I’ve seen this a couple of times now and I still can’t get over how amazing these fellows’ movements are.

via Wimp

Alchemy & Mysticism The Hermetic Cabinet is by Alexander Roob. Roob is an artist, into line drawings and the author of a few things on art.  I suspect him of being a closet alchemist because of the relative obscurity of his text, but then, one buys this book for its art. It makes the price seem more than manageable and probably partly explains the book’s constant reissue and apparent continuing sales.

If you look at his art (“line drawings” link above) you’ll have a pretty good idea of what his prose is like. One the first page of his introduction (approximately 300 words) he talks about puzzle pictures (or hieroglyphics), Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth, the concept of the psychopompos, the “emerald tablet” Hermeneutics, alchemical literature, Jacob Böhme, Romanticism, German idealism and modern literature. In 300 w0rds.

I wonder if he draws that way, the line flowing out and around a variety of shapes to, finally, cohere into a recognizable shape?

The problem with text (as opposed to graphic or pictorial communication) is that text requires a different kind of order, one that builds a path for the reader to follow. It may (and should) offer views of distant prospects, and glimpses of future paths, but the bricks under one’s feet should never simply vanish. A really good writer can make one question their solidity, but to make them invisible? Vertigo is not conducive to successful navigation.

Nevertheless I do not regret the book’s purchase. The collection of art is wonderful and feels like a significant pictorial reference despite the fact that it only amounts to 191 small-format pages. Roob collects the images (many in glorious colour) into sections pertaining to the general alchemical subject: genesis, resurrection, philosophical tree, conjunctio, mandala, serpent.

The two pictures below are my favourite. They are from a section called “Aurora” and are out of 16th century London. They are why I bought the book.

Gorgeous.

via Wimp

via the Wooster Collective

I’m a fan of The Wooster Collective and check out their stuff regularly. The idea of making art a daily part of human experience by making it an integral part of our surroundings is something to which we should pay much more attention. Art has a way of lifting mindless experience – the day going by in a hasty blur – art is something that suddenly stops – that forces attention – a particular inhabited moment felt.

On Wooster today I found doppelgangr. If you go to his site you’ll see the rather nice banner and, on the far right of it, the dude with the balloons. That image seems to be his brand. There are some really nice pieces in the site but it doesn’t have that many pages yet and so it seems like he’s just getting started. He has talent though and he gets around – there are shots in Boston, Calgary and Vancouver. Well worth watching to see what he comes up with.

I find that I really like the idea that doppelgangr is booting around the city where I live thinking about what he can do to add a touch of whimsey and a pinch of “wake-up!” to my life. Go dude!

A recent (relatively) painter (now dead) named Eric Sloane produced the painting below. Apparently he had this idea that our 18th century rural predecessors had more awareness than we did. That seems rather silly on the surface of it although certainly a finer, more intimate knowledge of the environment probably would have an impact on things like memory, the capacity to notice subtle variation and other such things but, if true, the relevant factor wasn’t that these people lived in some golden age, because I betcha there were a bunch of dudes and dudettes during the 18th century with little or no “awareness” even as defined in the above linked “more awareness” article. Still, the point of Sloane’s philosophy seems to have been that the required resourcefulness of New England farmer folk, the required attention to detail and change over time, the necessary far more intimate knowledge of environmental resources than most have today, the capacity to utilize manual skill and think creatively about limited resources, all of these factors would have made some folk more aware than the norm today. These environmentally required skills taken together with the possible impact they would have had on memory, etc and it might be cobbled together into a supportable position of  ”more awareness.”

As an aside, apparently Eric had 6 wives. Interesting. I understand why he thought a lot about awareness.

These images are not representative of the totality of his work (which was huge). He also had a thing for barns and airplanes, but since I don’t have a thing for barns and airplanes and do have  a thing for clouds and sky, this is what you get.

Clouds over Marsh Land

High Tide

Sky City

Spring Sky

I am always unseated by the beauty of this kind of art.

via Wimp

Amelia Rosselli is new to me. She was an Italian poet who, being fundamentally tri-lingual, seems to have had an approach to language that had more to do with the spaces between words – the zip-zaps of those inter-lingual synapses – than most can manage. It makes her an evocative and interesting poet. Her inter-lingual power, I suspect, one of the reasons her stanzas feel as if they are starting mid story. Reading through the text, it is like a repeated sky-dive into the fray. It’s wonderful.

For example, here is one that is the best evocation of female aging within this Euro-American cultural space that I have ever read.

                    And the dawning will be
that string of pearls you wear always untied on your pearly
thinning neck, o! the
muffled bones that
press in the excited dazed laughter. And you
will wear bandages on those tendons
snapped by the fury of loving
joyfully.

Here is another, one that comes right after in the edition I am reading.

                         of your oh nothing is the world and
   nothing
said is your word, kept on its diagonal
axis by the steps of illiterates. And beyond any saying is
   the true
schoolbook. Summer smiles in a sweet rustle of soft
green leaves, but the darkness of its weaving I won't tell.
And my necklace of ideals (only the earth knew the shore
it lapped while men squeezed the flower) is a dream
more real than your candied light pressed in today's
   machine.

The way she breaks apart linguistic expectation allows for the strands that string the pearls to take a place in the construction of meaning.

the strings that bind and order, visible

How cool is that.

The second bit seems to me to speak of that silence I am reading about in Sara Maitland’s book. That same silence I so want for myself. So tomorrow on my break at work I will be reading poetry at the Starbucks across the street. One way to survive.

War Variations by Amelia Rosselli, translated from the Italian by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti

I saw this on The Wooster Collective. The development of this will be fun to watch.

What caught me about this is a memory the piece evokes – a circle of women that met on a full moon night in an “unpasturized” mountain hotspring. There was a moment that felt just like this sculpture, although – tell truth – we were not nearly so beautiful.

via Wooster Collective