Walking in the City, Part 1

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Michel De Certeau was a Jesuit Priest and Scholar whose work on topics across history, sociology, philosophy, semiotics, theology and psychoanalysis helped define him as one of the most substantial and unique thinkers of his era. This essay, from his work ‘The Practice of Everyday Life’ published in 1974, is an attempt to individualize the concept of mass culture that Guy de Bord and the Situationists had established a decade earlier. He finds art in the unconscious action of living, and argues that though systems are placed upon us, humans cannot and will not act as a monolith but always as individuals, employing individual tactics of expression in every facet of life.

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Michel De Certeau November 26, 2024

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide - extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural figures of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.

Voyeurs or Walkers

To what erotics of knowledge does the ecstasy of reading such a cosmos belong? Having taken a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of 'seeing the whole', of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts. 

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp. One's body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which ·one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. 

Must one finally fall back into the dark space where crowds move back and forth, crowds that, though visible from on high, are themselves unable to see down below? An Icarian fall. On the 110th floor, a poster, sphinx-like, addresses an enigmatic message to the pedestrian who is for an instant transformed into a visionary: It's hard to be down when you're up.

The desire to see the city preceded the means of satisfying it. Medieval or Renaissance painters represented the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet enjoyed. This fiction already made the medieval spectator into a celestial eye. It created gods. Have things changed since technical procedures have organized an 'all-seeing power'? The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic drive haunts users of architectural productions by materializing today the utopia that yesterday was only painted. The 1370-foot-high tower that serves as a prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text. 

Is the immense texturology spread out before one's eyes anything more than a representation, an optical artefact? It is the analogue of the facsimile produced, through a projection that is a way of keeping aloof, by the space planner urbanist, city planner or cartographer. The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices. 

The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other's arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other.

Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible. Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the 'geometrical' or 'geographical' space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions. These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ('ways of operating'), to 'another spatiality' (an ‘anthropological', poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city.

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“This is the way in which the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.”

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From the Concept of the City to Urban Practices

The World Trade Center is only the most monumental figure of Western urban development. The atopia-utopia of optical knowledge has long had the ambition of surmounting and articulating the contradictions arising from urban agglomeration. It is a question of managing a growth of human agglomeration or accumulation. ‘The city is a huge monastery', said Erasmus. Perspective vision and prospective vision constitute the twofold projection of an opaque past and an uncertain future on to a surface that can be dealt with. They inaugurate (in the sixteenth century?) the transformation of the urban fact into the concept of a city. Long before the concept itself gives rise to a particular figure of history, it assumes that this fact can be dealt with as a unity determined by an urbanistic ratio. Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the veiy plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it.

An Operational Concept?

The 'city' founded by utopian and urbanistic discourse is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation. 

First, the production of its own space (un espace propre): rational organization must thus repress all the physical, mental and political pollutions that would compromise it; 

Second, the substitution of a nowhen, or of a synchronic system, for the indeterminable and stubborn resistances offered by traditions; univocal scientific strategies, made possible by the flattening out of all the data in a plane projection, must replace the tactics of users who take advantage of 'opportunities' and who, through these trap-events, these lapses in visibility, reproduce the opacities of history everywhere;

Third and finally, the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes's State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects - groups, associations, or individuals. 'The city', like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties.

Administration is combined with a process of elimination in this place organized by 'speculative' and classificatory operations. On the one hand, there is a differentiation and redistribution of the parts and functions of the city, as a result of inversions, displacements, accumulations, etc.; on the other there is a rejection of everything that is not capable of being dealt with in this way and so constitutes the 'waste products' of a functionalist administration (abnormality, deviance, illness, death, etc.). To be sure, progress allows an increasing number of these waste products to be reintroduced into administrative circuits and transforms even deficiencies (in health, security etc.) into ways of making the networks of order denser. But in reality, it repeatedly produces effects contrary to those at which it aims: the profit system generates a loss which, in the multiple forms of wretchedness and poverty outside the system and of waste inside it, constantly turns production into ‘expenditure'. Moreover, the rationalization of the city leads to its mythification in strategic discourses, which are calculations based on the hypothesis or the necessity of its destruction in order to arrive at a final decision. Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility - space itself - to be forgotten; space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology. This is the way in which the Concept-city functions; a place of transformations and appropriations, the object of various kinds of interference but also a subject that is constantly enriched by new attributes, it is simultaneously the machinery and the hero of modernity.

Today, whatever the avatars of this concept may have been, we have to acknowledge that if in discourse the city serves as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark for socio-economic and political strategies, urban life increasingly permits the re-emergence of the element that the urbanistic project excluded. The language of power is in itself 'urbanizing', but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power. The city becomes the dominant theme in political legends, but it is no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations. Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate; without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer.

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Michel de Certeau was a Jesuit Priest and Scholar who lived in Paris, France and contributed to innumerable fields of study. He was born in 1925 and died in 1986.

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Rays of Truth

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Ten of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Satiety, the Ten of Cups
Number: 10
Astrology: Mars in Pisces
Qabalah: Malkuth of He

Chris Gabriel November 23, 2024

The Ten of Cups is entirely satisfied, the ooze and gunk that had dirtied the cups before has been washed away, and now clean water overflows. This is the ‘over the rainbow’ - the storm has passed and we can appreciate the beauty. This is the flow state.

In Rider, we find a happy family, a man and wife rejoice as they look up to a rainbow, upon which ten cups are superimposed, and a brother and sister dance for joy. A little cottage sits a ways away, and a creek runs through the yard. This image is Dorothy’s yearning dream in the Wizard of Oz, the technicolor world  “heard of once in a lullaby”.

In Thoth, we have ten cups arranged as the Tree of Life. Clean water flows from the top cup downwards as a complex but perfectly functioning fountain. It sits atop a flat image of a red lotus. Astrologically this card is Mars in Pisces, where the force of war is made dreamy and psychic: the flow state.

In Marseille, we have 9 full, open cups below one large sealed cup. Qabalistically this is the Kingdom of the Queen. The Kingdom of the Queen is satiated.

The Ten of Cups is one of the most pleasant cards in tarot, alongside the Ten of Disks. While the Ten Disks are the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, this is the wonderful dreamland, the promised peace. This is the rainbow as a sign from God after the flood. 

It calls to mind William Wordsworth’s poem My Heart Leaps Up:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

As the flow state of Mars in Pisces, this card may indicate “oblique strategies”, obstacles that seemed immense will melt away through a strange solution.

When we pull this card, we may resolve lasting difficulties, find gnawing issues satisfied, or find joy in something dreamy.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Bjarke Ingels (Part 2)

Pauli and Jung’s Synchronicity

Illustration from Carl Jung’s ‘Liber Novus’ or ‘The Red Book’. 1917.

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Molly Hankins November 21, 2024

In 1945, the Viennese physicist Wolfgang Pauli won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum numbers and the structure of matter that predicted the existence of the neutrino 20 years before it was confirmed. This was 18 years after he started seeing Carl Jung for psychotherapy and dream analysis following his mother’s suicide, and 7 years before he and Jung would publish The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche exploring in great detail the concept of ‘synchronicity.’ It is a word intrinsically ties to Jung, who started using it in lectures a few years after meeting Pauli and published a book of the same name a year before his death, but the idea was brought to life in their  collaboration. 

In The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, synchronicity describes an acausal relationship between events that occur sequentially in linear time and appear meaningfully related but with no identifiable, underlying relationship. At the time, using physics as a lens to study metaphysics wasn’t controversial; Pauli’s friends and contemporaries like physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were working together to explore theories that would bridge understanding between esoteric philosophy, practice and science. 

The same year his treatise with Jung was published, Pauli spent the summer in Copenhagen with Bohr and Heisenberg having these very conversations. Heisenberg said that physicists needed to make every effort to grasp the meaning of old religions because, “… it quite obviously refers to a crucial aspect of reality.” This was before the chokehold of post-World War II and the Cold War thought made physics-funding the exclusive business of the war machine and condemned exploration of metaphysics to the realm of taboo. Fellow Austrian physicist and Tao of Physics author Fritjof Capra famously never received institutional funding again for his research after the book was published in 1975.

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“Synchronicity mirrors quantum entanglement, which occurs when two particles link together and influence each other's state no matter how far apart they are, because at the quantum level, the laws governing the interactions of space and time stop behaving according to the principle of causality.”

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Like so many revolutionary minds, Pauli was troubled and controversial, known for his alcoholism and quarrelsome nature. His mother’s suicide, which followed his father’s infidelity, devastated him, but ultimately pushed him to seek out Jung while they were both living in Zurich. Their relationship continued by letter, most famously documented in their published book of letters from 1932 to 1958, Atom and Archetype, named after a Pauli quote included in the collection. “As I regard physics and psychology as complementary types of examination,”, he wrote, “I am certain that the investigation of the psyche can throw light on the structure of the atom, just as the study of the atom can illuminate the structure of the psyche.” The core tenet of this thought is that both the human psyche and atom contain a central core, “a nucleus of self” surrounded by orbiting subatomic particles or “unconscious electrons” such as archetypes or complexes that influence conscious awareness. Atomic stability depends on the arrangement of the electrons, so their analogy espoused that stability of the psyche depended on the balance between aspects of the conscious and unconscious mind. 

Synchronicity was present in their daily lives too, as Pauli was known for disrupting experiments simply by being nearby. This became known to physicists as the ‘Pauli effect’ and describes the inexplicable disruption of technical equipment in the presence of certain people. When an experiment failed at University of Göttingen after a measuring device stopped working, the lab’s director James Franck wrote to Pauli joking that he could not have been the cause because he wasn’t physically present. In response Pauli revealed that he actually had been at the Göttingen rail station at the time of the failure. After a china vase fell and shattered for no discernible reason at a symposium in 1948 as he entered the meeting hall at Jung’s Institute, Pauli attempted to explain the phenomenon and its relationship to psychology in a new paper called ‘Background-Physics.’

While Pauli and Jung were never able to completely pin down the mechanism of synchronicity explored in their 30 year collaboration on the subject, they did conclude that the experience must somehow correlate to quantum entanglement. Synchronicity mirrors quantum entanglement, which occurs when two particles link together and influence each other's state no matter how far apart they are, because at the quantum level, the laws governing the interactions of space and time stop behaving according to the principle of causality.

And it makes sense that the phenomenon of synchronicity was explored and articulated by a psychologist and a physicist: the experience of it feels like a feedback loop between what’s going on in our minds and the physical world. As Jung himself said, “Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.” Quantum physics tells us that to observe reality is to essentially render it, and synchronicity leaves us with the feeling our perspective is undeniably influencing the experience being rendered. 

The study of the occult lies at the intersection of observation and creation of what’s rendering in the physical and how we can work with it. Synchronicity, as Terrence McKenna said, is the universe nodding at us as confirmation that we’re on the right track.

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Molly Hankins is a Neophyte + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum

Bjarke Ingles (Part 1)

Why Collect Digital Art? What Do You Believe? (Gen Art)

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Ian Rogers November 19, 2024

On the 14th of November, I received a text message from the Digital Art Curator Grida Hyewon Jang asking if I would mind giving an answer to three questions she had posted on X. She told me she planned to use the responses in a lecture she would be delivering to art students in Korea who are not particularly familiar with digital art. “Who knows – your comments might inspire a future artist!” she wrote.

That same day I was traveling from Paris, France to Marfa, Texas, for ArtBlocks annual community gathering (for more on ArtBlocks please read my earlier Tetragrammaton piece, Chimera: The Not-so-Still Life of Mpkoz). I had many thoughts bouncing around in my head that morning regarding digital art, a medium much maligned in the aftermath of FTX yet somehow still living and gaining momentum again. Grida’s request was a welcome opportunity to put those thoughts here on digital paper. I’m very happy for the opportunity to save these thoughts for posterity and present them to you, dear Tetragrammaton reader.I welcome your feedback and discussion.

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“Basquiat's work increases in value because the number of people who know the story increases while the supply does not. Luxury brands are trading on heritage and storytelling, not only products. Similarly, if you are wondering if the value of Cryptopunks will increase over the next 25 years you only need to ask: Will people still talk about them in 25 years?”

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Collectors: Why collect? What do you believe?

Modern, digital technology is a tool, created and wielded by humans, ostensibly under our control. Throughout history, the adoption of new technologies has driven profound shifts in society and this has been especially true when the technologies connect humans in new ways (shipping, telephony, trains, airplanes, internet, mobile connectivity) that lead younger generations to live differently than those who matured ahead of them.

Today, most of us are living in two worlds at once: physical and digital. We breathe in the physical world where we hug our children, eat, sleep, make love, run, ride skateboards, and play vinyl records. Often simultaneously, we email, DM, scroll, heart, create, share, shitpost and type with thumbs in a world of small-yet-powerful computers connected to one another via TCP/IP. We value the opinion of our network neighbors far more than our physical ones. We operate in dual worlds most of our waking moments, and share data with the cloud while we sleep. 

In my lifetime, as the five-year-old recipient of my brother's KISS vinyl, a teenage collector of VHS tapes about skateboarding and music, and MP3-trader-turned GM of Apple Music, I've lived through the digitization of all information. Obscure performances once mail-ordered from the classified ads in a newsprint magazine are now available to 5.52 billion Internet users with a simple keyword search on YouTube. 

Now, we have begun the digitization of all value. The "renting services on the Internet" business (internet-services business) has a current marketcap of about $4.75 trillion. The "owning digital value" business (cryptocurrency) is currently valued at $3.2 trillion. I believe the "owning digital value" marketcap will be at least an order of magnitude larger than this "renting digital services" industry within the next 25 years, and if Instagram hadn’t chickened out of their digital collectible market the lines would already be beginning to blur. The value of Internet services is centralized with the shareholders of companies whose product is the user. The marketcap of cryptocurrency will at least partially belong to the world's digital citizens held in permissionless digital self-custody.

The digitization of value, however, has a cold start problem. Asset value is relative to network effect -- it only exists if we all agree it does. Adoption curves to new technologies always takes time but the emerging Internet of Value has a different foe than the 1990s Internet of Information. In 1999, digital media was challenging an $895 billion traditional media market;today, the crypto industry is challenging a $9 trillion banking industry. Replacing 3% credit card surcharges is inevitable but will take a long time and digital ownership is much more than just finance. It's trustless proof of humanity, identity, and anything else.

www.beastieboys.com in December of 1998.

Music apps hold "early adoptor" status in online history. Many of the first CD-ROMs, Shareware, Web and mobile applications were applications to find and listen to music. "Self-publishing" music platform IUMA pre-dates the World Wide Web. CD Baby bridged digital and physical self-publishing ten years before Amazon started allowing authors to publish their own books. The iPhone wouldn't have come into existence without the success of the iPod.  There are many reasons music was the tip of the proverbial spear, among them relatively small file sizes, artist/album/track/genre being a remedial database challenge, and every college-age computer programmer loving and listening to music while they code. 

Similarly, Digital Art is the tip of the digital value spear. Someone creates something. Someone else likes it. They exchange value. It's the simplest form of a digital economy. Scale helps, but isn’t required. As with traditional art and luxury goods, the number of market participants can be small relative to value. It only took two bidders to drive the value of Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucien Freud to $142.2 million dollars. 

In the 1990s I was the conduit between the band Beastie Boys and their online fans. I posted tour dates, press articles, and photos from the stage. I kept the FAQ up to date and moderated the message board and IRC channel. We shared information about the band's not-for-profit and indie record label. As a "market" the fanbase was relatively small, but extremely passionate and dedicated. It felt as if the internet was made especially for communities like this to gather. I used to say my job was "to turn a casual listener into an obsessed fan".

Similarly today, the "obsessed fans of Kim Asendorf market" (who gather in a private Discord of which I am part) is very small. Yet if you enter you will find it is indeed a market with rising prices due to demand growing faster than supply. 

When talking about value people often get stuck trying to puzzle out intrinsic value instead of simply admitting the obvious fact: Storytelling + Time = Value. Basquiat's work increases in value because the number of people who know the story increases while the supply does not. Luxury brands are trading on heritage and storytelling, not only products. Similarly, if you are wondering if the value of Cryptopunks will increase over the next 25 years you only need to ask: Will people still talk about them in 25 years? If yes then you have Storytelling + Time, which amounts to more value. If everyone forgets about Cryptopunks and stops talking about them, the value will decline. Intrinsic value be damned.

I'm not arguing that everything digital has value any more than I'm arguing that every song on Spotify is worth hearing. But I believe digital art holds and will continue to hold "early adopter" status as online economies grow because the barriers to creating very small test markets are very low. 

Crypto Punks from higallery’s collection, paired with Egon Schiele sketches, c.1912.

A value exchange between a creator and a collector is a beautiful thing, especially relative to the business models of stealing and selling attention or speculating and gambling.

What’s the biggest difference from the traditional art scene?

I'm the least qualified to answer this question. In the traditional art world I rate as "museum-goer and collector of work from skateboarders I know". 

Which is exactly why I've enjoyed the digital art world so much.

I love peering into the mind of a creator through their output.

I love being a patron.

I love the opportunity to get to know or even assist an artist in some way.

I studied and practice computer science; I'm more qualified to appreciate a generative art piece than a painting.

The digital art world is small and self-selecting, full of creative, intelligent, and often downright weird people. Those still participating in 2024 believe in something most do not with enough conviction to weather being negatively judged by their peers. I remember being called a "gayboarder", laughed at for wearing bermuda shorts and growing long bangs. But I can’t imagine my life without skateboarding and the people I met through it. I'm very comfortable in a crowd of idealistic, thoughtful, creativity-loving outcasts. 

In 2022 my wife Hedvig and I were sitting around our dining table with FVCKRENDER and his wife, OSF, Farokh, and Raoul Pal. Raoul said, when talking about this moment in digital art and the digitization of value,  "We will always remember that this was the time when everyone knew each other." I love that time. I'm proud to have been a skateboarder long before it was allowed in the Olympics and a punk rock fan long before The Offspring. I learned much more building pieces of the Internet than I do today as one its 5.52 billion consumers. I guess my preferred moment in any market is the one decades before "traditional".

Thanks for asking me to reply. I’m sure this isn’t the response you were expecting. I guess it’s dangerous to ask an idealist “what do you believe?” I hope it’s useful anyway!

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Ian Rogers

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Film

Terry Reid - Silver White Light (Live at the Wight 1970) (Out of Print)

Matt Sweeney November 18, 2024

This raw “off the board” tape of British Rock’s finest singer features astonishing interplay between Reid and his band, and Terry’s ripping and flowing singing and guitar work is just staggering. The recording shows why Terry Reid was Aretha Franklin’s favorite rock singer. I wonder if this is the kind of band interplay Deadheads think they are hearing at Dead shows. Only one track from this can be heard online and that is a shame.

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Matt Sweeney is a record producer and the host of the popular music series “Guitar Moves”. He is a member of The Hard Quartet (debut album out Fall of 2024). Rick reached out to Matt Sweeney in 2005 after hearing his “Superwolf” album, and invited him to play on albums by Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Adele and many others. Follow Matt Sweeney via Instagram.

Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

The Seven of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Futility, the Seven of Swords
Number: 7
Astrology: Moon in Aquarius
Qabalah: Netzach of Vau

Chris Gabriel November 16, 2024

The Seven of Swords is a card lost in its own imagination. It symbolizes daydreaming, brainstorming and the material consequences that come of it. 

In Rider, we find a clownish thief, sneakily walking off with five swords. He dons a fez, fuzzy boots, and a polka dot tunic. He warily looks to see if anyone has seen him. In the distance is a circus, three tents, and a group of people.

In Thoth, we have a single solar sword being struck and chipped by 6 smaller planetary swords. This is the singular idea destroyed by a restless mind, countless thoughts erode the strength of one good idea. As the Moon in Aquarius, this is the mind set upon the Strange.

In Marseille, we have a singular sword in the midst of 6 intersected swords. Four flowers sit at the intersections. Qabalaistically, it is the Love of the Prince, and the Love of the Prince is Futile

As it is the Love of the Prince, consider this card as a comedy of errors: the Prince plots out exactly what he’s going to do to win his love, everything that can go wrong and, because of this way of thinking, he fails to even take the first step. It is the paralysis that comes from analysis.

The card suggests there is a sort of cowardice in daydreaming and planning. This is explicitly clear when we contrast this card with Valour, the Seven of Wands: It shows a man willing to fight thoughtlessly without the consideration even of victory. With Futility the fellow would never have picked up his sword in the first place. The foolish courage of Valour can win honor, but the intelligent cowardice of Futility gains nothing, not even experience. 

With Rider, we can see intelligence applied negatively and the scheme works out. The circus goers, lost in fantasy, lose their swords, the thief wins them through his scheming logic.

This card is both schemers and suckers - the good idea undone. 

This is of course how we learn. We get tricked, and then we become better so as not to get tricked again. In its highest form, Futility is the lived comedy of errors, the countless mistakes that form and shape our lives. As I have compared the suit of Swords to Hamlet, here we find his countless mistakes, his failed romance with Ophelia, but most importantly his overthinking and failure to act. This is Hamlet as “John-a-Dreams”.

When we pull this card we may be given a confusing situation that requires planning and brainstorming. We may hesitate and procrastinate and miss our chance. When we properly utilize this energy, we can pull off a well thought out scheme. Don’t overthink - think just enough and then act!

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Matthew McConaughey

Film

On The Nature of Visions

Before the First World War and the infliction of politics into the art movement, the Austro-German Expressionist artists were concerned with, above all else, The Spirit. Oskar Kokoschka was a painter and poet whose intensity of emotion bled through into everything he produced, finding harmony with Nature and God in the untamed, free, and innocent soul of the artist. He offered a way into the self through religious experience, and payed respect to dreams and imaginations as visions of the inner eye just as valuable as optical sight. The true artist, Kokoschka believed, saw no difference in value between perceptions of the inner and outer world. This essay was originally delivered as a lecture in Vienna in 1912, before being transcribed into essay form for an early Monograph of the artist.

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Oskar Kokoschka November 12, 2024

The state of awareness of visions is not one in which we are either remembering or perceiving. It is rather a level of consciousness at which we experience visions within ourselves. 

This experience cannot be fixed; for the vision is moving, an impression growing and becoming visual, imparting a power to the mind. It can be evoked but never defined. 

Yet the awareness of such imagery is a part of living. It is life selecting from the forms which flow towards it or refraining, at will. 

A life which derives its power from within itself will focus the perception of such images. And yet this free visualizing in itself - whether it is complete or hardly yet perceptible, or undefined in either space or time - this has its own power running through. The effect is such that the visions seem actually to modify one's consciousness, at least in respect of everything which their own form proposes as their pattern and significance. This change in oneself, which follows on the vision's penetration of one's very soul, produces the state of awareness, of expectancy. At the same time there is an outpouring of feeling into the image which becomes, as it were, the soul's plastic embodiment. This state of alertness of the mind or consciousness has, then, a waiting, receptive quality. It is like an unborn child, as yet unfelt even by the mother, to whom nothing of the outside world slips through. And yet whatever affects his mother, all that impresses her down to the slightest birthmark on the skin, all is implanted in him. As though he could use her eyes, the unborn receives through her his visual impressions, even while he is himself unseen. 

The life of the consciousness is boundless. It interpenetrates the world and is woven through all its imagery. Thus it shares those characteristics of living which our human existence can show. One tree left living in an arid land would carry in its seed the potency from whose roots all the forests of the earth might spring. So with ourselves; when we no longer inhabit our perceptions they do pot go out of existence; they continue as though with a power of their own, awaiting the focus of another consciousness. There is no more room for death; for though the vision disintegrates and scatters, it does so only to reform in another mode. 

“Bride of the Wind”. Oskar Kokoschka, 1913. Oil on Canvas.

Therefore we must harken closely to our inner voice. We must strive through the penumbra of words to the core within. 'The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.' And then the inner core breaks free - now feebly and now violently - from the words within which it dwells like a charm. 'It happened to me according to the Word”

If we will surrender our closed personalities, so full of tension, we are in a position to accept this magical principle of living, whether in thought, intuition, or in our relationships. For in fact we see every day beings who are absorbed in one another, whether in living or in teaching, aimless or with direction. So it is with every created thing, everything we can communicate, every constant in the flux of living; each one has its own principle which shapes it, keeps life in it, and maintains it in our consciousness. Thus it is preserved, like a rare species, from extinction. We may identify it with 'me' or 'you' according to our estimate of its scale or its infinity. For we set aside the self and personal existence as being fused into a larger experience. All that is required of us is to release control. Some part of ourselves will bring us into the unison. The inquiring spirit rises from stage to stage, until it encompasses the whole of Nature. All laws are left behind. One's soul is a reverberation of the universe. Then too, as I believe, one's perception reaches out towards the Word, towards awareness of the vision.

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“Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions.”

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As I said at first, this awareness of visions can never fully be described,  its history can never be delimited, for it is a part of life itself. Its essence is a flowing and a taking form. It is love, delighting to lodge itself in the mind. This adding of something to ourselves - we may accept it or let it pass; but as soon as we are ready it will come to us by impulse, from the very breathing of our life. An image will take shape for us suddenly, at the first look,  as the first cry of a newborn child emerging from its mother’s womb. 

Whatever the orientation of a life, its significance will depend on this ability to conceive the vision. Whether the image has a material or an immaterial character depends simply on the angle from which the flow of psychic energy is viewed, whether at ebb or flood. 

Illustration from “The Dreaming Boys”. Oskar Kokoschka, 1908. Photolithograph.

It is true that the consciousness is not exhaustively defined by these images moving, these impressions which grow and become visual, imparting a power to the mind which we can evoke at will. For of the forms which come into the consciousness some are chosen while others are excluded arbitrarily. 

But this awareness of visions which I endeavour to describe is the viewpoint of all life as though it were seen from some high place; it is like a ship which was plunged into the seas and flashes again as a winged thing in the air. 

Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions. 

My mind is the tomb of all those things which have ceased to be the true Hereafter into which they enter. So that at last nothing remains; all that is essential of them is their image within myself. The life goes out of them into that image as in the lamp the oil is drawn up through the wick for nourishing the flame. 

So each thing, as it communicates itself to me, loses its substance and passes into the hereafter which is my mind. I incorporate its image which I can evoke without the intermediacy of dreams. 'Whenever two or three are gathered together in My name, I am in their midst' [Matt. 18:20]. And, as though it could go out to men, my vision is maintained, fed, as the lamp is by its oil, from the abundance of their living. If I am asked to make all this plain and natural the things themselves must answer for me, as it were, bearing their own witness. For I have represented them, I haw taken their place and put on their semblance through my visions. It is the psyche which speaks. 

I search, inquire, and guess. And with what sudden eagerness must the lamp wick seek its nourishment, for the flame leaps before my eves as the oil feeds it. It is all my imagination, certainly, what I see there in the blaze. But if I have drawn something from the fire and you have missed it, well, I should like to hear from those whose eyes are still untouched. For is this not my vision? Without intent I draw from the outside world the semblance of things; but in this way I myself become part of the world's imaginings. Thus in everything imagination is simply that which is natural. It is nature, vision, life. 

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Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980) was an artist, poet, playwright, teacher and theorist from Austria. His writing and ideas on vision formed a basis for Vienesse Expressionism and brought a new focus on the role of the imagination in artworks.

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”