Joy explodes in puffs of colored powder and the exaltation of rainbow delights, masses of human bodies dance and writhe like a vast colony organism or the murmuration of birds ascending to the heavens, as the Festival of Holi unfolds across the Hindu diaspora in psychedelic surrealism and ecstatic trance.
Herein a festival of love and ecstasy emerges from a more ancient one of spring and fertility, embedded in a historical psychodrama and mythic narrative of Krishna and Radha, who share the same blue skin through exaltation and the magic of his marking her with colored powder, a ritual of transformation enacted during this wild street party of colors cast upon the winds.
Wary as I am of institutions of faith as enforcers of authorized truths, especially those which field armies, Krishna is just love without boundaries, and explicitly transgressive love as the gods are blind to whatever we do during this liminal amok time. In a society bound with laws still rooted in divisions of caste and hierarchies of virtue as karmic action, Holi is the free pass festival, wherein Nothing Is Forbidden.
Let us embrace those truths written in our flesh and love which liberates us from the limits of our form.
As I wrote in my post of March 19 2022, On the Conjunction of the Hindu Festival of Triumph Over Evil Holi and the Islamic Festival of Atonement and Liberation From Sin Shab-e-Barat; Tonight a strange conjunction of the heavens unites Islamic and Hindu peoples, and in this we rejoice for it is a sign of hope for our common future.
Shab-e-Barat, which means “night of innocence” though shab also means luck, and signposts the belief that on this night the Infinite decides the life, death, wealth, health, and future for the coming year of our lives, a liminal time of absolution and atonement, deliverance and salvation in the liberation from sin.
Holi, a celebration of the triumph over evil through the sacrifice of oneself, and also a festival of the divine madness of love.
Both are spring festivals; which begin as the first crocuses bloom here at Dollhouse Park, and the unfolding of the earth’s renewal begins again; soon tulips will follow, the cherry trees will blossom, and the rose gardens emerge from winter.
This on the first day of the end of the mask mandate, with the stores full of people again; as the world’s first state Quarantine imposed by the Republic of Venice lasted from 1423 to 1797 when Napoleon conquered it, we have been lucky. But also as the world slides with glacial slowness and inevitability into a Third World War which will bring either the nuclear extinction of humankind or centuries of war and an age of tyrants in which all books now written, all music composed, all films created, all that our civilization has achieved and all that we have dreamed and done, all human meaning and value we now possess, will become ashes and be lost.
From this fate we have created and damned ourselves to I can see no possible escape; but none of us can contain all possibilities of becoming human, nor comprehend the Infinite. Here is my first principle of epistemology, the Conservation of Ignorance, a primary insight of my time as a graduate student historically developed from the thought experiment of the Spear of Archytus, who asked the question; “What happens to a spear when it is hurled across the outer boundary of the universe? Does the spear rebound, or vanish from this world?”, then by Nicholas of Cusa, and finally by Kurt Godel whose work is brilliantly interrogated in Rudy Rucker’s book Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite.
And yet our calendrical reckoning of our place in the universe has aligned these two festivals of hope and renewal by happy chance, and reminds us that to live as a human being is to practice the art of the impossible.
So to you all I say Shab-e-Barat Mubarak, and Holi ki shubhkamnayein; as a reminder to us all of the power of poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and of the redemptive power of love. As Jean Genet taught me during our Last Stand while we were about to be burned alive; “When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things.”
Let us practice the art of the impossible, wherever we may be, as living Autonomous Zones.
As I wrote in my post of January 28 2022, I Sing of Madness, Vision, and Love: Lewis Carroll, on his birthday January 27, which I celebrate on the 28th because the 27th is also Holocaust Remembrance Day and the Liberation of Auschwitz, and the 26th is Australia’s Indigenous Mourning Day, and I need something wonderful to balance the darkness; I practice the art of believing “six impossible things before breakfast”; this is possibly a confession of faith, though if asked directly I normally quote either Keats; “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty”, or Rumi; “Let the beauty you love be what you do”, depending on who is asking, and in what language and nation.
Without question and absolutely it is a declaration of allegiance to poetic vision and to poetic and metaphorical truth, as identity and the terms of struggle for its ownership; for after language itself the ideas by which we organize ourselves are our most fundamental ground of being.
Are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others? Always there remains the struggle between the masks we make for ourselves and those made for us by others; this is the first revolution in which we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Poetic vision and truth allow us to escape the limits of our form and the flags of our skin; to create ourselves anew as a primary human act and the reimagination and transformation of our possibilities of becoming human.
To Lewis Carroll, Surrealist and philosopher of poetic vision, we are indebted for his primary insight which reconciles the transcendent truth of Keats and Romantic Idealism as developments of the western mystery tradition from Plato with the immanent truths written in our flesh.
His great book Alice in Wonderland, like Mozart’s Magic Flute, encodes this mystery tradition, for which his primary sources are Plato, the Biblical Book of John the Evangelist which forges a faith of the Logos, and Coleridge’s Primary Imagination; but he also attempted to write a Summa Theologiae which can unfold itself within the mind of its readers as transformation and transcendence.
Dense with word games of the Italo Calvino-Georges Perec variety and mathematical-philosophical puzzles which are satirical metacommentary on the great thinkers of his time, Alice in Wonderland is intended to transmit the whole of a classical education, but is also a Socratic dialog which questions the premises of our civilization. Few such total reimaginations have ever been attempted.
I discovered Wonderland through the brilliant work of the mathematician Martin Gardner, which has been updated as The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, when as a sophomore in high school I joined a reading group at the local university, carried along in the wake of my best friend, four years older than myself and a former Forensics student of my father, Doc (given name Brad) Hannink.
This occurred during my teenage James Joyce-Ludwig Wittgenstein fandom and immersion in medieval magic, both related to a love of languages, logic, and math as hidden systems of meaning. These enthusiasms of my youth foundered before my senior year of high school on my failure to learn Kabbalah, as I discovered it is written not in Hebrew which I was attempting to teach myself but in Aramaic and Andalusi Romance.
But as a fifteen year old steeped in the iconography of Surrealist film and the esotericism of Finnegan’s Wake and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, I loved that Alice always questioned authority and regarded her as an anarchist hero and a figure of Socrates, and this remains the primary meaning of the work for me. Alice enacts parrhesia, what Foucault called truth telling, and I saw in her someone I wished to become.
As I wrote in my post of January 8 2022, Let Us Bring A Reckoning; Politics is the art of fear as the basis of exchange and the origin of authority and unequal power as systemic evil in the Wagnerian Ring of fear, power, and force, as balanced with the desire to belong, but it is also about poetic vision as reimagination and transformation; to dream an impossible thing and make it real, as Washington did in crossing the Delaware to create America and as Alice teaches us when recounting the Six Impossible Things in her battle with the Jabberwocky.
On the way to fight a dragon, and seeing it for the first terrible time, Alice remarks to the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s beautiful film; “That’s impossible.”
To which the Hatter says, “Only if you believe it is.”
“Sometimes, I believe in six impossible things before breakfast.”
“That is an excellent practice, but just now, you really might want to focus on the Jabberwocky.”
Just so.
Here follows some things I have written for Mad Hatter Day, which I celebrate as a three day Orphic vision quest which begins the month of Halloween.
As I wrote in my post of October 7 2021, Love as a Divine Madness: a Celebration of Mad Hatter Day; We celebrate the beginning of the Halloween season, wherein we let our demons out to play, a time of masquerades, the performance of secret identities, violations of normality and transgressions of the boundaries of the Forbidden, reversals of order, the embrace of our monstrosity, of the reimagination and transformation of ourselves, and the pursuit of new truths through ecstatic trance and poetic vision, with our new national holiday of amok time, Mad Hatter Day.
The Mad Hatter acts as a psychopomp or guide of the soul in Alice in Wonderland, and Alice is a Holy Fool like Parsifal, but he and Alice are also figures of a single whole person and the story one of hierosgamos or heavenly marriage; like Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a myth into which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes cast themselves so disastrously.
Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast interrogates this myth of idealizations of authorized masculinity and femininity as Freudian horror and Sadeian transgression. But it is also a primary myth of reimagination and transformation which signposts the inherent fluidity of identities of sex and gender.
What does love do? Love sublimes us into a unitary being, erases our limits as individuals defined by our form and liberates us from the event horizon of our flesh.
Love also reveals to us our true selves; a lover has the power to see the truth of others, and to reveal to others their true selves, and models thereby an ideal of human relationships. We choose partners who can help us become the person we want to be, and who embody qualities we wish to assimilate to ourselves; a healthy relationship returns to us and helps us discover our true and best selves. To love is to transform others by the power of our vision to see who they truly are and set them free.
A lover is both a Pythian seer of truths who like Michelangelo can free us as images captive within the stone of our bodies and our material and social context, who in naming us like Adam naming the beasts defines our truth, and an inverted figure of Medusa, goddess and monster, a victim cursed for the crimes of her abuser like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and whose power to turn men to stone appropriates the dehumanizing and objectifying power of the Male Gaze and transforms it into the power to see others true selves and release them to be free, and to mutually assimilate the qualities of the other and transform them both.
Love is a divine madness which defiles and exalts, reveals truths and confers authenticity, and the redemptive power of love can make glorious and beautiful the flaws of our humanity and bring healing to the brokenness of the world and the pathology of our disconnectedness.
What is to be done? Alice Slays the Jabberwocky:
Jefferson Airplane – Go ask Alice
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition
(Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland #1-2), by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner (Introduction and notes), John Tenniel (Illustrator)
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Decoded: The Full Text of Lewis Carroll’s Novel with its Many Hidden Meanings Revealed, by David Day
The Making of Lewis Carroll’s Alice and the Invention of Wonderland,
by Peter Hunt
Sources of Holi festival myth and ritual
Gitagovinda of Jayadeva: Love Song of the Dark Lord, Jayadeva Goswami, Barbara Stoler Miller (Translator)
Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God: Srimad Bhagavata Purana, Edwin F. Bryant (contributor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60421703-krishna
Bhakti Yoga: Tales and Teachings from the Bhagavata Purana, Edwin F. Bryant
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31450741-bhakti-yoga
Krishna: A Sourcebook, Edwin F. Bryant
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2557841.Krishna
Hymns Of The Atharva Veda, Maurice Bloomfield
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4522359-hymns-of-the-atharva-veda
Hala’s Sattasai (Gatha Saptasati in Prakrit): Poems of Life and Love in Ancient India, Peter Khoroche, Herman Tieken
Kamasutra, Mallanaga Vātsyāyana, Wendy Doniger, Sudhir Kakar (Translators)
https://goodreads.com/book/show/6457220.Kamasutra
Redeeming the Kamasutra, Wendy Doniger
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27845372-redeeming-the-kamasutra
The Ramayana, a reading list
Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, Jonah Blank
The Ramayana: A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic, Vālmīki, Ramesh Menon
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141153.The_Ramayana?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_57
The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic, R.K. Narayan (Translator), Pankaj Mishra (Introduction)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/129876.The_Ramayana?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_65
Torch of Liberty 
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