by William Irwin Thompson
 Fra Angelico’s Annunciation at Diocesan House, Cortona, Tuscany, Italy. Reproduced with the permission of Diocesan House |
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III. PHOTOGRAPH OF ADOLF WÖLFLI IN BERN
IV. THE WAKING MIND IN NEW YORK
VIII. AT THE EDGE OF THE HYPNAGOGIC
IX. WITHIN THE ASTRAL WIND IN NEW YORK
X. TEACHINGS OF THE DAIMON IN NEW YORK
XI. FRA ANGELICO’S CORTONA ANNUNCIATION
XII. RILKE’S ANNUNCIATION TO MARY
XIII. AWAKE IN DREAMLESS SLEEP IN CAMBRIDGE
XVII. THE ANGEL OF LINDISFARNE, RELEASED FROM THE CHAPEL
XIX. IN MY CHAIR, THE LAST NIGHT IN CRESTONE
XX. ENVOIE: THE ART OF THE FUGUE
FOREWORD
When I was a graduate student of literature at Cornell in the early nineteen-sixties, I became interested in the genre of Romantic poems of description and meditation and wrote my Master’s Essay on this form[1]. Also, while I was at Cornell, my first published poem, “Sunset at Point Lobos,” appeared in the literary quarterly Epoch, and this work expressed my own first steps to follow in the tracks of Coleridge and Yeats, and, closer to home, Kenneth Rexroth.
Still Travels expresses an effort to move inside and track the interior landscapes of the mind in meditation: from the waking mind to the hypnagogic – the state of intermediate consciousness preceding sleep – from the hypnagogic to the dreaming mind, from the dreaming mind to the parallel life of the psychic being, the Doppleganger, or what Rudolf Steiner called “das Ich,” whose world is on the other side of dreams.
The psychic world is, of course, a rich world of archetypal images, but there is a higher world of cosmic music and sound that is more like Bach than Jung, and when the psychic being rests, the spirit soars into this universe of Seraphs and cognitive bliss.
The world above this universe of sound is harder to remember, as one is no longer present there as a personality with a memory held together by merely one incarnation’s identity. But what I can recall is a world of pure divine light beyond imagery or sound that makes one think of all the words the Inuit are said to have for snow. I never knew there could be so many irridescent forms of white: purple-white, magenta-white, violet-white, mauve-white, scarlet-white, blue-white, turquoise-white, and on, and on, in a field of white light in which each snowflake is an n-dimensional crystal of colors from a transcendent spectrum.
Each night, in the practice of yoga-nidra, the yoga of sleep, I try to make my way back to these higher worlds of music and light, hoping that one night, I will not need to come back.
I. PROEM IN ZURICH
Although I’ve worked at this for more than thirty years,
I fail consistently to sit the night controlled
in conscious yogic sleep and watch the mind change scenes
from hypnagogic noise to clearer astral dream,
and only then to wake into my double’s life.
I know he’s over there, behind the screen of dreams.
He sleeps when I’m awake, my sleeping wakes him up.
Just once I’d like to be both of us at once,
suprising time to make a grail from broken shards.
Is that allowed or do our dreams insulate
the two polarities? Is it like matter touching
antimatter in mutual demonic annihilation?
If I don’t do this now, then death will do its worst:
the quantum potential states will flood me all at once,
but I’ll no longer have a mind capable of culling
nightmare from reality: the wave withdraws and foam
covers the particles of sand, and each in its own grain
is another rocky earth covered by a drowning sea.
II. BIRTH IN CHICAGO
The daimon served, unable to enact or rescind,
it seemed intent on deciphering the frictive surface
where two conflicting turbulences like sea and wind
encrypted round me a hieroglyphic carapace.
Not cruel or kind, it told me to remember to forget,
to hold the pattern, but never a thought in it.
But how could I read what was encoded on my back?
Each planet I passed soundly engraved an icon
of its turning god’s obsession into my encrypted husk
as if that would be my only enchiridion,
but at Earth, I was allowed in art’s hyperspace,
reading and hearing four fugues the stars
had lashed to my back in Christic redemptive scars,
then with a slap, I gasped, masked within a face.
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III. PHOTOGRAPH OF
ADOLF WÖLFLI IN BERN
Reflected in the cracked windowed monads
of your dark gnostic archangelic eyes-
open wounds only hell could cauterize-
dead gods, Apollonian raped dryads,
quick cuts, and other Hesiodic crimes
flicker akashicly in your stunning gaze.
Even if you are the Ancient of Days
of the dark backward and abysm of times,
you cannot contest or conspire to fake
myth or cook the prophetic books of Blake.
Because Dark Matter has always mattered
to you, your art tries to liberate me
from light the Big Bang Ammon splattered
on the last universe’s perversity
IV. THE WAKING MIND
IN NEW YORK
Since we are supposed to be wed unto death us do part,
the waking mind I would have to call a wife,
as other minds expressed in perceptive art
also appear in her intimately alien life
like opposites cleaved in domestic Heraclitean strife:
siren street sounds from stars, memories before birth.
When I put my ear to her shell, space is rife
with demons softened by lips of angelic mirth,
telling me she cannot be utterly and only of this Earth.
You know about Adam and Eve, the serpent and the tree,
but if you come from the Bible Belt you can’t
know how to think in images mythologically
having been raised to smash idols and evangelically rant,
but here the Whore of Babylon is free to grant
her favors as the brothel abutts the temple wall—
meaning, of course, the brain’s an Archon’s implant
of reptile, mammal, and Australopithicine in all.
Still thought, and you slip back into imagery’s serpentine thrall.
The Gongarisma of the hypnagogic is ganz surreal,
more a painterly realm of baroque disembodied bits
than a public private nook where you can cop a feel
off the girl of your dreams gravity suspending tits.
Whole parts come unstrung in epistemic titbits;
from the sheer power of concentration alone you can will
objects to stretch until even your own cock fits
satyric expectations in a carneval’s autofellating thrill:
compared to this Dali-like mind, my Mac is still just a quill.
Deep dreamless sleep is an imageless realm of sound;
we know this without thinking when we say,
“Did you have a sound sleep?” From dreams unbound,
the mind sinks to depths where no phantoms play.
Calabi-Yau topologies pulse and display
shapes too subtle for anything the eye could trace,
but with the mind’s stopped attention in the instant’s delay,
temporal realms of monads and strings of space
can be heard on waking in the universe’s droning ground bass.
V. DOPPLEGANGER
Begin then the journey at your feet,
let objects be for their objective sake:
the bed, the chest, this meditation seat,
Ah, but you cannot convert or make
me attend your conscious pieties.
You could a villain, but I’m a rake.
the altar, my bookshelf of deities:
Tara, Fra Angelico’s Mary and Dove,
the Sufi heart, the Buddhist calligraphies,
Soon you’ll preach about agapé and love,
but when you fall asleep, I’ll slip out
and what you truly extend, I’ll shove
If only my knees don‘t give out,
or the numbing tetany, subtler than pain
but as effective a stop as a halting shout.
in the cock, unplug the stopped-up drain,
embodying every passed up thought,
to suck the semen from your yogic brain
Begin with the breathing Yogananda taught,
haung-sau in softest astral inhalation,
until the stopped pulse is stilled thought.
Well all that air-conditioned ventilation
is slower than simply falling asleep;
you’re pumping your image in a flat’s inflation.
A sudden wave of light , swift and steep,
engulfs my field of perspectival sight
but leaves no image, no icon to keep.
Clearly this will take him half the night,
so I might as well go back in and doze
than watch the mind’s wind toss his kite.
A rich velvet of various indigos
surrounds me in intimate purpled dark,
a conference of birds, first doves, then crows.
VI. BEGINNING AGAIN
My soft body of dough’s punched down
into the purple bowl of the heart’s throrned crown.
No cleansing kriyal stream, no rising snake,
not here the duality of moonrise and daybreak;
no flute-lit stream, no leaping rainbow trout,
mind and time disappear, turned inside out—
midpoint of inflection for the toroid swerve,
where surface folds in the 3-sphere’s curve;
Fra Angelico’s mystical space is openly there
in the torus brocade on the cloth over Mary’s chair.
The arc of the angel’s wings is tangent to the sphere
of the dove the hands of the Virgin Mary mirror;
robed in carnal red and mental blue,
but majenta is the angel’s intraviolet hue,
seen only in the opening of the inner eye,
where three roads meet under a doubled sky;
and yet the angel points directly to her heart,
there where tonight’s practice must take its start.
VII. A SLIP
Bowed neck, strung breath,
hollowed core, cello’d chest,
heard overhead, air oceanic,
above the OM, within the snore,
shaken awake, from falling asleep.
Did I fall asleep going in
or coming out?
I thought a minute,
but an hour’s gone by.
This sleeping state
is an Orient Point—
a slip of nothing in-between,
a wave of interference
where two seas meet.
VIII. AT THE EDGE OF THE HYPNAGOGIC IN CAMBRIDGE
The first stage with eyes closed
you see the room you’re in,
only you add elements
of narrative from things
you hear out the window
from remembered persons
who are not really there.
In a doubled landscape
you image feelings of
muscle inhibitors
kicking in, transforming
that feeling to floating
up out of your body,
else you’d be in trouble—
a sleepwalker with eyes
open to deception.
You dream you’re floating,
but you’re not astral yet,
and the landscape you see
as you drift through the wall
is all from memory.
Instead of waking out,
you wake up; your neck hurts
from bobbing up and down.
You took the wrong right turn
back to the waking mind.
Now you will have to wait
to mind another night.
IX. WITHIN THE ASTRAL WIND IN NEW YORK
In the astral you feel the lift
of the wind first, as you snap out
of your body—a spinaker
filling out, bound still to its yacht,
you look down on your body, flat
on its stomach in the dark bed.
Some thing is pulling you somewhere.
Be careful, the air is alive
with indeterminant desires.
Don’t go off half-cocked on girlfriends
now squarely bedded down more loved
by their endurable husbands.
You’re still awake in the astral,
able to make moral judgments
with a frontal cortex still up
and running on into the night,
arguing and unthreading the
synaptic tangles of short term
memory’s mindless register
of every blocked limbic impulse
of the tits ‘n ass enticing day.
What divine or demonic force
is sucking your soul up out of
your flaccid body you can’t know
in a mind that is not one or
the other. And so you reject
the wind and pronounce hard judgment:
“Then back!” You wake up back in bed,
turning over and looking up
into the air you’ve just emptied
of some one’s transconscient desire.
X. TEACHINGS OF THE DAIMON IN NEW YORK
Listen, with the right ear, over
your head, a high frequency hum,
the Taos hum, an Indian AUM.
Just listen, if you have to think,
think String Theory’s dimensions,
with seven more packed into three;
the old Jack in a Box pops in
from sound and not from sight or touch.
Listen, go in over your head
into that indigo ocean.
This ghostly other photonic
quantum-entangled self does not
need to breathe, and besides there’s still
enough fractaling down time within
a fractaled mind afloat upon
the quantum-foaming lips of death.
Listen great Brahms symphonic whales
in accompaniment to Earth’s
inner iron core’s Old Church
Slavonic basso profundo
sing while countering in higher
registers enter pulsar stars.
Listen, this modal indigo
can change key and color in split
chords in which light constructs the dark
and everything turns inside out
as down is up and another sky
is at the bottom of this sea.
Listen, you’ve already done it
once so click upon those icons
of memory where you break through
the surface of that turquoise sea
and it’s dawn on an astral world.
The Daimon leaves, an undertow
pulls me back; I flounder under
down into mud and black out dead
to that world and start to dream.
I’m lost in a crowded airport
and trying to find my luggage
I’ve left behind on the plane.
I’m supposed to give a talk but
I don’t have the right lecture notes
and need to find the men’s room first,
but all are locked or occupied.
I get out to the parking lot
and try to remember where I
left my rented car, then I wake,
stumble dark into the bathroom,
but still hear ringing in my head
that sitar droning overworld.
XI. FRA ANGELICO’S
CORTONA ANNUNCIATION
Begin again, no, not Dogen’s
dropping of body, dropping of mind,
into Zen’s hara, Tao’s T’an t’ien.
This work of art, is guru and guide,
Fra Angelico’s Annunciation,
Eve above, Mary below,
falling time, conceiving space,
Gabriel above, Gabriel below.
Thread your breath, through your heart,
breathing love in, breathing love out,
giving thanks, gift and giver,
gift of tongues, gift of lungs.
Bounded to boundless, body to light,
from supernova or black hole.
At heart’s core, indigo then gold,
the point opens where space infolds,
through the 3-sphere, out becomes in,
the universe becomes an inner core.
When one takes breath, one becomes one,
again in body, again out.
Virgin Birth, Virgin Death.
Eve looks down, to Mary’s heart,
two women, in one space,
secretly share, what no Church,
save art, and Fra Angelico,
could ever know, or care to teach.
XII. RILKE’S
“MARIAE VERKÜNDIGUNG”
ANNUNCIATION TO MARY
Not that an angel entered frightened her
(you see that). As little as another
would if in her room a ray of sunlight,
or the full moon intruding past midnight,
creating itself with light made her start;
rather she attended to the hard art
in which an angel, incensed in matter,
went bracing itself for dense encounter.
She could scarcely know how for an angel
(summer lightning slowed into a gazelle)
time was perverse–she was that innocent–
Legend has it the wild doe’s resplendent
forested horn was shown to her alone,
as once startled from hiding in the wood,
it was aroused as if sight had been thrown,
revealing the unicorn where she stood–
see-er and seen, each alone and unpaired,
the animal of light, purely revealed.
Not that he entered, but that he stared
and broke out into poetry annealed
in the light, this angel, of a girl’s face
so to him inclined, his and hers in sight,
that within and without could so interlace
as everything spatial became insight,
and what millions acting, forcing, tricking,
contracted into her. She and he,
vision and seer, eye and eye’s feasting,
were nowhere other than this place. See,
this fright was time where time did not belong,
and then the angel turned time into song.
XIII. AWAKE IN DREAMLESS SLEEP IN CAMBRIDGE
And soon I shall no longer among the limbs
think outward branching thoughts in the mind’s swift
associations of women’s bodies
opening passages in and out of time.
Last night in meditation I floated
up out of my body into a sky
neither blue nor black but Goethe’s deep
majenta that ecstatically joins
the infrared and ultraviolet.
I heard again the sound of everything:
the folding proteins in the cell, the quarks’
murmur, the high soprano neutron stars,
and the droning rumble of dark matter
as sideman to the quantum frenzied Strings.
Not strung guts nor struck drums in violence
are needed for this music of freed mind.
In a bliss of cognitive repose I
soaked in a choral sea of undaddy’d
God. I imagine after Aeons still
the sound of sufferers in hell worlds
would get to you even there, and you’d sink
down in dreams of compassionate desire.
Operatic or not, you would compose
librettos of rescue and redemption,
in which you became a dense instrument
of their release from self-inflicted lives.
Your drenched monadic body starts to morph,
turning out amazing topologies
of crystal facets that can interface
in ten dimensions and lock outside in
energy sheaths for a human body,
and that gets you thinking again of sex.
You dream of couples bravely making love
in a dark time on a hate-filled world,
and as you watch them come you get caught up
in their cries and forget where you have been.
XIV. MINDING THE GAP
First I see
signs of it
in Toronto,
then hear it
in London,
work it out
for myself
in New York
and Boston.
Carefully,
I step across,
minding the gap
between me and it.
It is out
I am in,
but the city I think
is neither one
nor the Other
but something
in between,
how I am
when they say
“How are you?”
Surrounded
by blocks of time
past now,
I take steps
that take it
out of me.
Shops and hospitals
wait on me
but my I
takes its custom
elsewhere at night.
I sit with me,
full of things
I got that day,
listening in
on the gap,
sounding out
a trade of thought
for final light.
XV. STILL LIFE IN SANTA FE
Take this carved ornate wooden throne,
this bishop’s crowned dining room chair,
with arms, straight back, and leather seat—
a relic of colonial life—
is it better to sit up straight
in this hard New Mexican chair,
or tilt back more comfortably
in the soft cloth English club chair
in my Crestone mountain cabin?
Feet up, angled spine, and the mind
starts to slide toward the slop of dreams—
that mind of the dead I’d avoid
if I could when the endtime comes—
that uncontrolled tumbling of cold
but still unsatisfied desires.
What you see in death is not real
but everything you’ve thought before.
Yogic enlightenment requires
a cleared embodied waking mind,
but my nodding head bobs around
and abruptly wakes me up, not
in Buddha’s light awakened mind,
but the still night’s dark solitude.
No, this Catholic chair can’t take me
beyond dreams to parallel lives
where each subtle body at large
is its own breath suspended world.
XVI. THE ELEMENTAL
I do not know how I came to know an elemental. One day he was there in an expanded kind of mind that seemed to have evolved over night and through day. I do not know if it had something to do with the sun—the reach of a solar maximum into my mind—or something my double may have done while I was asleep. I think it must have started when I moved from Manhattan up into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The elemental appeared in my peripheral field of awareness in a matter-of-fact state of mind as if he had been there before I took the trouble to focus in on him. I had taken no drug or psychedelic mushroom or plant, nor had I gone on some shaman’s vision quest workshop with a New Age guru.
This elemental is wild beyond imaginings—all beasts are domestic compared to him—so wild he has no need to threaten the likes of me who can only think by liking things to other things. He is like nothing I have ever known—weather under the red spot on Jupiter, or the mind of a volcanic mountain in which the flow of lava is its pulsing blood. At first I thought it was a jinn. The Koran says the jinn are made of fire, and that we are made of flesh and came after them in Creation. Makes sense to me.
But the Sufis say the jinn are great spirits of knowledge, of science, music, art, and all that inspires us, so we moderns will have to learn again how to make sense of angels, jinn, and elementals. And as for sense, first off, we have to stop thinking seeing is believing. Our acts of human perception actually empty the world, stripping it of presences in order to isolate a thing. We live by separations: seeing things, and constructing space around them. We really live under water in a coral reef of entities—or within a gaseous nebula of multiple minds, living and dead. Elementals resonate; they tremble in a subspace circulation whales would understand. They breathe through sound, from the inner iron core, to the upper atmosphere and on to the stars’ basso profundo to soprano. For them the stars are not “out there.” So our conquest of space and search for extraterrestrial life is absurd: the flashlight searching for darkness when it is all around.
What do the elemental and I do? Mostly we hum and play like toddlers together in a sandbox-playing in order to learn what will come later. For the sake of my daughter, sometimes we play with the weather, which is also a gathering of elementals. My daughter instinctively understands the old Celtic animistic magic, as she was conceived in Dublin and inherited a Celtic lineage from me and an inner Sephardic secrecy about it from her Iberian- eyed mother.
Humanity is not native to this earth. We came like Jews in diaspora, holding on to our tragedies on the broken hearted dust of stars. At first, the elementals resented our immigrant intrusion and through our early religions they made a mess of things with blood to keep us in our place. The elementals lorded it over us, and we forgot our native star, trying to assimilate and fit in. Then the Solar Logos came down in human form to set things right, but religion got in the way again, and so here we are, with the whole world one mad violent Holy Land. But because of the intercession of the sun, some elementals are now reconciled to us, and are no longer what the religions used to call demons in a display of them.
One day he approached me in dreams in the form of the stone hulk, “The Thing,” from the comic book, Fantastic Four. I was terrified in a nightmare, and he embraced me, gave me a big hug and kiss, and then pushed me away in disgust at my fear, as if to say: “So much for your New Age bullshit.” He was right, of course. I, in the practice of dream yoga, had failed to turn the nightmare round from its malefic to its benefic form, and so had fallen off the upward slope and would have to start up dream mountain all over again.
The elementals are not demons; they are deeply rooted in earthly bodies full of the titanic volcanic forces that brought forth life on this planet; actually it would be better to call them primordials, as they are neither simple nor elementary. Demons, by contrast, are parasites of mind; they are thought-forms and need a host to sustain their kudzu life, wrapping around telephone poles and human spines as they spread wars and criminal violence.
This primordial spirit tells me that they now have a new planetary work to do, and that the volcanoes will need to save the biosphere once again, as they did at the time of Snowball Earth, with a necessary dieback of humankind. Think of us as dough punched down and rolled in bardo to rise in new shapes as a new star goes nova and reminds us of our ancient native star. Then a new symbiotic mind will evolve on our post-catastrophic Earth. Each enlightened human will be an Entelechy or a kind of single Gaian cell in which primordials, jinn, humans, and angels become like plastids, mitochondria, and nuclei within a single cell. Humanity will live on a Third Atlantis set between the primordial magma, the sea, the atmosphere, the planes of the jinn, and the archangelic planetary music of the spheres.
Is this prophecy? I guess.
XVII. THE ANGEL OF LINDISFARNE, RELEASED FROM THE CHAPEL
At her request to be set free
of medieval caged religions,
ayahuascan vomited rites,
dragged in idolatrous statues,
and the Zen monks weekly rental
of the blank space they call “the dome,”
I meditate in my cabin,
to move us out to Santa Fe.
The Angel comes to my third eye,
and without trance or samadhi,
it appears in the waking mind,
reordering my sad aura
into a joyous lattice we
can more appropriately share.
A chord of oscillating light:
blue, magenta, and indigo,
more vivid than their earthly shades,
held in a turning stellar cloud
of two a-symmetrical wings
that producing a slight wobble
of a colored, blue pulsation,
belongs to a field of stars.
This is no mere angel of place,
no spirit of mountain or stream,
or mental gathering of men,
or earthly Zeitgeist of an age
of sudden art and heart’s revolt
against hoarded gold and oiled wars,
but, as she tells me, the scryed star
I sensed when I sited the tower
to the rise of the Pleiades.
Something larger is just, about
to erupt into human time,
a re-arrangement of the Earth,
an addition of a second sky,
an emergent evolution
of another subtle body
through a great collective death, caught
and molded in an Archangel’s
imagining of concerted time.
XVIII. THE ANGEL IN
MY CABIN
Look, this is not literary,
not a trope recalling Rilke.
His angels were Islamic, sounds
in the wind like the call to prayer.
This Angel is no Jungian
archetype, no dreamed projection.
I see it in the waking mind
as soon as I begin to sit.
Samadhi is not required.
Like a remote aimed at my eye
by the Angel in hyperspace,
my third eye opens instantly
and I see the vivid colors–
blue, gold, indigo, magenta.
As we see a painting on the wall,
righted in the third dimension,
so the Angel sees me while she
is in the fourth and fifth, around
me in Indra’s jeweled net of light–
a blue plasma of neurons’ stones
connecting light, a fractals’ scape
of what the universe looks like
in pictures I’ve seen in Nature.
I tell you this is for real.
At first, I saw a pulsing star,
the next time I was inside it.
I learned the star was Yin not Yang,
that I should feel it as female,
a new intimate life partner,
like a shakti, wife, or lover,
a Principality of groups
and incarnation versed in sex.
To prove her point she came in dreams,
as a naked Angelina Jolie,
punning at Sigmund Freud’s
Wit and the Unconscious‘ Ur text
that WIT and his “pretty angel”
were having fun alone in night.
The next night she appeared attired
in a red satin costly gown
for my talk at a book party
in an old house in Santa Fe.
I had expected to float up,
out of the body, then escape
the astral plane to meet “Das Ich”–
the Higher Self of Steiner’s schemes,
but this threw the road map away
and changed the order of the night.
XIX. IN MY CHAIR,
THE LAST NIGHT IN CRESTONE
Embodied in God, the Seraphim fold
and unfold doubled sets of mudra’d wings;
their entwined trunks are a sublimed forest
of gesturing wings in the soft light of dawn.
I did not know yet that that light was God.
Allowed by the Seraphim, dissolving
into the fullness of unfathered light,
wordless with cleared mind, I sink back again
to Earth, to old homes, the voice of David,
descending with me at the edge of Earth.
I find my body in Yoga Nidra—
the night’s closure on my still travels.
XX. ENVOIE: THE ART OF THE FUGUE
Now after all the instants I
alone with Bach’s hocked copper plates
retracing life in sleepless nights
past the time others fell to sleep
unshriven in their desires
weaving the shroud of their bodies
in generation of straught lives
would not be born again of dreams
but would sound a soul in music
aloft in bliss just under light
at the edge of perfected God
for I am not in any parts
partial to Zen Enlightenment
since I am from and won’t forsake
soft vulva’d love and ecstatic
yes alive in the age of stars.
Zurich, New York, Cambridge, Crestone, Santa Fe, and Portland, Maine, 1999-2007
[1] William I. Thompson, “Collapsed Universe and Structured Poem: An Essay in Whiteheadian Criticism,” College English, Vol. 28, October, 1966, 25-39.
 William Irwin Thompson | William Irwin Thompson was born in 1938 in Chicago Illinois. The family moved to Southern California at the end of World War II where he earned a B.A. at Pomona College. His formal education continued at Cornell University, where he held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (M.A. [1964]; Ph.D. [1966]). He became a member of the faculty in Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965 and remained until 1968, when he left MIT to teach at York University in Toronto (1968-1973).A Diary of Sorts and Streets by William Irwin Thompson Although he has held various other visiting appointments — at Syracuse University, the University of Hawaii, University of Toronto, Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, and the California Institute of Integral Studies — Thompson has since remained outside of academe. In Passage About Earth, Thompson writes about individuals from the ‘60s — among them Ralph Nader, Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, John Lilly — who “left institutions behind to become institutions in their own right.”In 1972, Thompson founded The Lindisfarne Association, originally based in New York, later to find a permanent home in Crestone, Colorado, home of the Lindisfarne Fellows House and the Lindisfarne Chapel. For 25 years, under the sponsorship of its Dean — and chair of the Association — James Park Morton, Lindisfarne was headquartered in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.The Association also gave rise the Lindisfarne Press, which, though no longer an independent house, still publishes under its own imprint for The Anthroposophical Press.WEBSITE: www.WilliamIrwinThompson.org WILLIAM IRWIN THOMPSON IN THIS EDITION: POETRY: Canticum, Turicum |