I live in an older (ugly) house in Vancouver. It’s a rental, and the landlords are really good about keeping the interior functional but not at all good about making it look nice. Apart from sending someone round to cut down the grass up front during the summer, nothing else is done. So the house (a grey clapboard looking narrow 3-story perched up on a little hill) presents a bland face to the world.

What I’d like to do is set someone I know free with some paints. I have no idea what ideas she’d come up with but I think I’d like a combination of the modes below.  The idea that a house should present a face to the world that says something about its dwellers seems deeply right to me. I wonder if I just paid for the supplies whether the landlords would get all huffy or they’d be like “wow, that’s cool.”  I mean really, the house is of less value than the land it sits on and I suspect that someday the house will get torn down and rebuilt for someone who is upwardly mobile in an deeply economic sense. And it occurs to me to wonder, if they painted their home with iconic representations of personhood, what would it look like?

I went to the museum in Victoria yesterday and I had a bit of a shock.

I’ve lived here for nearly four years now and this is the first time I’ve gone. Partly that’s because I’ve been to severally really great museums and so now I tend to measure all new museums against their measure and that is really not very fair.  I spent, for example, a lot of time as a child in one of the Carnegie-Mellon museums, and in the British Museum and to tell the truth they’re pretty hard to measure up to.  And while the Royal BC Museum is really wonderful in many ways, it is not a museum with anywhere near the breadth of the C-MM or the BM.

Still, I liked what was there. They represent, for example, various parts of BC history and environment in permanent dioramas that do a really good job of giving a visual sense of what they variously represent.  There is also, on another floor, a First Nations exhibit (also permanent) that provides story, examples of art, culture, etc.  Now I find exhibits of First Nations a bit difficult.  There’s the history for one thing  – imagine Turks staging historical displays of the Armenians, or the Taliban leadership building a loving memorial to women, or a Nazi museum to all things Jewish.  That may seem a bit harsh, but there you go, that’s feeling for you. But for the shock…
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…time off. This year at 4.5 days. Lovely.

Of course Christmas means more than that, having been raised in the Western Civilized World. All the lights and stuff are symbolic of the dark skies that will cycle into the spring for one thing, but now, in the world of city and work, Christmas has become about time to read.

It could be worse.

When I was still a child I held in my hands a slightly curved arc of yellowed bone that had small holes drilled into it. The holes swirled across the surface like a flattened, elongated S. It was a moon map that one of my relations had made long before my life began.  Keyed to a particular bit of horizon, the drilled holes marked the rising point of the moon as it wended its way over the course of a bit more than a month. I’ve never seen another, and have yet to make one myself, but I can still feel the bone in my hands. It made a huge impact on me, although at the time, and for decades after, I could not have said why. Even now, as I think I am beginning to understand it, its power over my imagination is still largely beyond my linguistic mind – as all good symbols should be.
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The CBC reported that there has been a drug bust. They estimate that the value of the bust is more than $1,000,000 but this isn’t the real news. As most of you probably know, the winter Olympics are being held here shortly. The real news is that apparently ecstasy dealers are excited about that too.

Advertising and its reach

Nope. It’s not a joke.

Today in 1838: Emma Wedgwood and Charles Darwin became engaged. That’s what is at the core of November 11 for me. It’s the thing that holds all the rest of the pieces together.

I have a day off work today. Ostensibly this is to honor those that are dead in war. All week last week, and for the first part of this week, there have been old men in uniform with paper-covered cans and red plastic poppies camping in the corners of work-a-day high-rises quietly asking for money and to be remembered.

Here are some of the things I remember.
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In Newsweek (I found it by way of Arts & Letters Daily) there is an article about Kandinsky called Kandinsky’s Influence on Painting is Far-Reaching. It’s a delight. Apart from the author’s insight there are 11 paintings loaded into the presentation.  My favourite was Elizabeth Murray’s “Open Drawer.”

What the author (Peter Plagens) says:

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The purpose of Western esoteric tradition, writes Versluis, is “the restoration of paradise, which could also be expressed as the ending of objectification, or division into self and other.” For this to occur, a change of consciousness (or rather a transcendance of consciousness into awareness) is required. In the Western tradition, this change is codified in text providing both the means and the method of personal transformation. The word (lettter, number, glyph, what have you) is sacred because it is both the method of transformation and the desired outcome.
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The New York Times has an article about the publication of Carl Jung’s Red Book. (My son sent me the link this morning.) It’s 10 pages of goodness and is essentially both a tracing of the rather tortuous route to publication and an examplar of the book and its ways in action.

It’s an expensive book — on Amazon its nearly $120. Still, here’s a look at a couple of the pages.

It’s a contemporary illuminated manuscript. I mean who could not buy that.

There are more pictures available on the Times site.

Project Gutenburg has a copy of Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Dr. Herbert Silberer. This famous rendition of the goal of alchemical practice has always been one of my favourite emblems of human desire and the western European narrative that tries to make sense of the experience of wanting is fascinating.

Silberer lived between 1882 and 1923. He was four years old when Emily Dickinson died. Dickinson had been influenced in her thinking by many things but one of them was Transcendentalism, or at least Emerson’s writings about it. Emerson was influenced by the various magical traditions of the west largely through Swedenborg (1688-1772) just as Ethan Allen Hitchcock (1798-1870) was. Although Hitchcock and Emerson focused on different things, one thing stayed the same, they were both obsessed by the notion of the transcendence of the individual human being, as was Dickinson in her own fashion.

Hitchcock was fascinated by alchemy. In fact the finest collection of early alchemical works in the United States was his. Hitchcock knew Emerson, and certainly Emily Dickenson read Emerson’s essays in her daily papers, and Emerson and Dickinson – arguably two of the most influential writers in American history. And of course there are the Great Awakenings, the first occuring between the (approximate years) 1730 and 1775 and the second between 1790 and 1840. The third rolled around only 10 years after that, between 1850 and 1900. I don’t think it can be underestimated how woven a magical world view is in American society and Letters.