Islands : side two ~ Islands

Chapter Seventeen

ISLANDS
- side two -

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Islands

A SEA GULL'S EYE VIEW OF FORMENTERA

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom"

- William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

"Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.
The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from the heaven."

- St. Paul
I Corinthians, 15:46-47

"My consolation is that everything that has been is eternal: the sea will cast it up again."

- Nietszche, The Will to Power

"And so castles made of sand
Fall in the sea eventually."

- Jimi Hendrix

"The Ocean will not allow its fish out of itself.
Nor does it let land animals in
where the subtle and delicate fish move.

The land creatures lumber along on the ground.
No cleverness can change this. There's only one Opener for the lock in these matters.

Forget your figuring. Forget yourself. Listen to your Friend.
When you become totally obedient to That One,
you'll be free."

- Rumi

"The ordinariness of the journey is not considered of import in the beginning as the questor is imagining the "great conclusion." The journey is where the life spirit is cooked in the fire of time and deeds. The conclusion almost always turns out to be the first moment of another journey. For the Tantrica, the practitioner of the resultant path, this is even more true."

- Buddhist meditation in the Nyingma Vajrayana tradition

Conference of the Birds, Dave Holland

"In the 12th century, the famous Persian mystical poet, Farid ad-din Attar, wrote about the seven valleys of the Way in his epic poem The Conference of the Birds. Attar described the stages encountered by the pilgrim in his 'journey in God,'. He described it as a very perilous journey – "Of all the army that set out, how few survived the way… not one in every thousand souls arrived – in every hundred thousand one survived" ('Attar 1984, p. 214)

- Towards the Sacred union: The Mystical Journey of the Soul
by Julienne McLean

"...pagan rituals purported to confer upon a "sacred king" endless life in an earthly paradise. This "life without end" -- actually perpetual death in exile from Eternity -- was granted by the great Moon goddess, who the Greeks called by the name Hecate, signifying "one hundred" -- a hundred months being the term of the sacred king's reign, after which he was sacrificed to the goddess. As his reward, the king would receive from the hand of the lunar goddess an apple, which served as his passport to a fabled island, located in the Western Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where he would live forever, never growing old."

- Moloch!

"For seven years I dwelt in the loose palace of exile
playing strange games with the girls of the island.

Now I have come again
To the land of the fair, & the strong, & the wise."

- Jim Morrison, The Celebration of the Lizard

"The second man comes from heaven and is of heaven."

- last line of C.G. Jung's epitaph

"Look through that astrolabe and become oceanic."

- Rumi

In the fourth King Crimson album we see a thematic symmetry reminiscent of earlier albums. With Epitaph acting as the mirror by which the two sides reflect one another, the first album, In The Court Of The Crimson King , presents a mirror image of above and below, conscious and unconscious. Side one of Lizard is concerned with the the outer or sensory world, the psychological function of Sensation, while side two addresses the inner experience, Intuition. Islands presents a symmetrical progression from innocence to experience and back again (to wisdom/Intuition), a mirror image away from psychological unity and back again. The two instrumentals, Sailor's Tale and Prelude: Song of the Gulls both represent transitions to a new way of seeing. Sailor's Tale is the descent into darkness (the Fall) and Prelude: Song of the Gulls the transition (prelude) to the re-emergence into light, the two tracks occupying identical positions on (what was) side one and two of the LP. Robert Fripp's guitar interlude in the middle of Sailor's Tale is a prelude to the final descent into darkness that occurs in the final movement of the composition just as Song of the Gulls is a prelude to the re-emergence into light, the re-integration of ego functions (elements) that occurs in Islands . The albums two songs of experience, The Letters and Ladies of the Road , face each other, one at the end of side one, the other at the beginning of side two. They mirror each other in that while one ( The Letters ) is moving away from innocence (undifferentiated psychological functioning/Intuition) the other ( Ladies of the Road ) is moving toward it. Each song is equidistant from innocence/wisdom/Intuition but going in an opposite direction. Additionally, The Letters and Ladies of the Road , portray conflict within the same person. Mirroring each other (superficially) as a female and male perspective on the same situation, the two songs are actually portrayals of positive and negative anima (the madonna and the whore), a reflection (post "Fall") of the narrator's outlook (the experience of unity broken by the perception of duality) and of his psyche (which,at that point, was split into conscious and unconscious). Finally, at opposite ends of the album, Formentera Lady and Islands both take place on the island, but one song is about leaving (innocence/Intuition) and the other returning. Again, mirror images and perfect symmetry.

The album begins and ends on the island, beginning and inevitably returning to innocence/Intuition:

Jung restates this idea (which he calls anamnesis) in his Letters:

"Originally we were all born out of a world of wholeness and in the first years of life are still completely contained in it. There we have all knowledge without knowing it. Later we lose it, and call it progress when we remember it again."

C. G. Jung, quoted in James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower : The Perennial Philosophy--Yeats and Jung pp. 45-46

- 'Ethereal Chemicals': Alchemy and the Romantic Imagination
Maureen B. Roberts Ph D

"It is the child that sees the primordial secret in Nature and it is the child of ourselves we return to. The child within us is simple and daring enough to live the Secret."

- Lao-Tzu

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"Earth, stream and tree encircled by sea"

The Eighth Oxherding Picture

21.Cosmos - World
Pythagorean Tarot

"The herder and the ox are transcended, neither matter any more. This is the moment of Awakening. The circle is the symbol "Il Won", the Dharmakaya Buddha, the essence of enlightenment."

- Ten Oxherding Pictures

"The round is the egg, the philosophical World Egg, the nucleus of the beginning, and the germ from which, as humanity teaches everywhere, the world arises. It is also the perfect state in which the opposites are united--the perfect beginning because the opposites have not yet flown apart and the world had not yet begun, the perfect end because in it the opposites have come together again in a synthesis and the world is once more at rest."

- Erich Neumann & C. G. Jung
The Origins and History of Consciousness

EIGHT

"Spiritually eight is the goal of the initiate, having gone through the seven stages. Eight is the number of Paradise regained.

Eight is solidarity as the first cube and it denotes perfection by virtue of it's six surfaces. There are eight winds and intermediate directions of space. Eight represents the pairs of opposites. The octagon is the beginning of the transformation of the square into a circle and vice versa."

- Numerology

"With further reference to what I have called the sign of life and its connexion with the number 8, it may be remembered that Christian Gnosticism speaks of rebirth in Christ as a change "unto the Ogdoad." The mystic number is termed Jerusalem above, the Land flowing with Milk and Honey, the Holy Spirit and the Land of the Lord. According to Martinism, 8 is the number of Christ."

-- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
by A.E. Waite

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On the World Tarot card, a female figure (the Formentera Lady) dances in an oval field.

"Though she dances, her right foot is planted firmly on a small patch of golden earth, and her left dips into silvery flowing water.
In this trump the Saturnalia comes to an end (see 0.Fool). The Fool, chosen by chance (or destiny) to be the Carnival King, Saturnaliacus Princeps, the Lord of Misrule, has had many adventures; he has been exalted and tried. At the head of the Triumphal Procession he has led a succession of triumphs of progressively higher order, which now reach their culmination.

The overall design of 21.World, a circle in a square, symbolizes the Squaring of the Circle, which represents the completion of the alchemical Magnum Opus. Jung explains that the square represents earthly reality (the four elements, the world's four quarters, etc.) and the circle represents the infinite (the rotation of the zodiac etc.)."

In their original Lp format, the first four King Crimson albums consist of eight sides. Ostensibly, the Sinfield albums constitute a four record set released over a period of 26 months. The end of the Magnum Opus takes place on side eight.

"This realm corresponds to 21.World, the Eighth Sphere..."

Seven (Lp) sides preceded the end of Islands .

"Thrice…

Three albums preceded Islands.

…has he passed the seven gates. On each of the seven days of the Carnival one of the seven Feathers of Folly was pulled from his head, so that now none are left."

- The Pythagorean Tarot by John Opsopaus

After Islands , there were no more King Crimson albums with Peter Sinfield.

"...passing the Seven Gates thus corresponds to the final triumph, the Triumph of Eternity."

- The Pythagorean Tarot by John Opsopaus

"In his theory of psychological types, Jung concluded that the quaternity forms the archetypal basis for order and orientation within consciousness. Jung's typology comprises two 'rational' functions of evaluation, thinking and feeling, and two 'irrational' functions of perception, sensation and intuition. These functions are directed not only externally (extroversion) but also internally (introversion), so that in total eight 'types' are defined, viz introverted thinking verses extraverted feeling, etc."

- The Problem of the Fourth
The New Alchemy Website

"What goes round must surely spin."

The eight towers of Castel del Monte, featuring spiral staircases, are circular. In Castel del Monte, to get where he is going, one must go around and around . . . like a phonograph record.

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