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Sciborg_S_Patel
Good stuff MysticG!
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From the comic Invisibles:
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From the comic Invisibles:
. . . Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance — and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.
I know this is will seem silly at first, but I highly recommend Cartoon Network's Adventure Time:
It's a series taking place on a post-apocalyptic earth, usually about 10 minutes long so makes a nice little break when doing something else.
Over time a lot of topics discussed get mentioned - reincarnation, the limits of scientism, the nature of time & space, levels of reality accessible to souls, magick, etc.
Yeah! This show has some supremely strange esoteric things going on.
For me, the show was all about magick, religion, and free will. Magic Man, as quoted above, casts a spell upon these homunculi (using a perversion of Aleister Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law“) and Finn assumes a godlike role over them. There are definite allusions to masturbatory magic as a means of communicating with these tiny critters who are shown to be in an alternate dimension. Finn, their cruel horned god, apologizes for his behavior, accepting the blame for their tumultuous lives, and abandons them, promising never to return, and returning to them the gift of free will.
It was really heavy stuff that I will be chewing on for days to come.
If you’re not watching Adventure Time, you should be. At the very least, track down the latest episode, “All the Little People” and have a look. I think you’ll be very much surprised.
Wow, what a find.
Calvino's great!Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Some quotes:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
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'In Raissa, life is not happy. People wring their hands as they walk in the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the river and press their fists to the temples. In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins. At the workbenches where, every moment, you hit your finger with a hammer or prick it with a needle, or over the columns of figures all awry in the ledgers of merchants and bankers, or at the rows of empty glasses on the zinc counters of the wineshops, the bent heads at least conceal the general grim gaze. Inside the houses it is worse, and you do not have to enter to learn this: in the summer the windows resound with quarrels and broken dishes.
And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young serving maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says:
"Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence." '
In addition to Blavatsky, the Theosophical movement brought about other spiritual thinkers including Annie Besant and Rudolf Steiner – the latter of whom broke away from Theosophy to start his own spiritual school of thought, Anthroposophy. We know that Hilma af Klint was influenced by many of the names mentioned above. But it’s important to note that she was a medium for most of her life, and that she came to her geometric art style very intuitively: building up her own visual language that she believed was communicated to her directly via spirit guides through the duration of her life. She engaged in séances at a young age, and as a medium, channeled these visual messages into her work. I think the clearest lens through which to view Hilma af Klint’s work – as well as the other abstractionists working in parallel to her – is that it is the attempt of an artist to render the invisible visible.
First, I think it’s helpful to know that many of Burgher’s other pieces are made up of sigils – those charged, magical emblems you see in the center of this drawing. His work is often non-figurative, in other words, and operates with a symbol system reminiscent of Austin Osman Spare’s. In this drawing, however, Burgher inserts a figure (presumably himself) into the frame, so it becomes as much a narrative piece about the process of art-/magic-making as it is a spell in itself.
And I love the dichotomy he sets up here. To me, this is powerful depiction of the “as above, so below” principal that’s so crucial to occult thought. On the one hand, it is about ritual, magic, creation: all of these divine, immaterial ideas. On the other, it’s a very grounded picture. It shows the actual physical labor, day-to-day minutia, and quiet sacrifice that are involved in the process of creativity. The subject is naked, earthly, squatting, making something with his hands. We see coffee cans and a wine bottle and boombox: items that are mundane and of the modern age. I think it’s a truly tender moment, vulnerable and rare, wherein we see the magician/artist attempting to build something meaningful, and utilizing methods that are equal parts sacred and banal.