Kaboodley-Doodley-Doo
Adam Blatner

(Revised, December 6, 2005):
Some of those mandala drawings I do can also be imagined to be alive, sort of multi-cellular pulsing living beings from another dimension. (Click here for more about the theory of my mandala-forms.)

A few years back, it occurred to me, or perhaps my "muse" and source of inspirations suggested it, that one of these mandala-form organic cartoon-doodles was also the core of a parallel auditory inspiration, a particularly flexible little melody, and this drawing-melody's name was the wording of an improvised and changing simple melody that goes, basically, "Kaboodley-doodley-do." What if the melody and drawing complex was yet another form of sprite, a totem-ally? Of course! 

A totem-ally is a spirit-guide. Those who have become acquainted with the Harry Potter series of books about magic and wizardry may remember that the students at the Hogwarts school for young wizards are invited to acquire special magical animals–and for beginners, they start with owls, rats, and toads, I believe. (Cats and the like are more complex and not acquired as "familiars" until wizards are initiated into higher grades than shown so far in this series–for young adults, really. Have you ever wondered what kinds of wizard education Harry Potter will get when he reaches the college-age years, or beyond, what a graduate doctoral program might entail?)  Shamans traditionally also have spirit allies, usually related to the kinds of animals in their environments, such as bears, eagles, crows, wolves, and the like.  Well, there can be all kinds of spirit guides, actually, including those that attend the work of artists, poets–they're called "muses," and also–and here's my point–anyone who invites them!

They are attracted by creativity, imagination, energizing the intuitive field, which connects with the creative subconscious, the active soul-making functions of the deep psyche.

Kaboodley-Doodley-Doo is a trans-dimensional geometro-heliozo-oidal, proto-zo-oidal sprite. Actually, although I've only become more aware of his name and true nature this (wonderful) year, he has been coming to and through me for over 20 years.

[I just wasn't ready to recognize that he was in a certain sense, alive, autonomous, working on me as much as I was (I thought) just making him up. Silly me, that's when I thought I was living my own life, doing it "my way" as Sinatra sings. Well, I was, but only to a modest extent. Far more, I keep discovering, I'm doing it "thy" way, according to the great insight that the Divine is working through me and all around me, through a whole mess of angels, sprites, and the synchronicity and grace of friends and loved ones. Anyway, back to Kaboodley-doodley-do:]

Many of my other elves, faeries, sprites, pixies, and suchlike have generally taken the forms of homunculi, small human-like beings, more in the tradition of our folklore. Not Kaboodley-doodely-do (who changes the spelling of his name as easily as his form). He appears generally as some form of mandala, a circular, roughly symmetrical diagram.

He really lives in a parallel dimension, one that partakes of several more dimensional levels than our own, so he can shape-shift readily. In our dimension, as he projects himself, Kaboodley-doodley-do is generally about 2½ inches high, although on occasion expanding to a basketball-sized presence, or shrinking to a bouncing pea.

Kaboodley, for short, he said, may be used in prosaic discourses on his essence. Kaboodley really is more of a five-dimensional being in his kaleidoscopic transformations. Exploring the inner structure of geometric potentials, as a young one, he resonated with Pythagorean insights, expressing them in his own dance-form, by becoming triangles, hexagons, and amplifying his dimensionality into the symmetrical solids of tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, isocahedron, dodecahedron, and beyond, into tesseract and other figures.

In the last few years, he's enjoyed interacting angles, that weave in and out around the center, not immediately joining up, but taking the eye on a trip. At other times, he generates Mayan-like glyphic forms that invite the participation of a colorist.

What he's doing in my life is gently inspiring my doodling. He is of the Doodle species, although he's quite open to noodle-ing, and other song-and word play-forms, too.

This year he reminded me, in the form of his name, that he's a cousin to the improvisational song-spirit of my mockingbird spirit ally, and that he, too, is an ally.

Please note, he suggests, that my use of the pronoun "he," which suggests the male gender, is a residue of my mid-20th Century upbringing, a linguistic convention in my culture that tended to refer to beings of the not-otherwise-gendered world as "he" as a default mode. Of course, Kaboodley is neither male or female, and those ideas are irrelevant to him.

Not completely, though. At times, he does a yin-yang, yab-yum, in-out, sexual-like allusion as part of his patterning, because such interlacing generative patterns are intrinsic to the core nature of the unfolding of existence in all dimensions. Of course, at times he hints at the permutations of more than duality, of triads, quadrads, and beyond.

Kaboodley, in his doodling, dances a dance of simplification and complexification, seeking to find the aesthetic balance. As I relax and he guides my pen–even if I'm working with a compass and straight edge–which may seem like the opposite of doodling, but it is and it isn't, which adds to its pleasure. There is a discovery of new possibilities in the given-ness of a six or seven sided figures.

Those of you who have been carefully following the evolution of my mandalaforms, noting the subtleties, have known that Kaboodley has moved from symmetry to asymmetry, and for several years improvised on the nonagram, the nine-sided figure, which has for him an optimal balance of complexity, permutation, etc. This year, though, he's expanded into the 11, 13, 14, and other more complex figures, dancing among their points in vibratory harmonics.

A bit of numerology, a bit of geometry, a bit of musicality, a bit of art, Kaboodley's point is that our creative spirit can find enjoyment in these tools as much as the poetry of words. Mandala-making, yantra forming, this, too, is a kind of dance, but instead of the whole body, he inspires the small muscles, eye-twinkle-hand coordination!  He invites the study of sacred geometry, the mysteries of the Golden Mean and Golden ratio,  .

Then there's his song: Kaboodley-doodley-do. You start repeating it, and all sorts of melodies begin to weave about it. He evokes little dancing tunes, harmonic elaborations, jazz improvisations. It's only a step away from "scat," that jazz sung semi-glossolalia. He giggles, if a geometric protozoic- amoebic non-material being could be imagined as giggling–and definitely you should stretch your imagination to intuit this–and reminds us that, of course, music and art and other modalities of creativity and spontaneity are up for him, too.

Kaboodley reminds me also that one's spirit guides need not be in the shape of either traditional animals or humanoids. They can draw from other realms and shapes, and in so doing, remind the human mind with which they are in resonance of the values of those realms–in his case, the mathematical, musical, artistic, and even the microscopic–because he brings in my associated interest in one-celled animals.

So, that's the story. For other explanations, go to other points in this virtual tour, take a look at some of the mandalas among my cartoons!


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