SubscribeDecember 25th, 2009
What Christmas means to me…
…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.
December 21st, 2009
Solstice, the moon and knowing where we are
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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December 11th, 2009
The olympics and the entrepreneurial spirit
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.
November 11th, 2009
Remembering November 11
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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September 27th, 2009
Kandinsky, art and perception
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:
September 22nd, 2009
Versluis, final post (for a while anyway)
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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September 21st, 2009
Carl Jung’s The Red Book
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.
August 3rd, 2009
Alchemy and American Letters
Project Gutenburg has a copy of Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts by Dr. Herbert Silberer. This famous rendition pictured here 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. The whole project of alchemy as it pertains to the human psyche 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, it seems as if the finest literary collection of early alchemical works in the United States was his. Hitchcock knew Emerson, and certainly Emily Dickenson had access to Emerson’s essays in her daily papers. 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.
July 29th, 2009
Trying to write and being stymied in the attempt
I have been writing all day. Trying to anyway. I have been working on a piece that talks about the Venus of Laussel bas-relief. The piece refuses to stop drifting off and I can’t seem to corral it. So finally in desperation I went into my files and copied all the bits of writing that talk about that carving or the person who created it. I found a lot. Can’t keep it all clear in my head so I created a little table with the titles and the first lines so I could see what issues were prompted by Laussel.
Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D is playing – the Allegro con spirito. I can feel myself like the music, a powerful current running but it’s skipping from instrument to instrument, like sparks of static jumping from roof top to roof top. A power that is beautiful, but not that coherent, and writing needs some form of coherence.
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July 27th, 2009
Associative meaning: Connotation
Whenever I hear the word “uprightness” or it is triggered by some other means, whether in the swinging stance of a walker, the moment by moment balance in movement or whether by the five pointed star (pentagram) on its “feet”, I get this little packet of resonant feeling. That “resonant feeling” is the signal that the connotations of things, words, activities is active. With language users, things are never simple and words are never conscribed by their denotative meaning. Words like “upright” carry multiple meanings and many of them will not be found at dictionary.com. For me, one of the connotations of “uprightness” has something to do with how human beings first came to walk bipedally.
Things, whether words or symbols, carry a (usually) hidden payload of meaning. The specific content of that “payload” is contingent: what books you read, who you meet, what culture you were born into, what films you see, what languages you have learnt to speak, what accidents occur around you, what superstitions you carry, what your parents told you was true. For example, someone I know says that for her, “uprightness” is mostly to do with morality; the word carries a sense of surety and an image of some human being standing tall in his or her goodness. Not for me. Paradoxically, the word triggers an image of a human male slightly crouched over while another postures, flinging his arms back, expanding his torso, his leg stance wide, exposing his groin to view. For this bit of hilarity, I blame Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.
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