plutonic
October
29
, 2015
I cracked open the book I borrowed from Norma last night (Pluto: New Horizons for a Lost Horizon, edited by Richard Grossinger, and including a contributor who lives around the corner in Troy) to a piece called "Pluto and the Death of God" by J.F. Martel. Seemed like a good positive place to start. The essay is also available here.
The author gives us the planet, the god, the Disney dog, plutonium, Nietzsche, Jung, Heraclitus, and the Grateful Dead all in a well-written romp. Here are a few quotes.
The discovery of Pluto coincides with the modern revelation of groundlessness. Synchronistically speaking, Pluto is the emissary of the death of God, expressing it through the death god’s return to mass consciousness.
As Carl Jung observes in the Red Book, if a new divinity, a new ground, should arise, it must inhere in the relative, that is to say the mysterious, the innately ambivalent: both/and as opposed to either/or. The pluralism that characterizes the spiritual scene today is not going away. We must somehow find our footing in groundlessness itself.
Modern humans are adrift in the unknowable, the most potent image of which may be the immeasurable vastness of outer space through which Planet Earth wafts like a wad of spit from the mouth of Cthulhu. It’s true that there is no shortage of religions, philosophical models, esoteric traditions, and spiritual practices for those who seek to make sense of the situation (myself included). However, it is impossible to entertain any one of these models of belief without being aware of the fact that it exists as one “option” among many. Whether the one I pick is the most adequate is anyone’s guess, especially when I realize that there are very smart people vouching for almost every position. We live in a metaphysically flat time, with all of these different models existing on the same theoretical plane.
It only makes sense that a planet named Pluto would turn out to be a dubious planet in the end: its namesake was the god who was not a god. In the ancient world Pluto was a deity without a temple, shrine, or cult, an invisible power dwelling apart from his Olympian siblings in the dank and lonely underworld. As James Hillman said, Pluto is the entity who has no substantial existence and yet in whose presence all things become manifest. Whether as planet, planetoid, or “swarm,” to borrow Richard Grossinger’s term, Pluto remains what it is: the outer limit of our groundless world. Our black horizon.
New Horizons is the name of the space capsule launched in January 2006 and arriving near Pluto in July 2015. The planet was discovered in 1930 and the Disney character originally called Rover was renamed to Pluto in 1931. In the introduction the editor Grossinger can also bend a sentence or two.
Though Pluto may be a small, insignificant planet, not even a full planetary body, it is a wide, deep archetype as well as a meta-planetary hyperobject, blending natural and curtural parameters in a tesseract beyond human deconstructability.
Most scientists also assume that, despite transient ideological and political hurdles, everything is going their way and in the long run they're on the winning team. Rarely examining the larger picture, the ontological background of their own paradigmns and algebraic structures, or the liturgical materialism of the carpet they have rolled over the cosmos, they ex officio condone macro-ecological pathologies that their interventions sow across the bipsphere. Unexamined technocracy plays a leading role in Earth's present crisis--and that includes rigidly narrow views of space, time, and matter.
On our way to visit our friends Ken and Carol and Peter and Pat in New Hampshire's White Mountains we routed ourselves through Bridgton, a sweet little Maine town with a friendly diner and a cool covered bridge. Each of the 16 tie-beams is made from a different native tree species. The bark was left on to help with identification. One of Melissa's naturalist mentors did an 
