Every minute the male genus produces 235,000 sperm cells....

...and looses 35 brain cells. No wonder I have trouble remembering her name afterwards (smiles). No but seriously, I've been reading alot about what jungians call 'mature masculine archtype' (that's pronounced ark-types, as I was corrected after I gave a psycho-analytical speech last winter)--this is reminiscent of the "Childman weary manchild in the womb" stream of thought. How does a boy transition into a man? Although I know I'll get dot-com mara-lambasted for scribing this,the woman, the essence of femininity serves as a harbinger of nature channeling the mystery of life. She is muse; she is both alpha and omega. Kingdom Come and the Life Everlasting rests solely on the position of her ankles and thighs in relationship to the perpetuity and genetic continuity of her species. I'm not saying that a woman's function is an incubator (not really saying anything as much as stuttering over footnotes and raked thoughts)I'm just saying that she's a vessel of humanity. By the time a female has her first menstruation life over takes her. She has made the transition from girl to woman.

This is intriguing when you consider the metaphorical notion of the womb. The womb is metaphorically a place of spiritual incubation. It has been suggested that the cave paintings of Lascaux and Les Tres Freres (caves that were implemented in boy-to-man rituals) were suppose to be emblematic of the womb--a rebirth so to speak. The young warrior slides through a narrow tenebrous plume (the birth canal) enters mother earth fraught with cave paintings and incense and animal skins. The burgeoning man meditates, fasts, incubates, allows his spiritual limbs to cultivate before he releases himself from the 'womb' realm, sluicing out through the narrow canal, re-entering the planet 'born-again' so to speak.

Hell, even Christianity utilizes this womb theory to administer their message of gulit mingled with a shot of sporadic forgiveness. Look at the architecture of a church. The center aisle becomes emblematic of the birth canal and the front of the church is the 'womb'--a place where the sacrement is offered. Where the baptismal fount is located. The congregation exits the church 'reborn'---is there any wonder that gothic cathedrals dotting the european countryside are called Notre Dame or "OUR MOTHER"?

Where the female arguably becomes life, the boy has to choose to become a man (purportedly).

"The boy has to act," is what jaded fairy-tale huggin' jungians suggest. They point to male rituals evident throughout humanity's discourse where the boy leaves the tribe, searches, nurses a vision, sloughs his old belief system like a snake skin.

Is this making any sense? Personally, I like to believe that, regardless of gender, both sexes have to 'act'--spend time knocking and digging, exert energy finding out what they are capable of achieving as human being verses their four-legged mammalian counterparts.

Sometimes I think the notion of intelligence is completely arbitrary when it comes to mammals. I could teach a well-trained monkey how to punch keys on Microsoft word. I could show him the pattern for a hiaku. I could teach him how to wipe his ass or how to sign out his gratitude. But still, human beings come to the notion of what does it mean to feel, what does it mean to overcome? What does it mean to Love? What does it mean to have a 'vision' and to feed that vision with splashes creative-fuel.

Jungian archtypes are cool but they've almost become posh. Hell, mysticism has become posh. It's no longer about suffering and yearning and eternal-longing as much as it is about sounding erudite and well-read at a campus dinner party and hoping to get laid afterwards. I read the greek etymology of 'mysticism' over the weekend and it stems from a word that means 'silence', 'secrets'...the early greek mystics knew something and they weren't gonna promulgate it or market it. Although, for a wayfarer or for someone searching they'd assent their chin and smile when they saw that they had embarked on their own personal sojorn.

Reverting back to masculine psychology...there's a well-known book by poet Robert Bly called IRON JOHN: A Book about Men (it's the yang to Woman who run with Wolves yin)....Bly alchemically dissects a grim's fairy tale 'Iron Hans'..it's really beautiful in a way. I'm familiar with the story and have owned the book many times (like all the books I love, I keep giving them away) every time I read it I get to the point of the story where I'm at psychologically and then...still-life with a dictionary, I can't move. Maybe someday I'll be able to finish the book, but perhaps that's what the author wants..."it's cool to read books and sound intelligent, much harder to live a life and experience and not share it because your their......get what I'm saying?

Just random speculations and irritating errata.

I do have one special place of spirtual incubation. Mattheison state park, outside of Starved Rock--it's my 'vagina' so to speak. It's place where I go to and let my hair down and run wild. A wet, moist, leafy, autumnal place with lavender sunsets and wheatfields and steep dells foaming with Waterfalls (an Illinois anomaly) with the beautiful vermillion river brushing through nearby. Once my booksies start selling I'm gonna build a thick log-cabin up near there so you girls (arya/daniela/ and the 'other' ex-girlfriend that is stalking me) can come and visit and we'll go on long hikes and I'll show you what my heart looks like as seen through the ontological lenses of mother earth. I may even dabble a book called "MATTHEISON GRACE"-every time I sweep through then canvas of Mattheison crazy shit happens and I come out 'reborn' awaiting a pending trial in my life.

I blasted up to Mattheison last year and skinny-dipped in the Vermillion (pretending it was the ganges). I looked up on a gravel precipice and saw a cross. Vision? Freak? Hallucination? It was a cross made of wood with thick black letters strewn across the plank. Reaching for my sandals and shorts I began to mount the precipice. As I neared it I saw the word JESUS thickly scribed across the plank followed by (freaky) my own birthday. JULY 6, 2001 (day in which I turned twenty-four and the day President Bush finally turned two). I scrambled up ot the top of the precipice and it turned out that it was a memorial for a spanish boy who had died. His first name was Jesus (hey-zeus) and he was born one year after I was and had died, on the precipice,on my twenty-fourth birthday.

There was a plastic statue of Mother Mary, half-melted from the late september sun. Burnt candals littered around the cross's trunk. For some reason I felt connected to this person. This Jesus. I uttered the prayer for the departed--kissed the bark of the closest tree, took off my sweater (the A&F sweater I purloined from Jenn's wardrobe; the sweater I wore when I first kissed Caroline two three years earlier) and tied it around the tree closest to the cross as a sacrifiece.

Six weeks later I went back to my 'sacred' place. Re-entered my 'vagina'. An early November snow had coated the bleak Illinois landscape. In early winter the entire state of Illinois turns silver--alchemically it aches for gold. I went back to this secluded palce where I always take off my clothes and bathe (not in the winter) went back to the cross, expecting to find mu double-knotted sweater damp, dirty, infested with bugs. Went back to mount the gravel precipice and to say the prayer for the Deaparted for Jesus. When I reached the summit there was no trace of the cross. There were no candles. No scattered beer cans. NO trace at all and when I went to the tree where I double-knotted my sweater as an offering, it too had completely disappeared.