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[ by Charles Cameron — and reality alwys strains towards a metaphor of itself, doesn’t it? ]
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Today’s weather headline:

This isn’t a metaphor, weather here means weather, even thought you might imagine it’s politics it’s talking about. If it was politics and we were lucky, the header might read:

Wild storm raging across globe to unleash all modes of extreme weather through the weekend

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Here are some of the details, graphically — very graphically — represented:

Blizzard conditions and heavy snow

Extreme fire danger

Oh, my!

Tornadoes and severe storms

Torrents!

Just suppose this was politics, after all!

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Another headline today:

That’s almost meteorological, ne?

Or try this one, a week out, and international in scope:

I’d be lost without my wifi..

[ by Charles Cameron — a repeatable dream back then, alas no longer ]
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What happens, in other words, when imagination enters factual reality?

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This doesn’t, as far as I can tell, heppen only in Christianity — Henry Corbin’s book, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, if I read it right, narrates an apparition of Beauty in the life of the Sufi known to Islam as the Sheikh al-Akbar, the Greatest Sheikh.

In India I was taught that Valmiki wrote the Ramayana, and Vishnu liked it so well he took the avatar-form of Rama to live out the epid in Valmiki’s honor, amybe 10,000 years later, every last detail correct.

Folklore, no doubt?

I have my own experiences.

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When I was about eight or so, I had a recurring dream, in which I was walking in the (grassy) English countryside, and a series of holes began opening in the earth around and in front of me. They were roughly manhole-sized holes, and after I had avoided a couple of them, I fell down one of them, much like Alice.

I found myself in Hell. To be precise, I was in a sort of stable with a number of stalls off a corridor that linked them — with fires burning in the stalls. Someone tried to throw me on one of the fires, and I objected, telling them I was a friend of the management — so they went off someplace to check.

When they came back, they told me that I did in fact have the freedom of the whole place — and indicated to me that besides the stables with their fires, there were two further rooms, one of which was a vast granary filled with silver corn, the other a granary of golden corn.

I would wake up as I moved through those two other rooms — and if I woke without having had this dream, I would frequently burrow back under my sheets and covers and demand it. And it would come.

The dream gave me a distinct sense that I need “fear no evil” — that hell could not in the final analysis touch me. This was its gift to me at the time, and I find it amazing that this particular gift was engraven in my dreaming consciousness maybe thirty or more times over a period of a few impressionable years…

It also told me that I was a citizen of the two realms represented by the granaries of silver and golden corn. I take them to be lunar and solar granaries, and equate them with the realms of poetry and mysticism, respectively: or one might think of them as savikalpa and nirvikalpa, via positiva and via negativa, Broceliande and Jerusalem, the imaginal and the radiant.

It was also clear that all three realms belonged to that same “management” whose friendship I had claimed, and which allowed me the freedom of the three realms. I understood on reading Dante (and remembering the dream after a lapse of years) that all three realms are realms of the divine love.

So in some very real and important sense, the seeds were never mine…

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Well, that’s pure dream, with its waking content a way of moving through this world.

[ by Charles Cameron — this is really the opening salvo, bracketing the ineffable ]
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Question #2 is the real shaker, though..

Did the Resurrection really happen?

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Here’s the key para from Tolkien:

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairystory, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels—peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: “mythical” in their perfect, selfcontained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the “inner consistency of reality.” There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.

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What happens, in other words, when imagination enters factual reality?

[ by Charles Cameron –with breath, thinking this through ]
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It seems to me that there are two chewable questions in all seriousness:

Does God Exist?

To which it seems to me that the only answer would be something along the line of this:

A roaring silence, in other words, which somehow worked itself out like this in the mind of one Franz Liszt — and he must have been pretty shaken by the end of it..

For the record, it’s my sense that if St Gregory of Nyssa had had a taste for Liszt and access to YouTube, he might have said much the same.. One cannot predicate existence of God, but one can experience revelation, eh?

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Question #2 is the real shaker, though..

Did the Resurrection really happen?

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[ by Charles Cameron — unequal sides of a coin spinning, methinks ]
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Aw, c’mon, Friedman, c’mon now:

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Sources:

Business Insider, Former DNI James Clapper: Putin is handling Trump like a Russian ‘asset’

New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, Is Putin a C.I.A. Agent?

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Supporting James Clapper, we have this from Barry McCaffrey:

Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks. It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr Putin.

— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) March 16, 2018

And this, by way of explanation, from Megyn Kelly:

The host of “Megyn Kelly Today” recently sat down for an interview with Putin, and told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that she thinks the Russian president “knows some things” that Trump would not want out in public. In the interview, she confronted Putin about why Trump speaks so highly of him, and said she does not think the Russian president likes Trump. “I would not say that Putin likes Trump,” she said. “I did not glean that at all from him. I did glean that perhaps he has something on Donald Trump.”

“I think there’s a very good chance Putin knows some things about Donald Trump that Mr. Trump does not want repeated publicly,” she added. Kelly said that she doesn’t think Putin’s information has to do with the infamous dossier linking Trump to Russian nationals. “My money’s not on the dossier,” she said. “I think it has to do with money and Trump’s early years dealing with the Russians back in the ’90s, his facilities here in the United States.”

And from Brennan:

John O. Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said Wednesday that he thought Russia may have some kind of compromising information on President Trump, setting off furious speculation about whether the former spy chief was basing that assertion on inside information.

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Supporting Friedman?

Bupkis.

But anyway.The two quotes in the DoubleQuote — they make a nice tai-chich symbol — — an ouroboros of sorts: Trump is Putin’s asset; Putin is Trump’s asset; Trump is Putin’s asset; ad infinitum or nauseam, whichever comes first.

Hence The Wilderness of Mirrors, via XX Committee. Tbis bears repeating:

Greg Treverton, a brainy wonk who has worked on the high margins of the U.S. Intelligence Community, famously explained that puzzles and mysteries are fundamentally different: the former, with their pieces, can be solved, while the latter, with inexact pieces and no firm map, defy easy solution. And some mysteries will defy solution indefinitely.

One of the best things about working in counterintelligence, if you’re comfy with imprecision, is that it’s all about mysteries (one of the worst things is that it can make you crazy), some so vexing and intellectually challenging that they elude agreed-upon solutions for decades, in some cases in perpetuity. James Angleton, the poet-turned-counterspy who became CIA’s genius/flake chief of CI for much of the Cold War, referred to this experience as “the wilderness of mirrors,” which captures the enduring mystery of never quite grasping up from down in a case, or knowing who’s really running the show, no matter how closely you look at it (the memorable phrase also happens to be the title of the best book about the CIA’s Angleton experience).