Visionary Artists

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The Rifts of Art: Reclaiming Our Capacity to Be Affected by the Real

J.F. Martel is a writer and filmmaker living in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, published by North Atlantic Books. This episode is a companion to J.F.’s essay, “Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination," published in Metapsychosis.

In this conversation Marco and J.F. discuss:

- the paintings of Vermeer and Van Gogh
- What makes an artwork a “classic”
- art and artifice
- the Church of Art (as a “church without walls”)
- capitalism and alienation
- panpsychism
- the untimely and time-free (achronon)
- art as singularity
- art as nondual multiplicity
- art as direct transmission
- art as a question of “ultimate concern”
- how religion is made out of art
- the aesthetics of Catholicism
- art and communion with the Real
- the mystery of Being and the originary power of art
- art and terrorism
- the Wagnerian vision of art
- art and the power to shape culture
- art and the power to shape our intimate lives
- art as apolitical / amoral
- art and individuality
- using the machinery of capitalism to subvert the machine
- living in interesting times
 
Inner Worlds, Art and Sacred Plants

The worship of nature may unite us more than anything else and allow us to overcome doctrinal discrepancies that are relatively unimportant if considered from the perspective of human culture as a whole...

...Therianthropes have been a part of our species’ artistic endeavors ever since. They are found in the human-headed winged bulls and lions guarding Assyrian palaces. In ancient Egypt, we have Anubis, the jackal-headed god associated with the afterlife, Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of war and battle, and, of course, the sphinx, silently gazing forever toward the eastern horizon. In India, there is Ganesha, the elephant god, and Hanuman, the monkey god. Fauns, centaurs, mermaids and angels are familiar images from antiquity, as well as Satan, a powerful archetype of Christianity and Islam, depicted as a therianthrope with horns, tail and wings. We find therianthropes in Picassos’ Minotaur. They are also the main heroes of today’s blockbuster films such asSpiderman, The X-Men, and the Na’vi of planet Pandora, in Avatar.

Clearly, our compulsion to create myths explaining our place in the natural world and the nature of existence itself dates from ancient times. What is the origin of all these enigmatic figures depicted in such diverse geographical areas since the very beginning? Do they come from dreams? Have they emerged from altered states of consciousness, as proposed by Lewis-Williams (2002)? Are they manifestations of beings that exist either in other dimensions or in the minds of particular individuals with enough power or charisma to imprint them in future generations? This remains a great mystery. In any case, they are certainly not beings from ordinary reality. Subjectively, at least, our ancestors were deeply affected by such apparitions, and, as far as we know, most cultures through time and space have believed that human-animal figures play an important role in supernatural worlds...

...Once copies of Pablo’s paintings began to circulate, and even more so when the book was published, I witnessed a profound reaction among Peruvian Amazonians themselves, who immediately recognized that these paintings depicted worlds revealed by the ayahuasca experience. Except for a few illustrations by Peruvian artist Yando Ríos that appeared in a book onayahuasca by his wife, anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios (1972), to the best of my knowledge no artist had attempted to render these kinds of visions as works of art. Friends of mine who are anthropologists took the book to Amazonian indigenous communities and encountered similar reactions. The book also caused something of an international stir, with some people claiming this publication was partially responsible for the new global interest in ayahuasca.

In 1988, Pablo Amaringo and I created the Usko-Ayar Amazonian School of Painting in Pucallpa, a project to which I dedicated several years of my life, buying high- quality materials, photographing the art, and organizing exhibits in various countries. At its apex, the school had three hundred students, mostly between the ages of 10- 20. Amazonians seem to have extraordinary eidetic memories, and Pablo, a remarkable pedagogue, was able to transmit his own technique of projecting on paper what the students had seen in the forest. Although it might be difficult to believe, not a single sheet of high quality paper was ever wasted...

...What might the current interest in sacred Amerindian plants mean for the religious and spiritual life of today’s globalized world? It isn’t entirely clear. New religions that adopted ayahuasca as a sacrament under the names Santo Daime and Vegetal emerged in Acre and Rondônia (in the Brazilian Amazon) beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. These syncretic religious institutions incorporate Christianity, Afro-Brazilian religious elements, European esoteric traditions and Amazonian ideas. Undoubtedly, institutions of many kinds are now being developed that will have a future impact. Experiences with sacred plants (in the proper setting) are not incompatible with these worldviews or symbolic systems. Previously held cosmological ideas may even be reaffirmed: encounters with Jesus or Mary, Lord Shiva, Odin, Ogun, the Cosmic Serpent, the World Tree, or Mother Earth (Gaia) are common. Strassman (2014) finds powerful explanatory models in the mystic Jewish tradition for the DMT experience. And, certainly, as presented by Professor Richard DeMaris in this catalogue, visionary experiences abound in the Christian tradition.

Remarkably, regardless of their cultural background, many persons participating in ceremonies with the sacred plants discover a renewed interest in nature and environmental issues. This represents extremely important common ground. In this time of ecological calamity caused in part by the desacralization of nature, all world religions and spiritual traditions (regardless of ideological differences) urgently need to reconsider our relationship with the natural world. The worship of nature may unite us more than anything else and allow us to overcome doctrinal discrepancies that are relatively unimportant if considered from the perspective of human culture as a whole.

Our Western contemporary world is perhaps an historical exception in that our attention is constantly being drawn (in keeping with the devastating logic of unbridled consumerism) solely towards controlling and profiting from the external world. We have forgotten our own traditions that facilitate entering inner worlds during our waking hours, even though we have learned the benefits of meditation from the East. Too often, we pay no attention to our dreams, arranging our lives so that we are violently disconnected every morning from our inner world by all sorts of clocks and artifacts. Art saves us, which perhaps explains why it fascinates us. Art reminds us (sometimes explicitly, as in the case of the artists in this exhibition) of other realities, hidden in the inner recesses of our minds.
 
Fearless Artist: Remembering Giger

...His house was a fascinating place, as one would imagine, and he was in a fine mood, laughing and discussing his artwork, as well as inquiring about a mutual friend, filmmaker Dan O’Bannon (writer of Alien, director of Return of the Living Dead and The Resurrected), who was still alive at the time. There was more to that fantastic encounter, including a fine meal, bottles of wine, the telling of amusing anecdotes, etc., but much of it is of a private nature; it is something that Sunni and I will always cherish and hold dear in our hearts. What I can share, however, is that Giger was very pleased that I had brought along a recent picture I had taken of Dan. He kept looking at the image in astonishment and muttering, “Mein Gott. ” I could sense that he was traveling back in time and reliving those moments so many years ago on the closed set of what would become the classic horror/sci-fi film Alien.

During the creation of that movie, Dan was one of the few people who would approach Giger and visit with him when he was working. Giger told me that between his uncertain English and his personal intensity, he had the impression that people were afraid of him, and so he and Dan ended up having many heartfelt talks. Dan was something of an outsider as well, and I suspect that each man deeply appreciated the other’s companionship. They enjoyed discussing their contributions to the current film, of course, as well as their mutual lifelong fascination with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft. (Indeed, perhaps no other figures in history have had as much widespread impact on the popular legacy of the writer from Providence as O’Bannon and Giger had, with the possible exception of S. T. Joshi.)...
 
Tommie Kelly

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Sorry for the ads, don't know what's going on at the LA Times:

Christopher Hitchens: The essential Auden

Though he had a Marxist phase in the 1930s, forming the stellar center of a group that included Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, Auden came to detest politics and especially the politicization of literature. He was interested in improving the private life, and I have always found it impressive that though his homosexuality was evident in "Funeral Blues," it often cannot be deduced (as in the famous lines that begin "Lay your sleeping head, my love/Human on my faithless arm") from many of his other poems. For him, being gay was a form of love, not a form of sex. What he wrote was for humanity.

Another celebrated Auden line -- "We must love one another or die" -- was annexed without his permission and used in Lyndon Johnson's notorious attack ad on Barry Goldwater in 1964, showing a little girl counting petals as she mutates into a thermonuclear countdown. The hideous scene closes with Auden's words. He was so furious at this that he removed the poem from his canon. He was prone to excise things that had been exploited or distorted, which is why "1 September 1939" -- the poem from which the line is taken -- can still be hard to get hold of. The same is alas true of "Spain 1937" and of his verse obituary for W.B. Yeats in 1939 -- three utterly magnificent works in the space of three years.

It is absolutely worth hunting down the early anthologies that include these poems. "Spain 1937" is a near-perfect evocation of how his generation had felt about the Spanish Civil War and about Spain itself ("that arid square/that fragment nipped off from hot Africa/soldered so crudely to inventive Europe").

The obituary for Yeats ("Earth receive an honored guest/William Yeats is laid to rest," he wrote) is a model of how to revere a writer with whom you have violent political disagreements.
 
The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Emily Dickinson (1830–86)
 
Borges and God: Discussion between Jorge Luis Borges and Osvaldo Ferrari

In March 1984, Jorge Luis Borges began a series of radio “dialogues” with the Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari. Forty-five of them have just been translated into English for the first time by Jason Wilson and will be published this month by Seagull Books as Conversations, Volume 1. What follows is Borges’s conversation with Ferrari about the existence of God.

—The Editors

...Borges: Well, I think that it’s enough to glance at the universe to note that justice certainly does not rule. I recall a line from Almafuerte: “With delicate art, I spread a caress on every reptile, I did not think justice was necessary when pain rules everywhere.” In another line, he says, “All I ask is justice / but better to ask for nothing.” Already to ask for justice is to ask for much, too much.

Ferrari: Yet, you also recognize in the world the existence of happiness—in a library, perhaps, but other kinds of happiness too.

Borges: That, yes, of course. I would say that happiness can be momentary but that it also happens frequently, it can happen, for instance, even in our dialogue.

Ferrari: There’s another significant impact—the impact that prompts most poets to hold on to the notion of another world, a world apart from this one. Because there’s always something in the poet’s words that seems to send us beyond what is mentioned in the writing.

Borges: Yes, but that beyond is perhaps projected by the writing or by the emotions that lead to the writing. That is, that other world is, perhaps, a beautiful human invention.

Ferrari: But we could say that in all poetry there’s an approximation to something else, beyond the words and the subject matter.

Borges: Well, language does not match up to the complexity of things. I think that the philosopher Whitehead talks of the paradox of the perfect dictionary, that is, the idea of supposing that all the words that a dictionary registers exhaust reality. Chesterton also wrote about this, saying that it is absurd to suppose that all the nuances of human consciousness, which are more vast than a jungle, can be contained in a mechanical system of grunts which would be, in this case, the words spoken by a stockbroker. That’s absurd and yet people talk of a perfect language, of a rich language, but in comparison to our consciousness language is very poor. I think that somewhere Stevenson says that what happens in ten minutes exceeds all Shakespeare’s vocabulary [laughs]. I believe it’s the same idea.

Ferrari: Throughout your writing, you have referred to what’s divine, including the supernatural. You have also accepted, in one of our dialogues, Murena’s words about beauty being able to transmit an otherworldly truth. That is, you seem to admit that transcendence exists but you don’t call it God.

Borges: I do think that it’s safer not to call it God. If we call it God, then we are thinking of an individual and that individual is mysteriously three, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, which to me is quite inconceivable. On the other hand, if we employ other words, perhaps less precise or vivid ones, then we could approach the truth, if an approach to truth is possible. Or it could be something that we ignore.

Ferrari: That’s exactly why one could think that you do not name God. Even though you believe in the perception of another reality, besides the everyday one.

Borges: I am unsure if this reality is an everyday one. We don’t know if the universe belongs to a realist genre or a fantastic one, because if, as idealists believe, everything is a dream, then what we call reality is essentially oneiric. Schopenhauer spoke of the “essence” (oneiric sounds pedantic, doesn’t it?). Let’s say, “The dream-like essence of life.” Yes, because “oneiric” suggests something sad—like psychoanalysis [laughs]...
 
Set Adrift: Beneath the Surface of P.M. Dawn

"Today, P.M. Dawn exists as a faded memory for most music fans, if they’re remembered at all. But Attrell Cordes made songs like nothing that came before. Beautiful, sweeping melodies paired with lyrics of regret, remorse, heartache and profound loss. And then there were those surreal, recurring images of water."


 
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"Image of a Siddha: the soul who attains Moksa; although the Siddhas (the liberated beings) are formless and without a body, this is how the Jain temples often depict the Siddhas."

-Wikipedia
 
Been reading the Berserk manga (Dark Horse Comics' translation), originally written by Kentaro Miura. Actually has a lot to do with the paranormal, gnosticism, the thinning Veil...

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Cross posting an interview with Alan Moore:
https://arthurmag.com/2007/05/10/1815/
Crowley lamented that he wasn’t a better visual artist. I went to an exhibition of his and well, some of the pictures work just because they’ve got such a strange color sense, but…it has to be said that the main item of interest was that they were by Crowley. But yes, there’s that whole kind of crowd really: Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Harry Smith. And if you start looking beyond the confines of self-declared magicians, then it becomes increasingly difficult to find an artist who wasn’t in some way inspired either by an occult organization or an occult school of thought or by some personal vision.
But you don’t have to look as far as the Surrealists, really. With all of those neat rectangular boxes, you’d think Mondrian would be rational and mathematical and as far away from the Occult as you could get. But Mondrian was a Theosophist.
Picasso spent his youth pretty well immersed in hashish and occultism. Picasso’s imagery where you’ve got people with both eyes on one side of their face is actually an attempt to, it’s almost like trying to create, to approximate, a fourth dimensional view of a person.
 
Alan Moore: The art of magic

"In the forthcoming Moon & Serpent Bumper Book of Magic we argue that consciousness, preceded by language, preceded by representation (and thus art) were all phenomena arising at around the same momentous juncture of human development and that all of these would be perceived as magic, an umbrella term encompassing the radical new concepts born of our discovery of our new, inner world.

This allows us to offer a definition of magic as a ‘purposeful engagement with the phenomena and possibilities of consciousness’. We then go on to argue that originally, all of human thought and culture was subsumed within the magic worldview, with the advent of urban society and the rise of specialised professionals gradually stripping magic of its social functions.
...
To finally answer your question, one of the many things that magic offers is a plausible and, I believe, rational worldview in which science, psychology and all the other fields mentioned above are joined up and connected meaningfully into the all-embracing, one-stop science of existence they first emerged from.
...
t is my position that art, language, consciousness and magic are all aspects of the same phenomenon. With art and magic seen as almost wholly interchangeable, the realm of the imagination becomes crucial to both practices."
 
The Omnistructure in Decay

An Omnistructure because it is not just a structure filling reality, but a structure that is reality. A reality that can only exist as structure, in the same way that ours is expressed as space and form.

Here are worlds the size of Nebulae, grown, not in tight massed spheres and gravity wells, but like ferns or fractal fungi infiltrating a mass. Storm-wrapped tendril worlds with neutronium cores. Worlds as slender as mycelium, all linked, receiving their light from the transient civilisation of intelligent nomadic suns. Primary trunks of world with surfaces like gas giants and storms as large as small galaxies.

Entire world-equivalent biospheres spending their existence transiting and slowly evolving. Sometimes running into each other, resulting in titanic conflicts and strange syntheses.

Gravatically balanced structures of form. Vast tendrils of world.

Some worlds with hollow cores like old trees, some wormed within by passages and cells, some carrying lightless life inside.

Some oceanic, like branches of water. Some carrying vast globular oceans at their tips. Sometimes these oceans have frozen surfaces and pressure-ice cores. Sometimes they break free and drift, are caught and smeared through the Lagrange zones causing disaster and opportunity.

Sadly, all the world curls have fallen into decay. They are blackened and dying, though the diamond highways sing.

The highways are cylinders the thickness of stars, transparent, flexible diamond lattice environments, home to their own intelligence yet transmitting a blood supply of light.

At the nexus-points of the intersecting highways, like the cores of neural cells, are the Photo-Arcologies , gigantic hives of living suns that take on strange insectoid forms. Between the worlds the suns are harmonies of light like freight trains spiralling round the helices inside the diamond highways.

Yet without the responsive song of life from the the world fronds, the arcologies themselves grow silent, the highways are failing, slowly but inevitably being cut off. Eventually the culture of the Omnistructure will retreat, becoming only a memory. In the star-cemeteries deep in the centres of the Photo-Arcologies, black-hole tendrils and white dwarf root-stubs animate and attempt escape.

The space between the highways and the mycellium of world is divided into cells of void, like the cells of a leaf, each similar but distinct. At the border of each cause/effect lipid layer, time hesitates for a moment to confirm.

Lagrange points within the cellular voids play host to their own strange zero-g civilisations. High altitude web cities grow like gigantic highway shacks along the easy-to-transport zero-g lines between the world-roots and the suns.

Lagrange points generally lie at the borders of void cells and have slightly different realities depending on which side you are on. Multi-cell Lagrange strands are complex, with many realities involved. They say if you agree something there you must agree it four times, once between all possible combination of yourself and the other party.
 
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