much bigger than anticipated and b) due to some curious oddity of physics in this particular dream world, all gasoline in the area - i.e. in gas stations, in cars and in other places not directly related to the building - also ignited and exploded. The end result was a much bigger mess than I was expecting. In the resultant panic, Edward and I were separated. I ran for a really long time, with various things continuing to blow up around me, until finally I was exhausted and passed out.

When I woke up (i.e. still in the dream), there was still much clean up of the disaster in progress, and plenty of media whatnot going around about 'who had done this terrible act' etc. I didn't know where to go or what to do. I couldn't get ahold of Edward on the phone, so I went back to (what was left of) the workplace to look for him. He was there, hanging out in the ruins with his other co-workers - minus the one we'd wanted to eliminated and a few others, whose charred corpses were probably being extracted elsewhere.

Anyway, although we were relieved to see one another alive and uninjured, Edward and I were pretty neutral toward one another with his co-workers around - apparently we had some kind of agreement such that although the plot had been his idea, it was 'ok' for me to be held the one solely responsible, and not seeming too close to one another was part of the plan in order to maintain his innocence. That is: while my guilt had not yet been discovered, we knew it was only a matter of time, hence it wouldn't do for him to associate with me too much. This may sound unfair, but at the time in the dream it struck me as entirely natural, obvious and acceptable to me. Which is not to say that Edward and I weren't still friends - certainly we were concerned about one another and wanted subsequent events to be as painless as possible for each other - just that we had agreed and accepted, for whatever reason, that at some point the burden of responsibility had become solely mine.

Continuing on from my last oh-so-cheery entry... (consider that a minor content warning)

I once had a vision, which I have referred to in the past as "the death of the feminine principle." I've finally decided to share some additional details of this vision.

The main plot of the vision involved the herding of all earthly female entities (not just human ones, although they were the most visible and came in all races, sizes, ages, etc.) into some kind of Gigeresque complex. Those who had proved themselves more 'masculine' by traditional criteria (e.g. reason over emotion, mind over body, spirit over flesh, etc.) were 'installed' into cybernetic contraptions.

These overseers or 'queens' interacted with various bio-machinery in the complex so as to bring about the containment, classification, silencing, blinding, torture and extermination of all their various 'sisters.'

Once all things female were dead and their bodies piled in an orderly manner for efficient flushing into the abyss, the cybernetically enhanced female entities would also be slaughtered by the bio-machinery. And then, even the bio-machinery would self-destruct, leaving the universe's masculine entities with clean hands. (I assume actually that in this vision, all masculine entities had already long shed the inconvenient dross of their bodies and retired to some ethereal realm from which to observe the final flushing-and-evacuation of the world, leaving the female entities to 'finish the house-cleaning.' )

In any case, it was made clear in the vision that whatever 'God' ruled this (speaking as a feminine entity) nightmare universe, 'He' (and it was in this case most explicitly a 'He') had planned everything and that plan was now being executed perfectly, in all its violent glory. i.e. there are two lists...

Feminine Earth Gross Matter Conditioned Existence in this Life Emotion Physical Bodies

Masculine Heaven Ideal Form Unconditioned Infinity after Death Reason Eternal Souls

... and everything on the right was to be raised up while everything on the left was to be cast down. Which made me wonder why this oh-so-perfect 'God' wasted 'his' time even creating anything feminine in the first place... probably part of the whole usual gnostic view of earthly life as some kind of big mistake. Not sure what that's supposed to imply about the omniscience and omnipotence of God, but hey, what do I know, I'm just a girl...

I've finished digitizing all the 'bad goth poetry' I had lying around. There's still lots of 'bad goth prose' to digitize eventually, but that stuff doesn't scream 'waste of paper' to me in quite the same brutally-crap way as the poetry does, so I don't feel as much urgency there.

Mostly it's been more of the same, as already discussed here, here and here. One interesting thing I did run across though was a poem in which I specifically referred to having two demon-muses, one black-haired and one blond. This idea has been kicking around in my head for ages, but I hadn't realized that I'd actually expressed it directly on paper anywhere in the past. (No, the poem itself will not be posted here because it sucks. )

In any case, I blame the black-haired muse on Adamus Scarabae in Tanith Lee's "Dark Dance," and the blond one on Julian Sands in the Warlock movies, those being two of my more significant dodgy high school crushes. Looking at my poetry and various other writing I have lying around from that time, it seems that the two muses had/have the following traits:

I try to write down all my dreams. I have a notebook beside my bed for this purpose, in which I jot notes as soon as I'm awake. Later I re-type these notes into a database on my computer. Sometimes a number of days go by before I get around to this transfer. I just got caught up today.

Typing in so many dreams in sequence has made me think of a few themes that I've noticed recur in my dreams often. In no particular order, here are the main ones that occur to me:

RE: that dream I just wrote about:

It seems that my family is having an all-seafood dinner tonight in which lobster and shrimp will feature prominently. Oh boy, more bigass red bugs, yay!!!

Anyway, on the off, off chance that you aren't sick of hearing about this dream yet, read on... there's some interesting discussion brewing, so I thought I'd give it a thread of its own.

My dreams have been... interesting lately. There was one that I was going to write a story about and post it here, but now that I've written most of it, I've decided against actually posting the whole thing because a) it's way too long and b) it is starting to contain way more personal information about me than 99% of the people who read this journal need to know. Sadly or perhaps fortunately, I'm just not quite that exhibitionistic. So here's a summary.

I was living in a cabin in the woods, along with a middle-aged black woman who was a voodoo priestess. (This element of the dream was pretty obviously influenced by what I've been reading lately, namely "Mama Lola" by Karen McCarthy-Brown.) In the middle of the night, I stepped outside the cabin and discovered that the surrounding area was lit up with a red glow which seemed to come from the trees and bushes.

I thought it looked all pretty and enchanted, so I went to get a closer look at this phenomena. Much to my unpleasant surprise though, it turned out that the reason the bushes and trees looked so odd was because they were covered solid with these crimson insects who looked like a praying mantis / locust cross. "Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head." Seriously. That's a whole lot of big fucking bugs. (Although not as big as one that would come along later. I'll get to that though...)

In any case, they were in all the trees and bushes, all around me, and they were all staring at me intently, the effect of which was, strangely, to compel me to approach them. Seeing as how I intuitively knew that these creatures were poisonous, I wasn't particularly hot on the idea, but no matter how I resisted it seemed I was still on the verge of stumbling into the bushes. I even tried standing still with my eyes closed, only to find when I opened them that I wasn't where I thought I was, and instead some bug-infested bush was about two inches from my face. This startled me, causing me to lose my balance, and in the process of sticking out my hands for support I put them right into the middle of the insects. At which point, things started to get particularly bad...