Rivering (Museum of Suspense IV)
Ale Nodarse October 16, 2025
To study rivers is to adopt another life…
Charles François Daubigny, River Landscape with Moon. c. 1860, Leopold Museum, Vienna.
Ale Nodarse October 16, 2025
“To study rivers is to adopt another life.”
A white orb glistens. A sky swells forth. Daubs of orange-pink glow incandescent before falling into a warm blue — falling further again into a muted violet. And the sky folds on itself, so that the rivershore appears as an isthmus, a dark ground set between the sky and the sky’s double. The painting, Charles François Daubigny’s River Landscape with Moon (c. 1856–66, Leopold Museum), is a lesson in reflection.
Charles-François Daubigny, Night Journey. 1862.
The artwork is a study, among many, which Daubigny produced of the River Oise during the 1850s and 60s. As with most studies, it implies speed. The brush moves quickly, oil paint crossing atop the wooden panel as the horsehair bristles make themselves seen. Paint structures its own topography. In this case, the first ground layer of cream-colored oil remains visible beneath the secondary, darker tones. The effect (which a screen fails to capture) proves luminous. The light of the moon suffuses the landscape. It emerges as if from below, flickering through and under everything.
Daubigny knew the river he painted well. He had chosen to live and to paint upon it by setting himself within a floating studio called Le Botin or “The Little Box.” While the works within the Museum of Suspense have dwelt on the suspended figure in painting, Daubigny placed the artist and studio quite literally adrift –– and made a series of etchings to “document” the novelty of such a transformation. In one, the Night Voyage, Daubigny views himself and his boat from above, his little box a luminous if isolated flicker. (In reality, Daubigny was often accompanied by family and by fellow painters. Monet, too, would set up a floating studio.) In another scene, The Boat Studio, the box is amplified (fig. 3). The view to the landscape at the picture’s center emerges as a painting in miniature, while finished artworks sit to the painter’s right. They are the products of the little box and the river upon which it floats. The undated River Landscape with Moon most likely numbers among these.
Charles-François Daubigny, The Boat Studio. 1861.
On the etched “picture” closest to us, Daubigny adds a single word along the lower right corner -“Realism” (realisme), . This word was to insist on truth. This is how it was. It was also to insist on possibility: a subtle testimony to all that might emerge, beautiful and strange, when suspense took its place as a fixed condition rather than a momentary exception. The river suspended and estranged the painter, who willed the familiar unfamiliar and set it near at hand.
Today, we are familiar both with the moon and with the blue orb viewed from its horizon. Ventures to outer space, both scientific and commercial,) continue to insist and to capitalize upon the power of such a vantage. While a view from the moon back to earth may no doubt be a life-changing thing, Daubigny’s study reminds us that, when it comes to wonder, the river may suffice. Something of the moon is already, really, there. And there is another life.
¹ Jim Harrison, The Theory and Practice of Rivers (Livingston, 1989), 24.
²Bonnie Grad, “Le Voyage en Bateau: Daubigny’s Visual Diary of River Life,” The Print Collector’s Newsletter (1980): 123–27.
³See Edouard Manet’s painting of Monet Painting in His Studio Boat (1874; Neue Pinakothek, Munich). To an extent, Manet revealed the artist’s isolation and the distance between artist and subject, in Monet’s (and Daubigny’s) works, as exaggerated. See Harmon Siegel, Painting with Monet (Princeton University Press, 2024), 218–221.
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
Egyptian Magic and The Seven Octaves of Vibration
Molly Hankins October 9, 2025
The ancient Egyptian deity known as Ptah embodies the concept of a primary creator as the source of all…
Molly Hankins October 9, 2025
The ancient Egyptian deity known as Ptah embodies the concept of a primary creator as the source of all there is. When Hungarian author, mystic and yoga teacher Elisabeth Haich began remembering her past lives in Egypt as an initiate and priestess, she attributed her devotion directly to Ptah, who came to her in the Earthly form of Ptahhotep. In her 1994 book Initiation, Haich describes one of these past lives growing up as a daughter of the Pharaoh Atothis, and niece of a high priest in the mystery school of Ra, Ptahhotep. She sought initiation as a young girl, but her uncle Ptahhotep insisted she was not ready. After she asked him to be initiated for a third time, Ptahhotep had to give her permission because, according to rules governing initiates, asking three times for initiation is a sign that it’s a requirement for her soul. Knowing she lacked sufficient life experience in that incarnation to safely begin the process, Ptahhotep began teaching her the universal truths which she describes throughout Initiation.
The basis of these universal truths is the divine law of nature. Ptahhotep explains this using what he calls the seven octaves of vibration, through which life expresses itself in the material world. Like most spiritual belief systems, the ancient Egyptians believed the world of form was a small piece of the far greater expression of the spiritual world. “The fact that the creative force manifests itself on each and every level of innumerable possibilities means there are countless different wavelengths, wave forms and frequencies,” Haich tells us, recounting the words of Ptahhotep. “And as long as we are in the body, with its limited perceptive ability, we can perceive only a certain number of these wave forms because our organs of sense are limited. Whether some form of vibration appears to us as ‘immaterial energy’ or as solid ‘matter’ depends upon our own idea and the impression of something which is basically nothing but movement, vibration or frequency.”
According to Haich, Ptahhotep claimed that shorter energy wave forms correspond with matter, while longer wave forms with ideas and the divine creative force. This is paradoxical because in the physical world of form, shorter wave lengths correspond with a higher rate of vibration, which is traditionally associated with divinity rather than physical matter. However, only when we really consider this paradox do we begin to close in on universal truth beyond the material world of duality we currently live in. If we imagine the occult axiom of, “As above so below and as below so above,” as being akin to a mirror, the reversal of how shorter and longer wavelengths express themselves in the material vs. the spiritual world begins to make more sense. The source of these vibrations, known as God or The Creator, are radiated into our world by our sun, and Ra is the sacred sun god of Egypt. Explaining these seven octaves of vibration, Ptahhotep shared how all divine energy radiates in all directions from a center, such as the sun, to take form in different wavelengths.
“In the material world, we are living amidst the vibrations that emanate from the spiritual into the physical, and developing our consciousness so as to be able to cause effect is at the heart of magical practice.”
The chemical composition of matter determines the vibrations it can hold. In communicating this information, Ptahhotep was preparing Haich’s past life body to be able to hold the vibration of initiation. Receiving and integrating this knowledge begins the alchemical process of preparing any initiate for the “higher octaves of consciousness” that allow us to begin practicing magic, defined as being able to cause change according to will. Magic is far more efficient and effective when practitioners can hold and transmit a wider range of vibrational states. Everything radiates the vibration it embodies from its center, and that vibration corresponds to its state of consciousness. The first four octaves of vibration correspond with matter, vegetation, animal and human life, while the last three, accessible to humans who take responsibility for their vibrational state, correspond with personal intuition, embodiment of wisdom and universal love, and finally reunion with the mind of God. All seven of these states are available to us while we’re in our human form, according to Ptahhotep.
“Matter, the very lowest degree of consciousness, manifests itself only through contraction, cooling off and hardening. The plant manifests itself on two levels, the material level and the level of force - vegetative force - that gives life to it,” he explained. “The animal manifests three forces, the material, the vegetative and the animal. It has a body, it seeks out its food, eats and digests and is conscious on the animal level: it has emotions, instincts, urges, feelings, sympathy, antipathy and desires. The animal is conscious in the third developmental stage, only one degree lower than man. The average man stands one octave of vibration higher, he is conscious on the mental level. He has intellect and the ability to think. But at the same time he manifests the three other levels,” writes Haich quoting Ptahhotep.
At the fifth octave of consciousness development, man makes a great leap as he enters the plane of causality. In the material world, we are living amidst the vibrations that emanate from the spiritual into the physical, and developing our consciousness so as to be able to cause effect is at the heart of magical practice. The sixth octave is where God’s divine love radiates from, and as we begin to access it, we begin to integrate the wisdom of universal love and bring it into our daily lives. The seventh octave is described as the completely conscious God-man who becomes a center radiating purely divine, creative energy. Ptahhotep says, “All other forms of revelation manifest only in transformed vibrations, only part of God. A God-man is a person who manifests God - his own divine self - completely and perfectly through a perfect consciousness; one who experiences and radiates the divine creative forces in their primordial, untransformed vibrations and frequencies.”
Only those who evolve their consciousness to the level of the seventh octave can make conscious use of these primordial, divine waves of energy. Developing our physical bodies and consciousness to be able to hold these higher octaves makes up much of any occult initiate’s work. Ptahhotep reminds us that while the bodies of different beings in the world of form may look the same, they differ chemically based on the level of consciousness development of the soul embodied within that form. When undertaking any occult work, particularly without the direction of a teacher or established magical order, it’s essential to remember that it takes time and diligence to evolve our consciousness to be able to hold the energies of higher octaves of being. Divine frequencies can shock and even harm our physical, mental and emotional bodies, so a slow and steady approach is always recommended.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
Holy Water (1977)
Joan Didion October 7, 2025
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is…
Opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1913.
For all of the complicated politics around water in the American West, Didion focuses more on its physical movement — through aqueducts, dams, pumps, and reservoirs — and the psychological hold it exerts. Written first for ‘Esquire’ magazine in 1977 and then featured in her seminal collection ‘The White Album’ two years later, this is a deeply personal, meditative study of survival, of California, and of the overlooked infrastructures that make life possible. She is gleefully reverent when describing the hydraulic systems, seeing in them a lifeline, and a testament to the human drive to survive, to conquer, and to find control in a world of dust, drought, fire, and chaos. Water, for Didion, shapes not just landscapes but identities.
Joan Didion October 7, 2025
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons.
As it happens my own reverence for water has always taken the form of this constant meditation upon where the water is, of an obsessive interest not in the politics of water but in the waterworks themselves, in the movement of water through aqueducts and siphons and pumps and forebays and afterbays and weirs and drains, in plumbing on the grand scale. I know the data on water projects I will never see. I know the difficulty Kaiser had closing the last two sluiceway gates on the Gun Dam in Venezuela. I keep watch on evaporation behind the Aswan in Egypt. I can put myself to sleep imagining the water dropping a thousand feet into the turbines at Churchill Falls in Labrador. If the Churchill Falls Project fails to materialize, I fall back on waterworks closer at hand - the tailrace at Hoover on the Colorado, the surge tank in the Tehachapi Mountains that receives California Aqueduct water pumped higher than water has ever been pumped before - and finally I replay a morning when I was seventeen years old and caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River near Sacramento. I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.
I suppose it was partly the memory of that delirium that led me to visit, one summer morning in Sacramento, the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project. Actually so much water is moved around California by so many different agencies that maybe only the movers themselves know on any given day whose water is where, but to get a general picture it is necessary only to remember that Los Angeles moves some of it, San Francisco moves some of it, the Bureau of Reclamation's Central Valley Project moves some of it, and the California State Water Project moves most of the rest of it, moves a vast amount of it, moves more water farther than has ever been moved anywhere. They collect this water up in the granite keeps of the Sierra Nevada and they store roughly a trillion gallons of it behind the Oroville Dam and every morning, down at the Project's headquarters in Sacramento, they decide how much of their water they want to move the next day.
They make this morning decision according to supply and demand, which is simple in theory but rather more complicated in practice. In theory each of the Project's five field divisions - the Oroville, the Delta, the San Luis, the San Joaquin, and the Southern divisions - places a call to headquarters before nine AM. and tells the dispatchers how much water is needed by its local water contractors, who have in turn based their morning estimates on orders from growers and other big users. A schedule is made. The gages open and close according to schedule. The water flows south and the deliveries are made. In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418. In practice it might be necessary to hold large flows of water for power production, or to flush out encroaching salinity in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the most ecologically sensitive point on the system. In practice a sudden rain might obviate the need for a delivery when that delivery is already on its way.
In practice what is being delivered here is an enormous volume of water, not quarts of milk or spools of thread, and it takes two days to move such a delivery down through Oroville into the Delta, which is the great pooling place for California water and has been for some years alive with electronic sensors and telemetering equipment and men blocking channels and diverting flows and shoveling fish away from the pumps. It takes perhaps another six days to move this same water down the California Aqueduct from the Delta to the Tehachapi and put it over the hill to Southern California.
"Putting some over the hill" is what they say around the Project Operations Control Center when they want to indicate that they are pumping Aqueduct water from the floor of the San Joaquin Valley up and over the Tehachapi Mountains. "Pulling it down" is what they say when they want to indicate that they are lowering a water level somewhere in the system. They can put some over the hill by remote control from this room in Sacramento with its Univac and its big board and its flashing lights. They can pull down a pool in the San Joaquin by remote control from this room in Sacramento with its locked doors and its ringing alarms and its constant printouts of data from sensors out there in the water itself. From this room in Sacramento the whole system takes on the aspect of a perfect three-billion-dollar hydraulic toy, and in certain ways it is. "LET'S START DRAINING QUAIL AT 12:00" was the 10:51 A.M. entry on the electronically recorded communications log the day I visited the Operations Control Center. "Quail" is a reservoir in Los Angeles County with a gross capacity of 1,636,018,000 gallons. "OK" was the response recorded in the log. I knew at that moment that I had missed the only vocation for which I had any instinctive affinity: I wanted to drain Quail myself.
“This is a California parable, but a true one.”
Not many people I know carry their end of the conversation when I want to talk about water deliveries, even when I stress that these deliveries affect their lives, indirectly, every day. "Indirectly" is not quite enough for most people I know. This morning, however, several people I know were affected not "indirectly" but "directly" by the way the water moves. They had been in New Mexico shooting a picture, one sequence of which required a river deep enough to sink a truck, the kind with a cab and a trailer and fifty or sixty wheels. It so happened that no river near the New Mexico location was running that deep this year. The production was therefore moved today to Needles, California, where the Colorado River normally runs, depending upon releases from Davis Dam, eighteen to twenty-five feet deep. Now. Follow this closely: Yesterday we had a freak tropical storm in Southern California, two inches of rain in a normally dry month, and because this rain flooded the fields and provided more irrigation than any grower could possibly want for several days, no water was ordered from Davis Dam.
No orders, no releases.
Supply and demand.
As a result the Colorado was running only seven feet deep past Needles today, Sam Peckinpah's" desire for eighteen feet of water in which to sink a truck not being the kind of demand anyone at Davis Dam is geared to meet. The production closed down for the weekend. Shooting will resume Tuesday, providing some grower orders water and the agencies controlling the Colorado release it. Meanwhile many gaffers, best boys, cameramen, assistant directors, script supervisors, stunt drivers, and maybe even Sam Peckinpah are waiting out the weekend in Needles, where it is often 110 degrees at five P.M. and hard to get dinner after eight. This is a California parable, but a true one.
I have always wanted a swimming pool, and never had one. When it became generally known a year or so ago that California was suffering severe drought, many people in water-rich parts of the country seemed obscurely gratified, and made frequent reference to Californians having to brick up their swimming pools. In fact a swimming pool requires, once it has been filled and the filter has begun its process of cleaning and recirculating the water, virtually no water, but the symbolic content of swimming pools has always been interesting: A pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recently In my memory California summers were characterized by the coughing in the pipes that meant the well was dry, and California winters by all-night watches on rivers about to crest, by sandbagging, by dynamite on the levees, and flooding on the first floor. Even now the place is not all that hospitable to extensive settlement. As I write a fire has been burning out of control for two weeks in the ranges behind the Big Sur coast. Flash floods last night wiped out all major roads into Imperial County. I noticed this morning a hairline crack in a living-room tile from last week's earthquake, a 4.4 I never felt. In the part of California where I now live aridity is the single most prominent feature of the climate, and I am not pleased to see, this year, cactus spreading wild to the sea. There will be days this winter when the humidity will drop to ten, seven, four. Tumbleweed will blow against my house and the sound of the rattlesnake will be duplicated a hundred times a day by dried bougainvillea drifting in my driveway. The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way. I know as well as the next person that there is considerable transcendent value in a river running wild and undammed, a river running free over granite, but I have also lived beneath such a river when it was running in flood, and gone without showers when it was running dry.
"The West begins," Bernard DeVoto wrote, "where the average annual io rainfall drops below twenty inches." This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read, and it goes a long way toward explaining my own passion for seeing the water under control, but many people I know persist in looking for psychoanalytical implications in this passion. As a matter of fact I have explored, in an amateur way, the more obvious of these implications, and come up with nothing interesting. A certain external reality remains, and resists interpretation. The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control. Some fifteen years ago I tore a poem by Karl Shapiro from a magazine and pinned it on my kitchen wall. This fragment of paper is now on the wall of a sixth kitchen, and crumbles a little whenever I touch it, but I keep it there for the last stanza, which has for me the power of a prayer:
It is raining in California, a straight rain
Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough,
Filling the gardens till the gardens flow,
Shining the olives, tiling the gleaming tile,
Waxing the dark camellia leaves more green,
Flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile.
I thought of those lines constantly on the morning in Sacramento when I went to visit the California State Water Project Operations Control Center. If I had wanted to drain Quail at 10:51 that morning, I wanted, by early afternoon, to do a great deal more. I wanted to open and close the Clifton Court Forebay intake gate. I wanted to produce some power down at the San Luis Dam. I wanted to pick a pool at random on the Aqueduct and pull it down and then refill it, watching for the hydraulic jump. I wanted to put some water over the hill and I wanted to shut down all flow from the Aqueduct into the Bureau of Reclamation's Cross Valley Canal, just to see how long it would take somebody over at Reclamation to call up and complain. I stayed as long as I could and watched the system work on the big board with the lighted checkpoints. The Delta salinity report was coming in on one of the teletypes behind me. The Delta tidal report was coming in on another. The earthquake board, which has been desensitized to sound its alarm (a beeping tone for Southern California, a high-pitched tone for the north) only for those earthquakes which register at least 3.0 on the Richter Scale, was silent. I had no further business in this room and yet I wanted to stay the day. I wanted to be the one, that day, who was shining the olives, filling the gardens, and flooding the daylong valleys like the Nile. I want it still.
Joan Didion (1934 – 2021) was an American writer and journalist. She was one of the pioneers of New Journalism whose sharp, insightful essays gave a voice to modern American life.
The Power of a Heavy Sigh
Vestal Malone October 2, 2025
A mirror, a polaroid selfie, the surface of a cool mountain lake pre-immersion - we see ourselves in these reflections, but they don't explain who we are, or why, or how others perceive us…
Analogical Diagram, Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah.
Vestal Malone October 2, 2025
A mirror, a polaroid selfie, the surface of a cool mountain lake pre-immersion… we see ourselves in these reflections, but they don't explain who we are, or why, or how others perceive us. Bodies, images, faces, names, styles, reputations, and qualities of character; all a part of some definition of ourselves, yet none truly capture the whole. Only the mind's eye, carefully listening from the inside out with breath as guide, can see the physical and emotional self in their entirety.
The perfectly divine design machine of the human body may appear symmetrical but its balance is asymmetrical: our liver, gallbladder, the “good side” of our face for the family portrait, right or left handed, goofy foot or regular, all contribute to a lack of balance within ourselves. Even those that appear symmetrical - the kidneys, lungs, eyes, legs, ovaries, and arms - have subtle differences. And the gray matter, balanced atop the spine, encased by the skull, with the duties that control every aspect of our existence – the sacred left brain, the mundane right brain – separate yet united, floating and dancing with the breath. The simple wisdom of this twin organism can create a breath and relax the body without the mind's conscious choice getting in the way. The heavy sigh.
To begin to know the self from the inside out, one must invite the mind to follow as breath fills the lungs, like a pitcher filling with water. Focus and notice the body's details, truly observing each cell, and you can begin creating an opportunity to hit the “pause” and then “reset” button allowing the body to harmonize itself. The heavy sigh.
Sitting at the office or in traffic, dancing, surfing, receiving bodywork or practicing yoga are all opportunities to follow the breath with the mind, bring oxygen, and clear stagnation. The breath is the best chiropractor, especially lying or sitting still. As the lungs move to inflate and then release, travel along the mind's path until the focus blurs and flow begins. The body is designed to release itself, but it needs the mind to get out of the way as it waits for the heavy sigh. It can't be controlled, only invited, and when it comes, a powerful release to mind and body happens in the exhale.
After her University education (BA in English Literature and philosophy, minor in music), Vestal Malone followed the call to study her hobbies of yoga and therapeutic touch a the Pacific School of Healing Arts and continued in the Master's program of Transformational Bodywork with her mentors, Fred and Cheryl Mitouer, and assisting with their teaching. She went on to teach her own Therapeutic Touch workshops in Japan, hatha yoga in America, and study Cranial Sacral Therapy with Hugh Milne and John Upledger. She has had the honor of doing bodywork with professional athletes, laymen and nobility for over 25 years. Vestal is a mom, a backyard organic gardener, and sings soprano in her church choir on a little island in the middle Pacific ocean. She hails from Colorado and Wyoming and migrates every summer to her family ranch to ground in the dust of her roots.
How To Speak Poetry (1978)
Leonard Cohen September 30, 2025
Take the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils…
Leonard Cohen was always a reluctant songwriter. As a young man in Montreal, he published collections of poetry and a handful of novels that were critically very well received, but commercially unsuccessful. In 1966, the year his novel ‘Beautiful Losers’ was published, Cohen made the decision to abandon the printed word and focus on music. He released his first album the following year, and four more in the following decade, becoming a new voice of his generation and establishing himself as one of the finest songwriters of the era. In 1978, following the release of his album of the same name a year before, Cohen returned to his first love and released the poetry collection ‘Death of a Ladies Man’. A dialogue with himself, each poem is accompanied by a meta-commentary or companion piece of writing. Amongst the poems is the short essay featured here. A guide to reading poetry aloud, Cohen’s directions are applicable far beyond their intention; it is a plea to respect the written word, to understand that vulnerability comes not from over-emoting but from the straightforward pursuit of truth, and to embrace our imperfections as compelling, interesting, and beautiful.
Leonard Cohen September 30, 2025
Take the word butterfly. To use this word it is not necessary to make the voice weigh less than an ounce or equip it with small dusty wings. It is not necessary to invent a sunny day or a field of daffodils. It is not necessary to be in love, or to be in love with butterflies. The word butterfly is not a real butterfly. There is the word and there is the butterfly. If you confuse these two items people have the right to laugh at you. Do not make so much of the word. Are you trying to suggest that you love butterflies more perfectly than anyone else, or really understand their nature? The word butterfly is merely data. It is not an opportunity for you to hover, soar, befriend flowers, symbolize beauty and frailty, or in any way impersonate a butterfly. Do not act out words. Never act out words. Never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. Never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. Do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. If you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. If ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material.
What is the expression which the age demands? The age demands no expression whatever. We have seen photographs of bereaved Asian mothers. We are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. There is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. Do not even try. You will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. We have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. Everyone knows you are eating well and are even being paid to stand up there. You are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. This should make you very quiet. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Everyone knows you are in pain. You cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. Step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. You have nothing to teach them. You are not more beautiful than they are. You are not wiser. Do not shout at them. Do not force a dry entry. That is bad sex. If you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. And remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. What is our need? To be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. Do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. The bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. They have also destroyed the stage. Did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? There is no more stage. There are no more footlights. You are among the people. Then be modest. Speak the words, convey the data, step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room. Do not put yourself on.
This is an interior landscape. It is inside. It is private. Respect the privacy of the material. These pieces were written in silence. The courage of the play is to speak them. The discipline of the play is not to violate them. Let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. Be good whores. The poem is not a slogan. It cannot advertise you. It cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. You are not a stud. You are not a killer lady. All this junk about the gangsters of love. You are students of discipline. Do not act out the words. The words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition.
Speak the words with the exact precision with which you would check out a laundry list. Do not become emotional about the lace blouse. Do not get a hard-on when you say panties. Do not get all shivery just because of the towel. The sheets should not provoke a dreamy expression about the eyes. There is no need to weep into the handkerchief. The socks are not there to remind you of strange and distant voyages. It is just your laundry. It is just your clothes. Don't peep through them. Just wear them.
The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorers' Club of the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honour you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them about the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it. Do not work the audience for gasps and sighs. If you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. It will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. It will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence.
Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you're tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty.
Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016) was a Canadian songwriter, singer, poet, and novelist.
Quantum Entanglement and the Ho'oponopono Prayer
Molly Hankins September 25, 2025
The ancient Hawaiian Ho’oponopono forgiveness prayer was brought to modern attention by Dr. Hew Len, a clinical social worker who used it with great success while working in a ward for the criminally insane…
Two carved Hawaiian figures, J. M. Booth. 1930s.
Molly Hankins September 25, 2025
The ancient Hawaiian Ho’oponopono forgiveness prayer was brought to modern attention by Dr. Hew Len, a clinical social worker who used it with great success while working in a ward for the criminally insane. He learned the simple prayer from his family, and it had an enormous impact on his patients at Hawaii State Hospital, which he wrote about in the 2007 book Zero Limits. In ancient, tribal Hawaiian culture, whenever a member of the Kahuna tribe came to any harm or did anything harmful, everyone in the tribe would sit in a circle around that person and psychically send them the message, “I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you.” When Len began using it with his patients, he found their issues began resolving more easily, that they were getting along better day-to-day and, overall, were exiting the ward more quickly.
The effectiveness of Ho’oponopono is based on the principles of quantum entanglement, which theorises that particles of the same origin, if once connected, always stay connected - even across space-time. If we apply the same principle to human beings, it means we’re influencing each other on an ongoing basis whether we’re aware of it or not. It could take the form of holding each other in some form of psychic bondage through our perception of each other, either consciously or unconsciously. It could also take the form of judgment, envy, or any negativity held towards the person experiencing harm. Regardless of how this negativity expresses, the premise is the same - we cannot escape the impact we have on others as individuals or as part of a collective, but we can cleanse our impact to make it positive by engaging in this practice.
For the prayer, the words are sent telepathically rather than spoken because it is communication that happens beyond the world of form that reorganizes reality at the quantum level. Len would repeat the prayer in his mind while looking at his patients’ file until he felt a lightness towards them, then he would move onto the next file. His Zero Limits co-author Joe Vitale realized Len had distilled the complex Kahuna ritual into a simple, ten-word prayer that was having profound and sometimes immediate effects on recipients. They were receiving the benefit without having any awareness of why, and Vitale posits that the prayer lifts a veil of negative perception, freeing patients from their past. Positive regard becomes the organizing principle at the quantum level instead of negativity or disregard, so the recipient of Ho’oponopono begins to perceive themselves subconsciously in a new, positive light. They have not changed, they are just operating from a new baseline, which is feeling the support of interconnection within community and with their true selves.
“The divisions between us are only in our imaginations. Although bodies and actions appear separate, the mind that is expressing through all of us is the same. All behavior is either an expression of or a call for love. So love is the cause of everything, and the cure at the same time.”
Each line of the prayer combines to create this alchemical reaction, beginning with “I’m sorry.” The apology needs not to be for anything in particular that’s happened in this life, it could simply be apologizing for our souls’ choosing to experience separation from the divine and for all the suffering that choice caused. The next line, “please forgive me”, affirms the idea that forgiveness alleviates much of the suffering we create by choosing to play the human game of separation. It is a gift we’re always in a position to give ourselves and each other. Author David Ian Cowan has his own take on the impact of this line in his book Navigating the Collapse of Time. He writes, “Please see me as an undiluted, invulnerable, eternal and forever joyful spirit, as I now choose to see you. I see you as spirit, who through the majesty of your own creativity and freedom, has created this opportunity to awaken and remember love, and I trust you to love me and forgive me my illusions.” By passing conscious awareness of another’s transgressions, Ho’oponopono allows us to see each other with fresh eyes at the quantum level.
We acknowledge both our unity with others and self-love when we say, “I love you.” According to Cowan, this line recognizes our oneness, that we’re all drops in the infinite ocean of consciousness, and that we serve as mirrors for each other, so to give love to another is to give it to ourselves. By this logic, to judge or condemn another is to judge and condemn our own soul, so choosing love and forgiveness for another heals them and ourselves. Cowan writes, “The divisions between us are only in our imaginations. Although bodies and actions appear separate, the mind that is expressing through all of us is the same. All behavior is either an expression of or a call for love. So love is the cause of everything, and the cure at the same time.” The final line “thank you” shows gratitude for both the opportunity to heal the relationship and for the change of any misperceptions we may have of one another as being anything less than divine.
Len believed Ho’oponopono had the power to restore the mind to its higher purpose and connect with the truth of creation and interconnectedness of all things. When love, forgiveness, humility, and gratitude entangle, they generate an organizing pattern of reality that moves us beyond identifying with our perception of duality to become pure vessels of divine creation. It effectively functions as a non-duality spell, because the only way to perceive duality is by stepping outside it, and Ho’oponopono by its very nature is based in non-duality. By sending this blessing to another, we take a step outside of duality. Each time we do, we come back into the polarized world of form able to embody more non-dual divine intelligence.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is? (1979)
James Baldwin September 23, 2025
The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language…
When James Baldwin first published ‘If Black English…’ in 1979, he was already one of the most celebrated literary figures of the century, whose fiction and non-fiction work had shaped the American conscious, and radically changed the nation’s understanding of race relations. At the time of writing this short essay, he had left America for France because, despite his hopes for the civil rights movement, he felt that there was little chance of significant change in his home country. He uses language to explore how Black people have historically and continually been subjugated in America, implying that black people had to educate themselves. They created their language as a way to speak truths that the white people could not understand because they disavowed black language. Language, he implies, can be an instrument of oppression and a force to be understood in all its power.
James Baldwin September 23, 2025
St. Paul de Vence, France - The argument concerning the use, or the status, or the reality, of black English is rooted in American history and has absolutely nothing to do with the question the argument supposes itself to be posing. The argument has nothing to do with language itself but with the role of language. Language, incontestably, reveals the speaker. Language, also, far more dubiously, is meant to define the other-and, in this case, the other is refusing to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize him.
People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate. (And, if they cannot articulate it, they are submerged.) A Frenchman living in Paris speaks a subtly and crucially different language from that of the man living in Marseilles; neither sounds very much like a man living in Quebec; and they would all have great difficulty in apprehending the man from Guadeloupe, or Martinique, is saying, to say nothing of the man from Senegal although the "common" language of all these areas is French. But each has paid, and is paying, a different price for this "common" language, in which, as it turns out, they are not saying, and cannot be saying, the same things: they each have very different realities to articulate, or control.
What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death: the price for this is the acceptance, and achievement, of one's temporal identity. So that, for example, though it is not taught in the schools (and this has the potential of becoming a political issue) the south of France still clings to its ancient and musical Provençal, which resists being described as a "dialect." And much of the tension in the Basque countries, and in Wales, is due to the Basque and Welsh determination not to allow their languages to be destroyed. This determination also feeds the flames in Ireland for among the many indignities the Irish have been forced to undergo at English hands is the English contempt for their language.
It goes without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to identity: it reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity. There have been, and are, times, and places, when to speak a certain language could be dangerous, even fatal. Or, one may speak the same language, but in such a way that one's antecedents are revealed, or (one hopes) hidden. This is true in France, and is absolutely true in England: the range (and reign) of accents on that damp little island make England coherent for the English and totally incomprehensible for everyone else. To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": you have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future.
Now, I do not know what white Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but they would not sound the way they sound. Jazz, for example, is a very specific sexual term, as in jazz me, baby, but white people purified it into the Jazz Age. Sock it to me, which means, roughly, the same thing, has been adopted by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s descendants with no qualms or hesitations at all, along with let it all hang out and right on! Beat to his socks, which was once the black's most total and despairing image of poverty, was transformed into a thing called the Beat Generation, which phenomenon was, largely, composed of uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty, trying to get down, to get with it, doing their thing, doing their despairing best to be funky, which we, the blacks, never dreamed of doing-we were funky, baby, like funk was going out of style.
“A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.”
Now, no one can eat his cake, and have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation would be even more whipped than it is.
I say that the present skirmish is rooted in American history, and it is. Black English is the creation of the black diaspora. Blacks came to the United States chained to each other, but from different tribes: neither could speak the other's language. If two black people, at that bitter hour of the world's history, had been able to speak to each other, the institution of chattel slavery could never have lasted as long as it did. Subsequently, the slave was given, under the eye, and the gun, of his master, Congo Square, and the Bible - or, in other words, and under these conditions, the slave began the formation of the black church, and it is within this unprecedented tabernacle that black English began to be formed. This was not, merely, as in the European example, the adoption of a foreign tongue, but an alchemy that transformed ancient elements into a new language: A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.
There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.
Now, if this passion, this skill, this (to quote Toni Morrison) "sheer intelligence," this incredible music, the mighty achievement of having brought a people utterly unknown to, or despised by “history” - to have brought this people to their present, troubled, troubling, and unassailable and unanswerable place-if this absolutely unprecedented journey does not indicate that black English is a language, I am curious to know what definition of language is to be trusted.
A people at the center of the Western world, and in the midst of so hostile a population, has not endured and transcended by means of what is patronizingly called a "dialect." We, the blacks, are in trouble, certainly, but we are not doomed, and we are not inarticulate because we are not compelled to defend a morality that we know to be a lie.
The brutal truth is that the bulk of the white people in Americа never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child's language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: it is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way.
And, after all, finally, in a country with standards so untrustworthy, a country that makes heroes of so many criminal mediocrities, a country unable to face why so many of the nonwhite are in prison, or on the needle, or standing, futureless, in the streets-it may very well be that both the child, and his elder, have concluded that they have nothing whatever to learn from the people of a country that has managed to learn so little.
James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) was an American writer and civil rights activist who wrote essays, novels, plays, and poems. Baldwin is considered amongst the most important writers of the 20th century, and was an influential public figure and orator during most of his career.
New Forms of Music: Sound is a Spatial Force
Robin Sparkes September 18, 2025
If we listen to Antonio Lucio Vivaldi today, we may think of him as a classicist. In his time, however, he was at the very edge of the avant-garde; an innovator who unsettled musical tradition by setting harmony into motion…
Anonymous portrait of Vivaldi, c.1723.
Robin Sparkes September 18, 2025
If we listen to Antonio Lucio Vivaldi today, we may think of him as a classicist. In his time, however, he was at the very edge of the avant-garde; an innovator who unsettled musical tradition by setting harmony into motion. In the early 18th century, while many composers relied on static repetitions of familiar chords, Vivaldi began shaping progressions into sequences that pulled irresistibly forward, shifting the listener’s perception of space. He pioneered the now iconic chord progression, which became the foundation of almost every pop song today. He arranged harmonies as steps ascending a staircase, each leading into the next, a system Howard Goodall has described as a kind of musical gravity. Harmony was no longer a backdrop but an engine, driving both the music and the listener into acceleration.
To imagine this, think of a simple triad played on a keyboard C, E, and G. In isolation, the notes hang still in the air. When Vivaldi set chords into sequence, each one tilted toward a harmonic resolution, leading at the ear and propelling the listener through unfolding time. This momentum is felt in the body: a tightening, a quickening, a sensation of being carried forward. Audiences of his day described it as electrifying, an experience beyond sound, a psychoacoustic movement through time and space.
Vivaldi’s interventions transformed music into something spatial, even architectural. Listeners were no longer hearing notes in sequence, but inhabiting a sonic environment that expanded and contracted around them. His work opened a realm of possibility, allowing music to reconfigure the perception of time and space itself. This experience of acceleration, of being swept into motion by sound, foreshadows the ways new forms of music act as spatial interventions, reshaping how we move, and inhabit the world.
Wendy Carlos
Electronic Music
In the late 1950s, the German engineer Harald Bode developed the first modular musical system, and by the 1960s, commercially available modular synthesizers began to emerge, offering composers and performers expanded control over sound synthesis. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach (1968) exemplifies this approach, utilizing the Moog synthesizer to perform Johann Sebastian Bach's compositions. Unlike traditional acoustic instruments, the synth allowed Carlos to manipulate pitch, timbre, dynamics, and articulation with precise control. She translated each note and articulation into electronic signals, which were then processed through the synth’s oscillators, filters, and modulators, enabling a wide range of tonal colors and dynamic contrasts.
Because the Moog was monophonic, Carlos recorded each part separately and layered them to reconstruct the full texture of Bach’s works, a meticulous process that showed the capabilities of the synthesizer as a serious instrument for classical music interpretation. By reimagining Bach electronically, Carlos expanded the expressive possibilities of the compositions and demonstrated how sound could be sculpted and structured in ways impossible with acoustic instruments. Her work made listeners aware of the spatial and temporal dimensions of music, where the precise control of frequencies and modulation could shape perception, demonstrating a new form of musical experience.
Switched-On Bach is reverent, yet radically synthetic. Carlos’s synth echoes offer a new possibility of what music can be in an age shaped by dense industrial sound and electronic amplification. The work reclaims experiences that subvert hierarchy and introduce new dimensions of listening and making. In doing so, her electronic sound dissolves classicist boundaries between performer, instrument, and space, opening room for agency within and beyond inherited musical forms and sonic spatial practices.
“Studios functioned as infrastructures of autonomy, transmitting sonic agency to shape how we think, feel, and inhabit place and space.”
Sonic Memory
Within the broader idea that sound is spatial, sonic memory shows how music and noise are inscribed not only in recordings and compositions but in the very spaces where the music is made. It reveals how traditions and experiments endure across time, through tapes, instruments, studios, and architectures that carry the imprint of cultural histories. Paul Purgas unearthed one such archive, recordings made between 1969 and 1972 at South Asia’s first electronic music studio, housed at the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India. Long neglected, these tapes document how local composers used oscillators, filters, and patch bays to experiment with electronic sound on their own terms. They blended raga, tala, and modernist technique into new sonic languages, transforming the studio into a site of cultural authorship. Through Purgas’ archival project We Found Our Own Reality, he reframes the NID studio as a living infrastructure of memory where electronic sound became a means of reclaiming identity and rethinking the history of music itself.
At NID, Purgas highlights the work of composers Jinraj Joshipura, Gita Sarabhai, and S.C. Sharma, noting compositions such as Space Liner 2001, Frequencies in Square, and Sine Wave of Chromatic Scale. These pieces wove Indian rhythmic and modal traditions into the experimental grammar of modular synthesis, turning the studio into a hybrid space where raga and tala interfaced with signal flow to generate new forms of expression. Joshipura’s Space Liner 2001, composed at age 19, charts an interstellar journey through layered drones and synthetic pulses. He approached the synthesizer architecturally, sketching color coded patches to map the logic of his signal paths. Drawing from science fiction and spatial design, his work sought to “stand outside history,” building auditory structures that imagined futures beyond inherited systems.
Through the archive, Purgas has reactivated these experimental spaces, positioning the NID studio within the post-independence ambition and design-led pedagogy of its time. As he writes, “the infrastructure of electronic sound in India was neither a clone nor an imitation, but an extension of local pedagogies and cosmologies into new technological territories.” The work challenges colonial narratives that marginalized South Asian approaches to sound and space. By revealing the voices of early South Asian electronic composers and highlighting the spatial dimension of their practice, Purgas shows how these studios functioned as infrastructures of autonomy, transmitting sonic agency to shape how we think, feel, and inhabit place and space.
In his own practice, Purgas treats architecture as an instrument by activating abandoned buildings to explore their acoustic character. In one project at Woodchester Mansion, an unfinished Gothic Revival house in the British Cotswolds, he set up speakers and microphones to amplify sub-bass rumble through walls and staircases, capturing the building’s natural resonances. He recorded creaks, echoes, and structural vibrations without editing, letting the house perform itself through sound. This approach mirrors, in more explicit detail, how underground punk bands in abandoned squats and warehouses reclaimed derelict spaces, using raw acoustics and collective energy to resist institutional norms. By recording with minimal interference, Purgas exposed the spatial memory embedded in the structure’s fabric. The resulting audio traces reveal architecture as a living partner in sound design, demonstrating how sonic agency is rooted in place, history, and material presence.
Cõvco performer Surrender
Sonic Agency in Motion
Stephelle, founder of Area Scatter, a platform dedicated to experimental sound and spatial programming recently curated a performance at OR space in London titled SURRENDER by Cõvco, demonstrating how contemporary approaches to sound actively reorganize space. Performing from within a mobile structure Cõvco designed herself, she navigated through the audience erratically, prompting the crowd to shift, follow, and respond to her motion. The sound moved with her, transforming the room into an instrument. As Cõvco describes it, the work is about “surrendering to low-frequency subwoofers,” and her mobile structure, inspired by soundsystem culture, resembled a large, black speaker frame on wheels. In her words, agency emerges as “demand and permission, invasive invitation for homecoming and stranger’s paradise.” Sonic agency in the performance operates through movement and attention, shifting how space is perceived and inviting the audience to listen with the body.
Thinking through new forms of music reveals how sound can rebuild the built environment from the inside out. It defines the space around us, physically, emotionally, and architecturally, moves as vibration, shaping and being shaped by every surface it touches: low frequencies wrap and press, high ones scatter and slice. Space is redrawn by sound moving through it.
From the smallest scale of a headphone chamber, which alters perception and navigation, to the macro of an entire cityscape, sonic energy maps volume, depth, and edge in real time. What we hear is a reading of space; what we feel is its design. Sound fills, transforms, and expands. From the key of the sonics to the beat per minute, vibration becomes a tool for exploring spatial design. From micro to macro, sound waves form invisible structures in a continuous act of spatial design.
In an age when access to space is increasingly monitored, privatized, and algorithmically managed, music offers blueprints for reimagining how we inhabit the world. To embody sonic and spatial agency is to reshape space from within.
Robin Sparkes, is a spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.
‘Dont Look Back’ and the Self Made Myth (Copy)
Ana Roberts September 16, 2025
On the road to immortality, Dylan was learning from his mistakes and shaping the mythology of himself. One of those mistakes, it seemed, was inviting a young documentary filmmaker on tour with him. ‘Don’t Look Back’ captures Dylan in a way he never would be captured again, and for a good reason…
Ana Roberts, September 16th, 2025
In 1967, Bob Dylan was a prophet speaking truth to power with his guitar and voice, and informing the minds of a million young people searching for direction. He was settled in this role and comfortable enough to experiment within it. Yet just 2 years earlier, the foundations of this persona were a little less steady. On the road to immortality, Dylan was learning from his mistakes and shaping the mythology of himself. One of those mistakes, it seemed, was inviting a young documentary filmmaker on tour with him. ‘Don’t Look Back’ captures Dylan in a way he never would be captured again, and for a good reason.
D.A. Pennebaker followed Dylan in 1965, touring England, at the very start of his electric revolution, still playing live shows with his acoustic and harmonica. He is seen hanging with Joan Baez, Donovan, and a group of managers, journalists, and fans, with Allen Ginsberg appearing in the background of the now iconic opening sequence set to “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a proto-music video before the term existed. It is a remarkably candid film and stands as a pinnacle of 1960s-era cinéma vérité. Pennebaker does not interact with him; he serves as a fly on the wall and tries to, through the powers of sheer observation, understand the truth of his subject. The Dylan that the public sees in this film largely aligns with his established persona—a mercurial, elusive genius—yet the consistency of this behavior reveals a soft inauthenticity. The more we watch him interact with journalists and play the role of the aloof prophet, the more his predictability begins to erode the myth. Instead of reinforcing his mystique, it undermines it. We see not a spontaneous artist but an actor fully conscious of his role. At once relentlessly confrontational and perpetually elusive, his time on tour is punctuated by petulant encounters with journalists, lazy days, and frustrated evenings spent in hotel rooms, trading songs with Baez while he sits at his typewriter, and the occasional flash of anger. Where the consistency of Dylan begins to undermine his façade, it is the latter of these, the moments of anger, which one can guess are to blame for Dylan’s refusal to ever be filmed by him. Even in these moments, as he tries to recover from the broken façade he inadvertently revealed, we can see shivers of regret in the young Dylan’s eyes—fear that his image of a “cool cat,” unfazed by the world around him, has slipped in front of an audience and, worse, a camera.
There is a single scene that stands out, and one that resides most strongly in the public consciousness of the film, where Dylan, while his hotel room is filled with various figures from the contemporary British music scene, including Donovan and Alan Price, having recently left the Animals, tries to get to the bottom of who threw a glass out the window. It is the antithesis of the Dylan he presents: he is not the elusive figure, the freewheelin’ Dylan, the mocking Dylan. Instead, he is a petty, angry figure concerned about his own perception. He tells a drunken Englishman who he suspects threw the glass that “I ain’t taking no fucking responsibility for cats I don’t know, man… I know a thousand cats that look just like you.” Later, when the dust has settled, Donovan plays a song and Dylan, immediately after, plays “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” a pointed upstaging of the younger artist, clearly in the presence of his hero. These ten minutes of footage stand alone in Dylan’s career—a glimpse behind the glass onion. It is in these moments that we see such concern about the way he is presented, agonizingly self-aware and furious at the possibility that he might not be in full control of his image. Yet this does not weaken Dylan’s genius; it amplifies it. It is the reason for his success. He is a master at building the mythology around him, knowing, like Freud, that if he gives too much of himself, too inconsistent a version of himself, it won’t be a strong bedrock on which the fans can create the myths. ‘Don’t Look Back’ stands alone in documentaries because it pays attention to the man behind the curtain, and Dylan’s work remains more powerful when the curtain is not pulled back.
“‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ is the Temptation of Christ, the 40 days and nights in the desert—it is the prophet going alone, leaving those who believe they need him, only to force them to dig deeper into his message.”
Bob Dylan in the hotel room in ‘Dont Look Back’. (1967).
It is not this film alone that reveals the personal construction of Dylan, though it gives a wondrous insight into it. Between 1963 and 1965, Dylan put out five albums, and to listen to each is to hear in stark detail the active construction of an icon. He refines his ability with each album, taking the elements that most readily captured his listeners and expanding them constantly, while refusing to be pigeonholed in style or content. We can see this perhaps most clearly in the three-album run of ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’, and ‘Bringing It All Back Home’. ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, his third record and the first to contain all original songs, builds off the previous album, leaning into revolutionary-minded, political anthems and civil-rights era ideas, blended with majesty into his brand of beat-inspired folk music. It is a logical continuation to ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’, cementing his reputation as the voice of his generation, reporting on the issues in ways only the kids understand. Yet ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’, released some eight months later, entirely rejects this image. The name itself is a refusal to be defined as anything, a rejection of the label of prophet, which only makes the role more powerful as listeners try to rectify the two. “My Back Pages” confronts any attempts to pinpoint political views: “Equality, I spoke the word / As if a wedding vow / Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now,” a cry that he is changing, an offer to attempt an understanding of what he believes. ‘Another Side of Bob Dylan’ is the Temptation of Christ, the 40 days and nights in the desert—it is the prophet going alone, leaving those who believe they need him, only to force them to dig deeper into his message.
‘Bringing It All Back Home’ is the completion of this journey—it is when Dylan knew he had found greatness. He blends folk with rock music deftly, never allowing any song to fall simply into either category. Gone are the directly political songs; rather, he is able to embed the possibility of revolution into every line, turning songs of the personal into rambling prophecies of the last days of earth, as with “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Each line can be taken as its own maxim, its own prophecy, and Dylan throughout this album confirms his role as the oracle. “He not busy being born / Is busy dying / Temptation’s page flies out the door / You follow, find yourself at war” captures this ability to at once capture specificity and remain entirely open to interpretation. *Bringing It All Back Home* is the realization that the prophet is most powerful when they can never be understood. Each song makes you confident you are in the presence of, and listening to, something important, and if you don’t understand it in time you will—the prophecy will reveal itself. It is in these three albums we see Dylan embrace the inauthentic and use it to further his message; it is here we see him realize that authenticity leads to understanding, and when you are understood your message ends. Dylan embraces the inauthentic, and it lets him live forever.
Ana Roberts is a writer, musician, and cultural critic.
The Fool (Again)
Chris Gabriel September 13, 2025
As we have reached the end of our 78 week exploration of the Tarot, I thought it fitting to explore my own journey of discovery with this perfect tool. From Fool to learned Fool…
Name: The Fool
Number: 0
Astrology: Air
Qabalah: Aleph
Chris Gabriel September 13, 2025
As we have reached the end of our 78 week exploration of the Tarot, I thought it fitting to explore my own journey of discovery with this perfect tool. From Fool to learned Fool.
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Rider
I remember buying my first pack of Tarot cards. I was in high school and I went to Earth Spirit after class and bought a Rider-Waite deck. We went back to my room, and immediately splayed them out face down on the floor, and shuffled the cards around. We pushed them back in place, and I set about reading.
We did not study the booklet, instead we intuited the meaning from the images before us. I brought it to school the next day and set up shop in the library, reading for friends and fellow students. I felt I had found the perfect niche. Understanding philosophy or occultism was never enough, I had to communicate what I learned in an effective way, tarot was the perfect bridge between the esoteric and the mundane.
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Thoth
I was given the Thoth tarot deck, and the accompanying Book of Thoth as a birthday gift from my mother. It was in fact the last gift I would receive from her. At this point I had grown far more interested in the Occult tradition behind the tarot, and desperately hungered for the wisdom in that text, and so I devoured it.
I was able to grasp the basic symbols, having worked with them at length, but the astrological and Qabalistic elements were beyond my understanding at the time, so I read the book again and again, and I played with the cards constantly.
I had my first breakthrough as I taught my friend Jana, the astrological significance of the cards. It was sudden, the system had at last become a toy with which I could play, and play I did! My abilities in divination exponentially increased.
I joked often in the years that followed that the Qabalah played no part in my Occult work. Like astrology, I had rote memorization of the component sephiroth and alphabet, but it meant nothing to me.
It wasn’t until 2022, when I met my mentor Tessa DiPietro, that I began to grasp at the divine that existed within the tarot. She quizzed me regularly on the subject, and took time to show me how it functioned. Through her teaching, I was at last able to read the Book of Thoth and 777 fully, and apply this fantastic, expansive set of information to my readings.
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Marseille
I am embarrassed to say I didn’t own a Marseille deck until I was given this project by Tetragrammaton. I had played with the deck at shops, and studied the imagery in books, but I desired the Jodorowsky version, and foolishly went without. I purchased the deck, just like my first, at Earth Spirit.
I played with them, read with them, and recalled my studies of these cards. I intentionally used the method utilized by Aleister Crowley, the creator of the Thoth deck, to teach a student, record the lecture, and write it out. As I moved city to city throughout the year, I would engage in these dialogs with my friends. In this way I was able to get through the deck in an entirely randomized, meaningful way.
*
Upon completing every piece, I would anxiously send the work to my girlfriend, await her response, and then send it to my editor, who would fix my sloppy punctuation, and occasionally remove my references to internet memes (which is of course what got me into this work to begin with! The Three of Cups is “Girls Night”) and then send it into the would by way of the wonderful Tetragrammaton.com.
I am forever grateful to all involved in my esoteric development, and for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime, to share what I have learned from a decade of Tarot reading and study with all of you. I hope my writing has helped you form a greater understanding of the cards, and that you’ll stick with me as I begin to explore the I Ching with you!
With love and light, Christian Gabriel
Physics, Biology and the Seven Hermetic Principles
Molly Hankins September 11, 2025
Originating with the ancient Egyptians, passed down through millenia, and preserved in the early 20th century by an authorless book called The Kybalion, the seven Hermetic principles are timeless axioms of occult wisdom…
Molly Hankins September 11, 2025
Originating with the ancient Egyptians, passed down through millenia, and preserved in the early 20th century by an authorless book called The Kybalion, the seven Hermetic principles are timeless axioms of occult wisdom. They are also, according to cellular biologist and author Dr. Bruce Lipton, increasingly relevant to the world of quantum physics. The Hermetic principles contain the basic rules by which reality operates, with perception at its heart. Max Planck, one of the fathers of quantum physics, believed that consciousness is creating our life experience and adjusting our consciousness affects our reality. Lipton uses the placebo effect as a prime example of how this phenomena manifests, stating that the positive thinking is the underlying cause of healing and that negative thinking has equal effects.
Named after Hermes Trismegistus, believed to be an incarnation of the Greek god Hermes known as Thoth in ancient Egypt, the Hermetic principles begin with Mentalism: “The all is mind,” says The Kybalion, “The universe is mental.”. Here ‘the all’ refers to the substantial reality underlying the laws of the material world, and the idea of the universe being mental refers to the impact our perspective has in creating our experience. The second principle is that of Correspondence, which is where the saying ‘as above, so below; as below, so above’ originates from. Lipton uses Euclidean geometry, defined as the math that provides for structure in space, to illustrate how Correspondence is universally expressed in the material world of form.
“Is there a geometry that makes a tree? Or a snail? Yes there is,” Lipton explains. “It’s called fractal geometry, and it’s a very simple equation. But here’s the nature of the equation - you solve the equation and you get an answer, but the neat part is now you take the answer and feed it back into the same equation and solve it again.” This process repeats, creating repeating patterns of geometry that allow us to solve for answers at higher and lower levels of organization. Patterns revealed at lower levels of organization with minimal variables mirror patterns playing out at higher levels of organization with many variables, illustrating the second principle of Correspondence and its contemporary relevance. He also points to human cellular behavior as another example, “All of the functions that you have in your body are already present in a cell. The cell has respiration, digestion, excretion - cells even have an immune system. It’s the same mechanism that’s used in the higher organization of the human body. In other words, there’s a repetition in the structure - as above so below.”
Lipton started his early scientific research career focusing on the material world, but caught up to the Hermeticists when he began to study the relationship between the material and spiritual worlds. Spirit influences matter through the third principle of Vibration, which states that everything is in motion, from the spirit realms down to the subatomic level of gross matter. “All atoms are energy vortices with ripples that radiate out,” Lipton says. “As far as we know the ancient people weren’t talking about quantum physics, but they obviously knew quantum physics because they understood the nature of vibration even though they lived in a world like we live in a world that appears to be physical. This ancient wisdom was built into the Hermetic principles.” It is a requirement for all Hermetic students to learn control of their mental vibrations in order to influence reality. Think of your thoughts and emotions as pebbles being tossed into a pool of water and imagine the interference patterns between those ripples - that’s akin to how our energy is radiating out to influence the material world.
The fourth principle of Polarity states that everything has poles in this Earthly realm, that everything we experience is part of an opposite pair - black and white, good and evil, male and female, night and day, etc. We can adjust our mental vibrations to shift the poles of any phenomenon because Polarity represents a continuum in which all opposites are actually just different degrees of the same thing, at different ends of the same spectrum. Lipton describes polarity as a cycle, informed by wave/particle duality, which is a fundamental quantum physics concept that describes light and matter as exhibiting qualities of both waves and particles. Waves behave in an opposite manner to particles, with particles bouncing off each other upon collision and waves passing through each other. The fifth principle of Rhythm dovetails right out of the fourth, stating in The Kybalion, “Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides. All things rise and fall; the pendulum swing manifests in everything; the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left. Rhythm compensates.”
“The support of structure and evolutionary growth are necessary for any organism to survive and thrive, and the left and right brain functions are an example of how this principle expresses itself in the human body.”
That rhythmic compensation is explained by Lipton as a natural byproduct of vibration. “A vibration has a rhythm - an up-phase and a down-phase, and an up-phase and a down-phase. Well this rhythm can also be present in our life. There are times when you’re in harmony with the going-up, and these are the good-feeling times when things are great. Then there’s times when we seem to be out of harmony, but that’s because the rhythm is going down in the opposite polarity. So the point of the rhythm is that you can choose how you engage and you can ride the rhythm and make your life smooth.” It is not that the difficult or painful down-phases of our lives get easier, but when we see those times as part of a natural, inevitable cycle we can begin to move with the rhythm of life without seeing ourselves as victims.
The sixth principle of Cause and Effect states, “Every cause has an effect and every effect has a cause. Chance is but a name for Law not recognized; there are many planes of causation, but nothing escapes the law.” This law, according to Lipton, is that cause and effect are cyclical with each effect creating new causes. He goes so far as to say that the very existence of creation must be the effect stemming from some cause, implying the existence of a creator. We become co-creators of reality when we broadcast our thoughts and they interact with the subatomic particles of the material world to influence how they organize. In his book The Biology of Belief, Lipton expresses his thesis that our beliefs drive biological organization and therefore determine whether we’re healthy or sick. Applying the principles of Polarity, Vibration and Mentalism, we can adjust our mental vibrations, and switch our polarity from a negative to positive perspective. Through this we become the cause of our health rather than experiencing ill-health as an effect of negative thinking.
The seventh and final principle of Gender is about the balance of masculine and feminine energy present in all of life.Lipton describes this as the balance of structure and movement on the masculine side with vegetation and growth on the feminine side. The support of structure and evolutionary growth are necessary for any organism to survive and thrive, and he points to the left and right brain functions as an example of how this principle expresses itself in the human body. The Kybalion illustrates this through describing atomic functionality of positive and negative particles where those positively charged exert energy upon the negatively charged resulting in the organization or formation of atoms. “Arising from their unions, or combinations, manifest the varied phenomena of light, heat, electricity, magnetism, attraction, repulsion, chemical affinity and the reverse, and similar phenomena. And all this arises from the operation of the principle of Gender on the plane of energy.” This seventh principle unites the other six because it unifies Polarity via Mentalism and Vibration to produce a Rhythm of Cause and Effect that can be predicted by Correspondence.
Lipton believes that the highest and best use of these principles lies in allowing them to guide our intentions, which boosts the signal of our mental, vibrational waves to become the cause affecting how particles organize to render our experience of reality. Rather than treating the information as passive knowledge, he echoes The Kybalion’s emphasis on application of knowledge, insisting we consciously incorporate these principles into our intention to propel us towards what we want in life. “You are the creator, and that’s exactly how you do it.”
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
View from the Bandstand (1966)
Lou Reed September 9, 2025
Of course it had to happen, it really had to happen, it was the natural end to Beethoven's Ninth..
Illustration from Aspen Magazine, Issue 3. 1966.
In 1966, Andy Warhol was asked by Phyllis Johnson to curate the third issue of Aspen Magazine, the conceptual ‘Magazine In A Box’ that was already on its way to becoming the most significant cultural publication of its time. Amongst artworks, flipbooks, flexi-disk vinyls, postcards of Pop Art and fragments from a conference on LSD was a four sheet essay from a then unknown Lou Reed. ‘The Velvet Underground’s’ first album was a year away, and the band was serving at the time as the house band for Warhol’s factory but Reed writes in this essay with such ferocious, artistic, maddening brilliance that his superstardom seems all but inevitable. A passionate, chaotic, and satirical manifesto that rejects traditional culture, academia, and literary institutions in favor of the raw, emotional, and revolutionary power of rock-and-roll music.
Lou Reed September 9, 2025
Of course it had to happen, it really had to happen, it was the natural end to Beethoven's Ninth. Everyone was getting sicker and looking like a wolverine while the people pushed colleges. Dirty buildings with lawns for people to lie on blankets. Well-groomed wasps or purposefully disheveled sensitives reading Spengler. But meanwhile everything was dead. Writing was dead, movies were dead. Everybody sat like an unpeeled orange. But the music was so beautiful.
All the bastards that you were supposed to feel sorry for and fight wars for were screaming, "Look at the freaks in Central Park with transistors up their heads. " Tom Wolfe drew clever cartoons and people admired his vocabulary, forgetting he was dead and sucking blood. William B. Williams, circa 1400, appeared on David Susskind, benevolent, genial ("Please don't hate me, I must play the devil's advocate") trying to put down Phil Spector, maker of the beautiful music with those beautiful drum tag endings, Phillie's drummers reaching at the end of each chorus for the moment. And William B. wanted to tell Phil about coloured music, with his slick parted hair and tie pins and Nat King Cole mumblings.
And through all those years were those beautiful rock groups, tweeting and chirping like mesmerized sparrows, and if you weren't dead, you psyched in now, because it was now and no one had made a good book, a good movie, just bullshit over and over. Only the music, and now Robert Lowell, up for a poetry prize without a decent word ever written. The only decent poetry of this century was that recorded on rock-and-roll records. Everybody knew that. Who you going to rap with. Little Bobby Lowell or Richard Penniman alias Little Richard, our thrice-retired preacher. The incomparable E. McDaniels, otherwise known as Bo Diddley.
Giving Robert Lowell any kind of poetry prize is obscene. Ditto worrying about Ezra Pound. And the Yale Poetry series. The colleges are meant to kill. Four years in which to kill you. And if you don't extend your stay, the draft, by and for old people, waits to kill you. Kill your instincts, your love, the music. The music is the only live, living thing. Draft only those over forty. It's their war, let them kill each other.
The music going on and on. When Johnny Ace died, everyone was sad. Black arm bands in school. The early fifties, the first race music to make it to N. Y. white station. Alan Freed, the great father, clipped, fast speech and table pounding. The Jesters, Diablos, Coney Island Kids, Elica and the Rockaways. Old people in Hollywood rock-and-roll movies arm bands in school. The early fifties, the first race music to make it to N. Y. white station. Alan Freed, the great father, clipped, fast speech and table pounding. The Jesters, Diablos, Coney Island Kids, Elica and the Rockaways. Old people in Hollywood rock-and-roll movies wearing their pants around their nipples.
The dead way of doing it, it, the word it, no talking, titillation, but no coming across. And William B. Williams knows coloured music. The only poetry of the last 20 years was and is in the music on the radio. The colleges have to be destroyed. They're dangerous. Music appreciation courses. Metaphysical poetry. Theology. Playboy jazz polls. Tests. Papers. Psychological tests. Doctors trying to "cure" the freaks while they gulp pills. Rushing with the music. It's the music that kept us all intact. It's the music that kept us from going crazy. Folk music. That's music on the radio. You should have two radios. In case one gets broken. Live music is bad these days because records are better. Life in a speaker.
Rock-and-roll gobbled up all influences. Better blues musicians than the folk blues people. Better electronic music than the electronic people (i.e. England's the Who; N.Y. 's Velvet Underground.) Classical music's so simple. Really, anyone can write it. Anyone. It's a phase like teething. If you tie a contact mike to a new-born baby and spin it by the umbilical cord, think of the sound. The freaks are winning, there's no doubt about it, everyone better empty their pockets.
In the fifties there was the four chord school, C, Am, F, G. If you knew these you could play 400 songs and the top 20 - "Blanche, " "Why Don't You Write Me, " "In the Still of the Night. " Elvis was three chords, E, A, B. 7 billion groups, the music was inescapable, it sank into everyone's blood and Fender was the guitar. Then for awhile bullshit music. Pat Boone. Pat Boone imitating, covering every Fats Domino and Little Richard Record, putting down the freaks. White bucks and Columbia Teachers College ("I'd rather see my children dead than live under communism"). Balding Pat.
woke up this morning with a feeling of despair
looking for my baby and she wasn't there
heard someone knockin and much to my surprise
there stood my baby lookin in my eyes
crazy little momma come knock knock knockin
just like she did before
ya ya ya ya ya
ya ya ya ya ya yae yi yayayayayaya
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeiaeeeee
How can they give Robert Lowell a poetry prize. Richard Wilbur. It's a joke. What about the EXCELLENTS, Martha end the Vandellas (Holland, Dozier, Holland; Jeff Barry, Wile Greenwich; Bachrach and David; Carol King and Gerry Goffin, the best song-writing teams in America. ) Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with THE CHORDS. Phil Spector being made out to be some kind of aberration when he put out the best record ever made, "You've Lost that Lovin Feeling.”
We all made love to the music. And the word love was used and used and used in all the music. Over used, again and again, because that's where it was at. Still lingering idiots over Cole Porter, cheap cocktail sentiment and wit, Julie Styne, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein
"Shake it up baby."
Bo Diddley, unheralded genius of our time, who developed guitar techniques and sounds that just now are being appropriated.
Today you know music when you play. But there'd be nothing now without then. And there was a reaction against the Broadway music, middle of the road radio cretin music. How sad Richie Valens died. Give him a prize.
"ooohhhhhh Donna
ooohhhhhh Donna"
“The level of culture that mankind attained in classical antiquity can no longer be reached back to from man’s mind.”
Have you ever listened to "You've Lost That Lovin Feeling, " where the girls are saying oohhhh and suddenly, naturally, just right, come in with "Baby, " against Bill Medley's building vocal line. Repetition. Every head in America must know the last three drum choruses of "Dawn" by the Four Seasons. Paradiddles. Repetition.
Repetition is so fantastic, anti-glop. Listening to a dial tone in Bb, until American Tel & Tel messed and turned it into a mediocre whistle, was fine. Short waves minus an antenna give off various noises, band wave pops and drones, hums, that can be tuned at will and which are very beautiful. Eastern music is allowed to have repetition. That's ok for glops with strawhats and dulcimers between their blue legs... they don't listen to it, or see it, but they sanction it. Andy Warhol's movies are so repetitious sometimes, so so beautiful. Probably the only interesting films made in the U. S. Rock-and-roll films. Over and over and over. Reducing things to their final joke. Which is so pretty.
"Sally go 'round the roses
roses they won't hurt you”
The North American glop. The freaks are making it finally but they must unfortunately have glops around, it seems, to protect them. Lawyer glops, accountant glops, publicity glops, recording glops. But they will be done away with.
"One Monkey Don't Make No Show”
The N. Y. radio scene is so awful. A record won't be played unless it's already #.07 all over. All over has phenomenal records no one in N.Y. gets to hear. There's great music in the hills.
Hey, don't be afraid. The toy hippies generating excitement over THINGS. Junior Groupies. Future glops. But the music goes on and the ranks go, and they're converts, 47-year-old Madame Bouschelle, and the kids coming up are already three-year-old acid heads who need to be touched a long time to make it. Flaming Negroes in colorful African depression dresses bouncing to Otis Redding. Electricity. Why does a wall switch work. Work. Ohm. The power of the plastic people supplying their Dacron music. But this is good. Dacron is good, plastic is great and the music is all. People should die for it. People are dying for everything else so why not the music. It saves more lives. Glops invent polio vaccines and solve kidney problems. They collect urine in bottles and analyze it, test it out for glop diseases. Old wig women with varicose tongues plop from one foot to another DANCING but the real people are coming up fast. Real because they're here now alive, while the others are dead, and because they wouldn't give Robert Lowell a poetry prize either. That kind of beauty was wrong, fake, and didn't exist. It was manufactured so it could be taught. It was a myth perpetrated by pedants seeking tenure. But the tradition's finally broken. The children are stroking their knees and wearing World War I jackets. "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away. " You've got to watch. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. You'd better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All different kinds of plastic, pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, nonattached plastic.
"Sittin here la la
waiting for my ya ya
ahuuummmmmmm “
If if if if when she had come ba ba back anyone could have seen the color of her walls. Ultra sonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Have our own record on network radio across the country and have the sound blow up the APPARATUS. A take over. N.B.C. is mine. General Sarnoff demoted. Page boy glop to the Diablos. Sunrise Semester with the Harptones ("I need a Sunday kind of love, a love to last past Saturday night. ") Sally Passion in green flesh paint undulating, her earrings, arched hands, convalescing with my mind ("I'll be the rainbow when the sun is gone, wrap you in my colors to keep you warm”).
"Pa Pa Pa Pa Pa oooohhhh mow mow
Pa Pa ooohhhh mow mow”
California plastic people came up with California plastic chord changes. Which meant sticking in a Bb before your G, and after your C. Jan and Dean, the Beachboys, as opposed to cooings in the East with shiny saxophones, California plastic concentrated on white twirps and falsetto chirps. (Sidewalk Surfin - the angel chorus- "shake your B. . .uns.") The cult of the celestial choir. There is no god and Brian Wilson is his son. Brian Wilson stirred up the chords. Deftly taking from all sources, old rock, Four Freshman, he got in his later records a beautiful hybrid sound, ("Let Him Run Wild," "Don't Worry Baby," "I Get Around," "Fun, Fun, Fun -- and she had fun, fun, fun till her daddy took her t-bird away"). Like demented unicorns the East went West, and, it, all, made, it. It wasn't really a long cry from such early classics as "Peppermint Stick" by the Elchords (in N.Y. there are stores which sell old rock records for as much as $500).
The old sound was alcoholic. Spirit high. In the early 50's and early 60's pot high music. We're already past the A head, acid tripper stage. But plastic. You can hear it in the music. You can get high on the music, straight. Music's never loud enough. Taxi drivers listen to the news and worry about muggings. You should stick your head in a speaker. Louder, louder, louder. Do it Frankie do it. Oh, how, how. Oh do it, do it. The glops are wearing your clothes now and listening. Someone should paint them in azure stripes and mail them somewhere. It's like holding your arm rigid in a furry black sweater, with your hand bent so it seems amputated. When you straighten it out you get a present on two counts.
Lou Reed (1942 – 2013) was an American musician and songwriter. He was the guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter for the rock band The Velvet Underground and had a storied solo career that spanned five decades. Despite minimal contemporary success, the Velvet Underground came to be regarded as one of the most influential bands in the history of modern music and Reed’s solo work was genre defying at each turn.
Building with Music: Sound is a Spatial Force
Robin Sparkes September 4, 2025
Architecture and music offer distinct but interconnected ways of shaping space…
Promises for the 1872 Jubilee.
Robin Sparkes September 4, 2025
Architecture and music offer distinct but interconnected ways of shaping space. A building’s design directs how sound travels, influencing what people hear, how intensely they perceive it, and the atmosphere it creates. Music, on the other hand, constructs space from within, manipulating acoustic variables in real time. From recording in a bedroom, singing in a karaoke bar, performing in a warehouse or amphitheater, music has the power to transform how a space feels and how we move within it. Just as light waves can brighten a room, sound waves shape the emotional and atmospheric essence of a space.
We can shape the reverberation and resonance of a room by carefully positioning sound sources to guide how the sound unfolds. Subwoofer arrays and delay stacks allow us to synchronize sound across different areas and control how far the bass travels. Using EQ and level adjustments, we can direct the listener’s focus, concentrating frequency similarly to light waves, like a beam of sunlight cutting through a window to illuminate a single point in space. Bodies in a crowd act as moving absorbers and diffusers, continually reshaping the sound field. Through rhythm and spatialized playback, we can influence how these people move and connect, making circulation itself a medium in the psychoacoustic design of space. Sound design, then, acts as a form of spatial agency, granting us the power to reshape the architecture around us in real time.
Music changes how a space feels, the beat drives the room, making it feel entirely different than it would in silence. Sound waves bounce off surfaces, enter the body, and shift perception. A static building hosts sound, and when music activates its acoustics, the architecture responds in real time, becoming embodied and alive. Sound can be a tool for restructuring architecture and redefining our relationship to the environments around us.
Reclaiming Space: Underground Music
Les Rallizes Dénudés.
The acoustic elements of architecture often serve systems of bureaucracy and control. Underground music has the power to reclaim both historical and physical spatial narratives, turning architectural constraints into opportunities, transforming neutral or neglected spaces into sites of shared meaning and protest. By tuning into how music architects space through sound, we can engage in spatial activism to reaffirm presence, build community, and reimagine the built environment. Underground music reclaims space by asserting temporal agency, shaping how time is experienced and shared, and creating moments that resist permanence. A dance floor becomes a blueprint to reimagine the boundaries of time. The audience, moving as one, reshapes the space in real time.
Les Rallizes Dénudés, a psychedelic noise band that emerged in late 1960s Kyoto, were defined by their uncompromising use of volume and repetition in live performance. The only recordings they left behind came from these shows, where protest was enacted in real time and space. By rejecting mediated formats of releasing music, they made the audience’s presence inseparable from the music itself. Through this approach, Les Rallizes Dénudés transformed live performance into a spatial archive. Their music redefines agency by centering presence, activating space as part of the work itself, and imprinting sound directly into a collective experience.
In a similar way, through an evolving ensemble of musicians, performers, and visual artists, Parliament-Funkadelic activated space through collective rhythm. Working across Detroit, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, they transformed venues into full sensory worlds. The Mothership was a structure of frequencies, basslines and layered harmonies constructing a space of communion.
George Clinton directed these experiences as both bandleader and maker of space. He expanded perception and invited participation into P-Funk's expansive sonic environments. In Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts, Clinton offers a manifesto: “Every thought felt as true… blossoms sooner or later into an act and bears its own fruit.” In live performances Clinton points to a spatial principle of a “higher vibration”, where thought, sound, and growth are all forces that shape experience. His invocation of vibration echoes both acoustics and the metaphorical language of quantum theory, where energy and matter are understood as forms of oscillation.
Funkadelic used vibration to tune the room beyond the limits of sight. In Mothership Connection, Clinton’s chants and performances collapsed the boundary between artist and audience. As Gascia Ouzounian states, controlling sound is a way of controlling presence. P-Funk, however, designed presence as an open system—alive, communal, and bound together. This is the “higher vibration.
“Bowed fragments scrape into industrial resonance, while sustained tones blur into the hiss of air and the drone of engines. In this juxtaposition, nature and industry collide.”
In the early 1970s, Martin Rev and Alan Vega emerged from New York City's underground scene, pioneering a fusion of punk energy and electronic experimentation. Rev’s synthesizer, driven by an arpeggiator, generated a continuous cascade of notes, cycling through repeating patterns that created a hypnotic, trance-like effect, enveloping the audience. Rev’s drum machine pulsed with a heartbeat-like rhythm, imposing time on the audience while space seemed to collapse and expand around them. Vega’s presence on stage was commanding. His voice cut through the pulsating rhythm, turning individuals into subjects through the power of address, transforming the call into music itself and folding the audience into the performance. Through this hypnotic, repetitive beat, Rev and Vega cast spells over the spaces they performed in.
Reclaiming Space: Loud Sound
A Crowd Almost Dwarfed by Performers, National Peace Jubilee, Boston, June 1869.
Sound travels through the ear and floods the body with vibration. Depending on tone and frequency, it reflects, lingers, or presses against surfaces. Live performance can manipulate space through sound, creating environments where amplification and presence reorganize how bodies relate to one another. Tim Hecker expands this approach in his essay In the Era of Megaphonics (2007), tracing the rise of amplified sound from the 1880s onward. He examines how emerging technologies of the industrial revolution, such as megaphones, gramophones, and PA systems, transformed public address and performance. These tools shifted sound from embodied, proximate speech toward projected volume, redirecting attention from verbal meaning to sensory force. He situated this transformation within mass political rallies, religious revivals, and stadium-scale concert sites, in sound saturated space and intensified collective experience.
Amplification became a method for restructuring power relations, turning sound into an immersive field that conditioned behavior and expanded public presence. Distortion and amplification emerged as techniques for redrawing spatial experience. Hecker’s music practice and performances bring these principles to life, transforming venues into immersive soundscapes. His music employs deep drones, dissonant harmonies, and fluctuating frequencies to create a sense of vast, shifting space. Layered textures and industrial tones evoke tension and transcendence, while fog, darkness, and sustained sounds suspend time. In this way, Hecker sculpts space with sound, transforming the room into an instrument itself.
Reclaiming Space: Returning to Nature
Sound can trace the contours of the earth, bending industrial intensity toward the rhythms of wind, water, and foliage, shaping how we inhabit and feel the world around us. London-based artist Damsel Elysium’s music inhabits this intersection, weaving textures of industrial noise and the natural environment into sonic landscapes that reclaim both presence and place. Their work positions sound as a living medium, where body, space, and collective experience resonate together. Damsel reimagines the use of classical instruments, violin and cello, as tools for spatial experimentation. Beyond the traditional orchestral roles, these instruments become vehicles for evoking sounds of wind, machinery, and elemental textures. Bowed fragments scrape into industrial resonance, while sustained tones blur into the hiss of air and the drone of engines. In this juxtaposition, nature and industry collide.
Their performances extend beyond conventional venues into ritualistic encounters with natural environments. At Clandestino in Sweden, Damsel arranged flowers into a semicircle between themselves and the audience. The ritual culminated in the distribution of flowers to each participant, a gesture that carried the performance into the lives of the listeners. The ritual becomes a spatial act of reclamation, an invitation to experience the presence of nature together.
By blending the timbres of string instruments with industrial textures and natural soundscapes, Damsel activates a living dialogue between ecological memory and urban sound. Their work proposes new ways of feeling powerful in space through communion with the environment. Sonic environments, older than human architecture and music, remind us that sound has always been building the world around us.
Robin Sparkes, is a spatial designer, studying the kinesthetic experience of architecture. Her design, research, and writing practice traverses the relationship between the body, temporality, and the acoustics of space.
Review of the Arts and Crafts (1898)
Adolf Loos September 2, 2025
We have a new decorative art. It cannot be denied…
Wandbehang mit Alpenveilchen, Hermann Obrist. 1896.
Ten years before Adolf Loos published the seminal essay ‘Ornament and Crime’ that came, in a way, to be the defining text of modernism, he wrote an early critique of the burgeoning arts and craft movement that laid the foundation of his theories. With sharp wit and cultural insight, he argues that true modernity lies not in ornate symbolism or medieval nostalgia, but in functional beauty rooted in classical ideals and material honesty. Modern design must, he says, reflect modern existence, and the Art Nouveau movement that was sweeping his native Austria seemed to him to look backwards. More than twenty years before the Bauhaus school implemented his ideas, here Loos makes a powerful case for a restrained, purposeful, utilitarian design that reflects the genuine spirit of the time.
Adolf Loos September 2, 2025
We have a new decorative art. It cannot be denied. Whoever has seen the rooms of Liberty’s furniture store in London, Bing’s L’Art Nouveau on Rue de Provence in Paris, last year’s exhibition in Dresden, and this year’s in Munich, will have to admit it: the old styles are dead, long live the new style!
And yet we cannot take pleasure in it. It is not our style. Our time did not give birth to it. We do possess objects that clearly display the stamp of our time. Our clothing, our gold and silver jewelry, our gems, our leather, tortoise shell, and mother-of-pearl goods, our carriages and railroad cars, our bicycles and locomotives all please us very well. Only we do not make so much of a fuss about them.
These things are modern; that is, they are in the style of the year 1898. But how do they relate to the objects that are currently being passed off as modern? With a heavy heart we must answer that these objects have nothing to do with our time. They are full of references to abstract things, full of symbols and memories. They are medieval.
But we are beyond this epoch. Since the decline of the Western Roman Empire there has been no era that has thought and felt more classically than ours. Think of Puvis de Chavannes and Max Klinger! Has anyone thought more Hellenistically since the days of Aeschylus? Look at the Thonet chair! While subtly embodying the sitting habits of a whole era, it is not born out of the same spirit as the Greek chair with its lavish levels and at its backrest? Look at Louis Seize! Had the spirit of Pericles’ Athens not waft through its forms? If the Greeks had wanted to build a bicycle, it would have been exactly the same as ours. And the Greek tripods of bronze—I am not talking about those given as Christmas presents, but rather those that were used—they do not look exactly like our iron products?
But it is not Greek to want to express one’s individuality in the objects with which one surrounds oneself and which are in daily use. In Germany one sees the greatest variety of clothing; thus of all the civilized peoples, the Germans are the ones least filled with the Greek spirit. The Englishman, however, has only one outfit for a particular occasion, one box, one piece. To him the best is the most beautiful. Thus, filled like Greek, he chooses the best chair, the best box, and the best bicycle. Modifications in form arise not from a desire for novelty, but rather from the wish to make the good more perfect. Yet it is the boldest of our age to produce not a new chair, but the best chair.
However, in the exhibitions referred to, one saw only new chairs. The best chair will not be able to make any great claims to newness. For even ten years ago we had quite comfortable chairs, and the technique of the bent-wood chair, which helps man, has not changed so very much since then that it could also already be expressed in a different form. The improvement will not be something that no expert will be able to recognize. They will be limited to the millimeters of the millimeters in the dimensions or the grade of the wood. How difficult it is to build a truly new chair! How easy it is to invent a new chair! There is a very simple formula: make a chair that is exactly the opposite of that which has been made.
“The level of culture that mankind attained in classical antiquity can no longer be reached back to from man’s mind.”
In Munich, an umbrella stand was displayed which can probably best demonstrate what I have said concerning the abundant references and the medieval aspect of utilitarian objects. If it had been the task of the Greek or the Englishman to fashion such a stand, the first thing he would have thought about was to provide a good place for umbrellas to stand in. He would have reflected that the umbrellas ought to be able to be put in easily and taken out easily. He would have reflected that the umbrellas should not suffer any damage and that the covering material of the umbrella should not permit one to get stuck anywhere. But the non-Greek, the German, the average German, would do otherwise. For him, non-considerations take a back seat. The main thing for him is to point out the relationship of this object to the urn by means of its decorative form. Water plants twine their way from bottom to top, and each plant sits a frog. It does not trouble the German that the umbrellas can be ripped quite easily on those sharp leaves. He allows himself perfectly contentedly to be abused by his surroundings—as long as he finds them beautiful.
The level of culture that mankind attained in classical antiquity can no longer be reached back to from man’s mind. Classical antiquity was and is the model of all subsequent periods of culture. But there was cross-fertilization from the Orient that formed the greatest reservoir out of which new harvests of development flowed into the West. It almost seems as if Asia has bequeathed to us forever the last remains of her emotional strength. For we have already had to reach back to the furthermost points of the East, to Japan and Polynesia, and now we have come to an end. How good the Middle Ages had it! The Orient lay there still unexploited, and a voyage to Spain or to the Holy Land was enough to open up new worlds of form for the West. Arab influences transformed the nascent spirit of the West into the Gothic. The masters of the Renaissance had to reach out still further. They conquered Persia and India for us. Think of the Persian carpets without which no portrait of the madonna from this period is complete, and of the German artists and damascene work. The Rococo had to go as far as China; for us, only Japan still remains.
Now what is Japanese about our view of art? “That is a charming dress you are wearing, Madam. But what do I see? The one sleeve has a bow and the other one doesn’t. It’s very Japanese. You have a charming bowl of flowers in your vase. Nothing but long-stemmed flowers: roses, lilies, chrysanthemums. That’s Japanese too. If one wanted to appear truly immersed in favored Japan, we would find this kind of arrangement unbearable. Just ask the peasant girl on the Summe-ringo: she has never heard of Japan. And the peasant girl in her home always in an un-Japanese way. One part big in the middle, and then the others such as in a circle all around it. She finds it pretty.
In the first place, then, “Japanese” means giving up symmetry. Next, it means giving up everything that is represented. The Japanese represent flowers, but they are pressed flowers. They represent people, but they are wax people. It is a kind of objectivity taken to its extreme that cannot become subjective. But at the same time a naturalism is maintained. This is above all the world of embroidery, and it has to be one readily to anyone who delights in naïve textiles. I think of the inexpressibly charming embroidery by Hermann Obrist, for example, whose enthusiasm for Japanese art also, achieves his results.
The September issue of the leading arts and crafts paper Art et Décoration gives an account of a conversation in Paris between a reporter and René Lalique. Lalique, who is one of the greatest goldsmiths in Paris, has the courage to view the excessive use of artistically wrought form and not through materials. He uses copper to look especially distinguished and he adorns it with glass, opals, and even carnelians. This is inspiring. And yet he is wrong. In spite of the brave form, the spirit his objects is not derived from our own spirit; instead they gravitate toward the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They remind us of rustling silks and heavy velvets, rich furs and stiff brocades. It is the world of Charles V and Maximilian, the last knights, which suddenly appears before our eyes. But Lalique’s jewelry looks quite strange in the age of the lightly fluttering silk dress, in the age of the starched shirtfront and black tails. Who would not like them? But who would want to wear them? The pleasure they excite is only platonic. Our age demands small jewelry—jewelry that represents the greatest possible value on the smallest possible area. Our age requires of jewelry that it have “distilled costliness,” an “essence of the magnificent.” For this reason the most valuable stones and materials will be used in our jewelry. The jewelry’s meaning lies for us in the material. Thus, artistic work must content itself with bringing out the material’s worth as much as possible. In jewelry that is to be worn, the work of the goldsmith takes only second place. Lalique’s jewelry is real display-case jewelry, made as if to fill the treasury of a patron of the arts, who then graciously invites the public to admire the magnificent things in his museum.
Adolf Loos (1870–1933) was an Austrian architect, writer, critic and theorist known for his staunch opposition to ornamentation in design and his role in shaping modernist architecture. His landmark essay Ornament and Crime argued that decorative excess was a sign of cultural degeneration, helping to define the functionalist ethos of the 20th century.
Gain, the Nine of Disks (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel August 30, 2025
The Nine of Disks is where the fruits of our labors are made manifest in their glory…
Name: Gain, the Nine of Disks
Number: 9
Astrology: Venus in Virgo
Qabalah: Yesod of He
Chris Gabriel August 30, 2025
The Nine of Disks is where the fruits of our labors are made manifest in their glory. We are finally reaching the harvest -what was worked for throughout the suit, and invested properly in Prudence, now begins to reap rewards.
In Rider, we see a noblewoman in a long flowing yellow gown covered in red flowers. She wears a red bonnet and a falconer’s gauntlet, atop which is perched a small falcon with a red blinder. She stands in her full and fantastic vineyard, and by her feet there are nine disks.
In Thoth, we have three central disks, interlinking in red, blue, and green to form Crowley’s phallic and solar seal. Below there are three coins which bear the planetary Gods: Mercury, Venus, and the Moon. Above are Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars. The background is a deep emerald green. This card is given to Venus in Virgo, a careful approach to love and creation.
In Marseille, we have one central disk between two blocks of four disks. Two flowers with closed blossoms emerge from the center, ready to spread out. Qabalistically, this is the Foundation of the Princess.
The Nine of Disks is perhaps the most pleasing point in the suit;we’ve been working for a great deal of time, and now we see the great bounty in sight. This is the pleasure of a Friday, the final day of work before the freedom of the weekend.
As Venus in Virgo, the card relates to caution and criticality in love. Consider the scrutiny a farmer has when looking through the harvest; he must discard what is moldy, spoiled, or otherwise wrong. This is how a Virgo Venus approaches relationships, with an intelligent, seemingly uncaring eye. They will pick someone apart before they can give themselves over to love.
This careful, difficult process is what allows us to enjoy the fruits of the harvest - no one wants to eat bread filled with ergot or wine made of spoiled grapes. Gain represents both quantity and quality. It has done the work to increase the harvest, and has the taste to ensure its goodness.
Though we can expect some great benefits when this card appears, we must also keep our wits about us. Here a great deal of old phrases come to mind: a bad apple spoils the bunch, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, don’t count your chickens before they hatch. These phrases emerge from the rational, agricultural mindset which is embodied perfectly in this card.
When we pull this card, we will be entering a harvest period, whether this is beneficial or not depends entirely upon what we have sewn. Sow the wind and harvest the whirlwind, the wages of sin are death. If we have been diligent in our labor, we will be rewarded here.
Timothy Leary's Model of Consciousness
Molly Hankins August 28, 2025
While Timothy Leary was in and out of prison during the early 1970s, his friend and collaborator Robert Anton Wilson began expanding on Leary’s Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, which he published in multiple books the following decade…
Graphic for a Psychedelic Session led by Leary, 1965.
Molly Hankins August 28, 2025
While Timothy Leary was in and out of prison during the early 1970s, his friend and collaborator Robert Anton Wilson began expanding on Leary’s Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness, which he published in multiple books the following decade. Two of these, Prometheus Rising and the Cosmic Trigger series, use this model to describe the evolution of our species from mortals to higher dimensional selves. Humans move, Leary tells us, from a baseline Bio-Survival Intelligence that helps us stay alive into more refined states of being with a greater capacity for information sharing, creating and processing. According to Wilson, as information and understanding increases, humanity draws closer to a critical mass of self-awareness where we can begin to override our conditioning and experience true free will.
Wilson describes the Bio-Survival Circuit as part of our DNA programmed to, “seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism.” This circuit of consciousness orients us to what is supportive and nourishing and keeps us away from what is predatory or toxic. Born from ancestral survival strategies, this circuit first expresses in infancy to encourage bonding with the adult humans around us who can keep us alive. When we mature into adulthood, we can easily be brought back into this circuit when our nervous system is stimulated to produce the same state of fear we experienced as helpless infants. The results are predictable, robotic responses that make us incredibly easy to manipulate. Wilson wrote in Prometheus Rising, “A man or woman entering a new situation with the anxiety chemicals of a frightened infant coursing through the brain stem is not going to be able to accurately, observe, judge or decide anything very accurately.” As long as we allow our nervous systems to be negatively influenced, we can’t access free will.
In modernity, we instead of looking to interpersonal relationships to soothe our nervous systems from survival anxiety, we instead look to money. This brings us into the second circuit of hierarchy determined by our perception of territory associated with the ‘ego’. Known as the Emotional Territorial Circuit, in this level of consciousness money is a form of territory and the scarcity of it can keep us locked in these lower circuits.This imprint often comes from and is triggered by a father figure, or the lack thereof. According to Wilson and Leary, intergenerational DNA mutations take place based on imprinting we get as children that affects our nervous system in a way that conditions behavior. If we get stuck on this circuit, we lock in a territorial mindset of protecting ourselves from scarcity.
The third circuit is the Semantic Intelligence Circuit, which maps our reality tunnel and informs what is possible or not. These include language, concepts, tools, art, theories, equations, music, or poetry and all wind up informing our internal monologue somehow. “The Semantic Circuit allows us to sub-divide things, and reconnect things, at pleasure. There is no end to its busy-busy-busy labeling and packaging of experience,” Wilson writes of the third circuit. At this level of consciousness, we’re still easily manipulated because our reality tunnel can be reoriented by activating the Bio-Survival Circuit using fear. We update our map based on information gleaned from a dysregulated nervous system operating on first circuit consciousness data. Our range of responses shrinks and we begin to see the world through the lens of our wounding, which we’re revisiting every time our nervous system is dysregulated.
We can begin to break out of this strange loop at the semantic level by consciously updating our reality tunnel map, which expands our perception and propels us forward. The first and second circuits run on negative feedback as a precursor to returning to stasis, whereas at the third, semantic level we’re enriched by tailoring our perception of reality to meet our needs. This creates a forward propulsion out into the world and brings us to the next circuit -Socio-Sexual Intelligence. This is imprinted in adolescence and creates connection with others from either a regulated or dysregulated state. At this level, dysregulation can express itself in more covert ways, like being overly rational or moralistic. As Wilson wrote in Cosmic Trigger II, “Socio-Sexual Intelligence allows us to manage our social and sexual relations in ways that keep us reasonably happy or at least out of jail.” We learn how to get what we want on this circuit, hopefully in healthy ways.
“Operating on all eight circuits is an integration of body, mind, spirit and emotions that gives us the regulated state Hermeticists agree is necessary for successfully influencing reality.”
As we update our reality tunnel map in ways that help us get what we want, we become more difficult to manipulate. The fifth, Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit processes mind-body feedback loops and is imprinted throughout our lives by heightened states of awareness, whether ecstatic or fearful. We can manipulate our state of being to our advantage, moving beyond negative Emotional Territorial reactivity to a level of consciousness where we can select our preferred state of being from the platform of a regulated nervous system. This necessary mutation activates a new era of humanity that appears supernatural, but learned nervous system regulation represents a leap in evolution at the neuro-social level.
At the sixth Collective Neurogenetic Circuit, we come in contact with the Akashic Records, which holds the ancestral data informing our genetic expression. Wilson writes, “The Neurogenetic Circuit is best considered, in terms of current science, as the genetic archives activated by excitement of anti-histone proteins - the DNA memory coiling back to the dawn of life and containing all the genetic blueprints for the future of evolution.” At this level we remember the Creator through ancestral knowing that connects us to higher consciousness. It can come in the form of a spontaneous spiritual experience or from knowing that all of life is connected, from a work of art, meditation, being in nature or a heartfelt message, and the knowledge will stick with us if we spend enough time in sixth circuit consciousness.
At the seventh circuit level of Meta-Programming Intelligence, we learn to re-imprint ourselves so we can choose our preferred reality tunnel. We tune into specific circuits from this level and utilize them to our advantage. Instead of being trapped in the reality tunnel our brain has manufactured, we can imagine how we want it to be and tell our brain that story to program it accordingly. “The Meta-Programming Circuit, known as the soul in Gnosticism… simply represents the mind becoming aware of itself,” Wilson states, distinguishing the soul from our human self. “Simply accept that the universe is so structured that it can see itself, and that this self-reflexive arc is built into our frontal lobes, so that consciousness contains an infinite regress, and all we can do is make models of ourselves making models. Well, at that point, the only thing to do is relax and enjoy the show.”
As our soul kicks back to enjoy the human show, we enter the eighth and final Non-Local Quantum Intelligence Circuit and learn to consciously affect life at the subatomic level. Call it magic, magick, manifestation, or mystical experience, but Wilson calls it being able to affect reality on a meta-physiological level. Non-Local Quantum Intelligence Circuit activation can be brought on by near death or out-of-body experiences, and sometimes can be activated by psychedelics. To really work with it is to have agency in affecting reality to conform to our will, which is the definition of magic. Operating on all eight circuits is an integration of body, mind, spirit and emotions that gives us the regulated state Hermeticists agree is necessary for successfully influencing reality. Paradoxically, by existing in this detached way, we create the right conditions to materially affect our lives.
Towards the end of Prometheus Rising Wilson reminds us, “It is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your emotions than to have them inflicted upon you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever… The future exists first in imagination, then in will, then in reality.” And as we take responsibility for curating our reality tunnel and map, we experience true free will.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
A Forager’s Take on Fairytales Pt. 1
Izzy Johns August 26, 2025
Long ago in Drumline, County Clare, in the late 19th Century, an old farmer and his wife huddled for warmth in a mud hut…
Izzy Johns August 26, 2025
Long ago in Drumline, County Clare, in the late 19th Century, an old farmer and his wife huddled for warmth in a mud hut. Many a cold winter passed, and finally, the man agreed to build his wife a house of bricks and mortar.
He set to work the following Spring. Not a day had passed when the old man received a visit from a traveler, who spoke these words:
“I wouldn’t build there if I was you. That’s the wrong place. If you build there you won’t be short of company, whatever else.”
The old man paid him no mind, but sure enough, the moment he and his wife lay down to rest in their new home, they were plagued by noise and disruption. Furniture was knocked over, cutlery strewn across the floor, crockery smashed. They couldn’t get a wink of sleep. But, as sure as day, whenever they went to investigate, they found nothing and no one. The old couple sought the help of the local preacher, who recognised this as the work of the Sidhe, the Little Folk of this land. He tried to exorcize the house, but to no avail.
After five sleepless nights, the man wearily set off to the market to sell their cows. It was the Gale day, the day that their rent was due, and money was sparse. English colonisers had seized land from the Irish farmers some years before. Now they were renting it back to them, and the rent was high.
The old man got a fair price for the cows, and he stopped at a roadside pub on the way home. It was there that he encountered the traveler once again. In desperation, the man begged the traveler for advice. He would do anything so that the Little Folk would let him rest. The traveler walked him home, and took him to stand in the yard, on the far side of the house.
He said:
“Now, look out there and tell me what you see.”
[…] “The yard?”
“No,” he says, “look again.”
“The road?”
“No. Look carefully.”
“Oh, that old Whitethorn bush? Sure, that’s there forever. That could be there since the start o’ the world.”
“D’you tell me that now?”
The old man walked out to the gable o’ the house, called [him], then says, “come over here.”
He did.
“Look out there, and tell me what do you see?”
He looked out from that gable end, and there, no farther away than the end o’ the garden, was another Whitethorn bush, standing alone.
“Now,” says the old man, “I told you. I warned you. The fairies’ path is between them bushes and beyond. And you’re after building your house on it.”
Upon the instruction of the traveler, the man built two doors in either side of the house, in line with the Whitethorns. From then on, the Little Folk had a clear passage, and the man and his wife were not bothered again.¹
“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”
British Goblins, 1880. Wirt Sikes.
I was very struck by this account. It feels different to the rich, meandering folk-tale jewels I love so much, that are wrapped in mythos and allegory. Instead, this tale falls into the realm of family and community stories, that are still “lived in”, in this case, by the old couple’s grandson, who told this story to Eddie Lenihan in the living room of the very same house. He said that he still leaves the two doors ajar each night so as to let the fairies pass. There’s no use in locking them, he says, for they’ll only be open again by the morning.
Make no mistake, this story is not hearsay. A book of fairy tales might read like a book of fiction, but it isn’t. What we see in this tale, and so many others like it, is a relic of a complex faith system from times gone by, and it’s important that we storytellers hold it in that way. This story comes from Ireland, where the fairies are called Sídhe, or Sí, though often called by euphemisms to avoid catching their attention. The Sidhe are the descendants of the people of Danu, the Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of fallen Gods and Goddesses that dwell in the liminality between our world and the otherworld, the An Saol Eile. It’s only fair to acknowledge their providence, not least is it a crucial act of cultural preservation.
Fairies have a range of habitats depending on where you are live. In Ireland, they are particularly fond of two places: a lone Whitethorn (Hawthorn) tree, and the forts - those grand, grassy mounds of earth, often covered in a greater diversity of wild plants than their surroundings. In this tale, the old couple has disturbed not a habitat, but a passage between habitats. More savvy builders would have driven four hazel rods into the ground, marking out the proposed foundations of the house. If by the next day any rod had moved, the house should be built elsewhere.
The fairies in this story star in a role that I’ve seen in countless tales; defending their habitat from ecological destruction. Here, they were able to communicate with the intruders and resolve the problem quickly. It’s a good thing that the old couple were forthcoming. Fairies will always give warnings, but it’s perfectly within their power to cause grave suffering if those warnings aren’t heeded. They can be at best didactic and at worst violent, but they have no interest in troubling a person who isn’t troubling them. I can’t condone the violence, but I marvel at how proficient they are at protecting and stewarding the land. Plus, they greatly enrich the ecosystem. Various tales see fairies fertilizing soil for generous farmers, and producing abundances of wildflowers and fungi. It’s said that the rings of mushrooms we see in woodlands and meadows are where they’ve danced.
The Intruder, c.1860. John Anster Fitzgerald.
Thinking about this with an Ecologist’s gaze, fairies are a fascinating species. They might well be a larger genus with loads of regionally-specific variants like small people, spriggans, buccas, elves, bockles and knockers, browneys, goblins, dryads, gnomes and piskies. There’s a wealth of anecdotal evidence of their existence, thousands and thousands of stories, stretching back millenia, yet we’ve never successfully captured and studied them. Perhaps what makes this species most unique is their ability to outwit ours. Their cunning gently prods at our human arrogance, contesting our claim to be the most “developed” of species.
Far less frequently in the UK do we hear tales of the Little Folk interfering with larger property developments. In London, for example, you’ll scarcely come across a piece of land that hasn’t been leveled ten times over, and most Whitethorns are confined to cultivated hedges. I wonder how many forts have been destroyed in my neighborhood. Our lack of understanding of the fairies’ life cycles and physiology makes it pointless to speculate on why larger builds don’t experience ramifications from the little folk. It’s hard not to wonder if heavy machinery, giant crews of contractors and big blocks of hundreds of dwellings haven’t been too much for the fairies to contend with. I hate to think that, unbeknownst to us, urbanization might have wiped them out. If fairies are still around, it’s clear that they’re gravely endangered.
If this is the case, then it makes fairies one of over two million species under threat of extinction. It’d be such a shame if these creatures, these stories, and the feelings that they represent, disappeared altogether. I love this tale for giving us such a tangible example of humans making space for fairies and subsequently managing to co-exist peacefully. The fairies in this story are model land guardians, and from that we humans have a lot to learn.
Izzy Johns is a forager and storyteller. She teaches foraging under the monicker Rights For Weeds and manages the Phytology medicine garden in East London. You can find her work on Substack [rightsforweeds.substack.com] and Instagram [instagram.com/ rightsforweeds] .
¹As recounted to Eddie Lenihan in 2001 by the couple’s grandson, recorded in ‘Meeting the Other Folk…”
Knight of Swords (Tarot Triptych)
Chris Gabriel August 23, 2025
The Knight of Swords is the most active form of air. He is the hot and sharp wind that cuts through the sky. In each iteration, we see the Knight galloping ahead with his sword ready…
Name: Knight of Swords
Number: 1
Astrology: Gemini, Fire of Air
Qabalah: Vau of Vau
Chris Gabriel August 23, 2025
The Knight of Swords is the most active form of air. He is the hot and sharp wind that cuts through the sky. In each iteration, we see the Knight galloping ahead with his sword ready.
In Rider, we have an impassioned knight in reflective armor. His lifted visor reveals a face of great anger. He has a red cape, feathered helmet, and holds his sword high. His grey horse is galloping at a great speed and the trees in the background bend with the wind.
In Thoth, we see a knight in green armor from above. His pointed helmet has four bladed propellers, and his face is obscure. He carries two swords pointed at one target. His horse is long and orange tan. They are riding in the sky, below them three birds soar.
In Marseille, the knight is armored and expressionless. His pauldron has a face upon it. His long sword points up and ahead, and his blue horse is rearing up, as if preparing to make a great leap.
The Knight of Swords is a missile, a flying war machine. One can think of fighter planes, attack helicopters, drones, and projectiles. The Knight in Thoth shows a visual sympathy with the modern single rotor helicopter, which had not yet been invented when this card was drawn. The card strongly calls up the Flight of the Valkyries scene from Apocalypse Now.
From the start of aerial warfare, there was a sense of “nobility” in pilots. They were, quite literally above the war. When they were not fighting with one another, they dropped bombs, and early on, barbaric spikes and nails onto the enemy soldiers below. Pilots had the privilege, for perhaps the first time in history, of not seeing the product of their violence.
In modern times, we have brought this detachment to a profound extreme with drone warfare. Remote pilots sit in offices and use televisions and video game controllers to kill real people. This is the nature of the Knight of Swords, extreme violence without emotion. A pure intellect bent on achieving its will, without concern for others. Where the Page of Swords is the fog of war, and the confusion and hesitation of violence, the Knight cuts through the fog indifferently and lands his blow.
On a personal scale, this is expertise and effortless action, movement perfectly aligned with the intellect. The card is given to Gemini, so one can think of someone with a playful intelligence, someone with a very sharp tongue.
When we pull this card, rapid movement will be necessary to achieve what one seeks, one may need to literally speed off somewhere, or to direct their thoughts and words very intentionally, a bit of cruelty may be in order.
Dear Brother (1849)
Fyodor Dostoevsky August 21, 2025
At the age of twenty eight, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death…
Dostoevsky, Vasily Perov. c. 1872.
At the age of twenty eight, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death. He had written two novels, received to moderate acclaim, that had gained him entry to a social progressive literary circle known as the Petrashevsky Circle. Fearing another revolution, Tsar Nicholas I ordered the arrest and execution of the entire group, on the grounds of reading and distributing banned revolutionary material. At the last moment, while standing in front of the firing squad, Dostoevsky’s sentence was commuted and his life was spared - though he spent the next four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by six years of compulsory military service in exile. He wrote this letter to his brother that very day, detailing the events, and sharing what he thought might be his final words. Dostoevsky survived the camp, and the service, and returning to society became the most acclaimed writer of his generation, leaving a legacy that is near unparalleled today.
Fyodor Dostoevsky August 21, 2025
Brother, my precious friend! All is settled! I am sentenced to four years' hard labour in the fortress (I believe, of Orenburg) and after that to serve as a private. Today, the 22nd of December, we were taken to the Semionov Drill Ground. There the sentence of death was read to all of us, we were told to kiss the Cross, our swords were broken over our heads, and our last toilet was made (white shirts). Then three were tied to the pillar for execution. I was the sixth. Three at a time were called out; consequently, I was in the second batch and no more than a minute was left me to live. I remembered you, brother, and all yours; during the last minute you, you alone, were in my mind, only then I realised how I love you, dear brother mine! I also managed to embrace Plescheyev and Durov who stood close to me and to say good-bye to them. Finally the retreat was sounded, and those tied to the pillar were led back, and it was announced to us that His Imperial Majesty granted us our lives. Then followed the present sentences. Palm alone has been pardoned, and returns with his old rank to the army.
I was just told, dear brother, that today or tomorrow we are to be sent off. I asked to see you. But I was told that this was impossible; I may only write you this letter: make haste and give me a reply as soon as you can. I am afraid that you may somehow have got to know of our death sentence. From the windows of the prison-van, when we were taken to the Semionov Drill Ground, I saw a multitude of people; perhaps the news reached you, and you suffered for me. Now you will be easier on my account. Brother! I have not become downhearted or low-spirited. Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us. There will be people near me, and to be a man among people and remain a man for ever, not to be downhearted nor to fall in whatever misfortunes may befall me — this is life; this is the task of life. I have realised this. This idea has entered into my flesh and into my blood. Yes, it 's true! The head which was creating, living with the highest life of art, which had realised and grown used to the highest needs of the spirit, that head has already been cut off from my shoulders. There remain the memory and the images created but not yet incarnated by me. They will lacerate me, it is true! But there remains in me my heart and the same flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this, after all, is life. On voit le soleil! Now, good-bye, brother! Don't grieve for me!
Now about material things: my books (I have the Bible still) and several sheets of my manuscript, the rough plan of the play and the novel (and the finished story A Child's Tale) have been taken away from me, and in all probability will be got by you. I also leave my overcoat and old clothes, if you send to fetch them. Now, brother, I may perhaps have to march a long distance. Money is needed. My dear brother, when you receive this letter, and if there is any possibility of getting some money, send it me at once. Money I need now more than air (for one particular purpose). Send me also a few lines. Then if the money from Moscow comes, — remember me and do not desert me. Well, that is all! I have debts, but what can I do?
Kiss your wife and children. Remind them of me continually; see that they do not forget me. Perhaps, we shall yet meet some time! Brother, take care of yourself and of your family, live quietly and carefully. Think of the future of your children. . . . Live positively. There has never yet been working in me such a healthy abundance of spiritual life as now. But will my body endure? I do not know. I am going away sick, I suffer from scrofula. But never mind! Brother, I have already gone through so much in life that now hardly anything can frighten me. Let come what may! At the first opportunity I shall let you know about myself. Give the Maikovs my farewell and last greetings. Tell them that I thank them all for their constant interest in my fate. Say a few words for me, as warm as possible, as your heart will prompt you, to Eugenia Petrovna. I wish her much happiness, and shall ever remember her with grateful respect. Press the hands of Nikolay Apollonovich and Apollon Maikov, and also of all the others. Find Yanovsky. Press his hand, thank him. Finally, press the hands of all who have not forgotten me. And those who have forgotten me — remember me to them also. Kiss our brother Kolya. Write a letter to our brother Andrey and let him know about me. Write also to Uncle and Aunt. This I ask you in my own name, and greet them for me. Write to our sisters: I wish them happiness.
And maybe, we shall meet again some time, brother! Take care of yourself, go on living, for the love of God, until we meet. Perhaps some time we shall embrace each other and recall our youth, our golden time that was, our youth and our hopes, which at this very instant I am tearing out from my heart with my blood, to bury them. Can it indeed be that I shall never take a pen into my hands? I think that after the four years there may be a possibility. I shall send you everything that I may write, if I write anything, my God! How many imaginations, lived through by me, created by me anew, will perish, will be extinguished in my brain or will be spilt as poison in my blood! Yes, if I am not allowed to write, I shall perish. Better fifteen years of prison with a pen in my hands!
“Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness.”
Write to me more often, write more details, more, more facts. In every letter write about all kinds of family details, of trifles, don't forget. This will give me hope and life. If you knew how your letters revived me here in the fortress. These last two months and a half, when it was forbidden to write or receive a letter, have been very hard on me. I was ill. The fact that you did not send me money now and then worried me on your account; it meant you yourself were in great need ! Kiss the children once again; their lovely little faces do not leave my mind. Ah, that they may be happy! Be happy yourself too, brother, be happy!
But do not grieve, for the love of God, do not grieve for me! Do believe that I am not downhearted, do remember that hope has not deserted me. In four years there will be a mitigation of my fate. I shall be a private soldier, — no longer a prisoner, and remember that some time I shall embrace you. I was to-day in the grip of death for three-quarters of an hour; I have lived it through with that idea; I was at the last instant and now I live again!
If any one has bad memories of me, if I have quarrelled with any one, if I have created in any one an unpleasant impression — tell them they should forget it, if you manage to meet them. There is no gall or spite in my soul; I should dearly love to embrace any one of my former friends at this moment. It is a comfort, I experienced it to-day when saying good-bye to my dear ones before death. I thought at that moment that the news of the execution would kill you. But now be easy, I am still alive and shall live in the future with the thought that some time I shall embrace you. Only this is now in my mind.
What are you doing? What have you been thinking to-day? Do you know about us? How cold it was today!
Ah, if only my letter reaches you soon. Otherwise I shall be for four months without news of you. I saw the envelopes in which you sent money during the last two months; the address was written in your hand, and I was glad that you were well.
When I look back at the past and think how much time has been wasted in vain, how much time was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in ignorance of how to live, how I did not value time, how often I sinned against my heart and spirit, — my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each minute might have been an age of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! Now, changing my life, I am being reborn into a new form. Brother! I swear to you that I shall not lose hope, and shall preserve my spirit and heart in purity. I shall be reborn to a better thing. That is my whole hope, my whole comfort!
The life in prison has already sufficiently killed in me the demands of the flesh which were not wholly pure; I took little heed of myself before. Now privations are nothing to me, and, therefore, do not fear that any material hardship will kill me. This cannot be! Ah! To have health!
Good-bye, good-bye, my brother! When shall I write you again? You will receive from me as detailed an account as possible of my journey. If I can only preserve my health, then everything will be right!
Well, good-bye, good-bye, brother! I embrace you closely, I kiss you closely. Remember me without pain in your heart. Do not grieve, I pray you, do not grieve for me! In the next letter I shall tell you how I go on. Remember then what I have told you: plan out your life, do not waste it, arrange your destiny, think of your children. Oh, to see you, to see you! Good-bye! Now I tear myself away from everything that was dear; it is painful to leave it! It is painful to break oneself in two, to cut the heart in two. Good-bye! Good-bye! But I shall see you, I am convinced — I hope; do not change, love me, do not let your memory grow cold, and the thought of your love will be the best part of my life. Goodbye, good-bye, once more! Good-bye to all!
Your brother,
Fiodor Dostoevsky.
Ursula K. Le Guin ( 1929 – 2018) was an American author, best known for her science fiction works The Hainish Cycle and The Earthsea Cycle. Over the course of her life, she wrote more than twenty novels and more than a hundred shrot stories, as well as seminal works of literary criticism.
Enfolded in Living Reality Pt. 2
Tuukka Toivonen August 19, 2024
We were warned about the folly of viewing reality purely through an analytical or conceptual lens. The path to becoming fully human vanishes into thin air…
Plate from Oculus Artificialis, Johann Zahn. 1685.
Tuukka Toivonen August 19, 2025
Philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) warned us decades ago about the folly of viewing reality purely through an analytical or conceptual lens. They were highly critical of the dominance of such “conceived” or analytical perception, or an excessive reliance on abstract concepts, fixed categories and the relentless dissection of phenomena into their constituent parts. For these philosophers, analytical seeing and comprehension was far less than the totality of reality. Instead, they suggested that a continuous, indivisible “lived” perception formed the true ground for all our experience, from the the physical to the cerebral. That perception was the gateway to fully entering the embodied, living reality that always already enfolds us. As society further devalues and grows blind to lived perception and the reality it gives access to, individuals and contemporary organizations not only delude themselves by treating imperfect models of reality as constituting actual reality, they risk distancing themselves from what the ecological thinker and phenomenologist David Abram has called the sensuous world. This deprives us of our very ability to relate to ourselves, other forms of life, and the wider cosmos within which we have always evolved and found profound meaning. As a result, the path to becoming fully human vanishes into thin air.
In the sobering words of philosopher, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, “we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it”. We designate our abstract concepts, theories, images and other representations as primary and that which is truly present and alive as secondary. In this topsy-turvy rendering of existence, everything is reversed: health metrics, digital content, synthetic voices and scalable “nature-based solutions” come to be seen as more real and preferable than the dynamic and interrelated living wholes that they selectively abstract and exploit.¹ Indeed, in our reductionist fervour,² we have forgotten that complexity and constant change are the norm. Our disconnect mode of thought make it hard to accept this, but intuitively we know that, as McGilchrist puts it, simplicity represents “a special case of complexity, achieved by cleaving off and disregarding almost all of the vast reality that surrounds whatever it is we are for the moment as modelling as simple”.³ The act of simplifying what we experience or hope for does help us cope with our daily lives, but taking artificial representations of reality as truth effectively distorts and devitalizes our existence.
Consider how prioritizing unreal representations at the expense of a directly experienced living reality might manifest in relationships and communications. The relational space has become a site of active algorithmic mediation and intervention, with a rise in people developing intimate connections with chatbots of varying kinds. Consider a scenario where you are facing psychological hardship and long to be listened to, understood and supported, even if you are not (yet) able to expose the heart of the matter. In such a situation, an advanced AI chatbot may well serve as a supportive partner on the face of things, and it may even manage to intelligently unpick many of the root reasons behind your suffering. However, it would still amount to a situation where representations and cognition get treated as primary and where that which is truly alive and present is relegated to a secondary role. What gets devalued and displaced is the presence of another human being who feels your pain, their deeper potential for empathizing, and their simply being there, sharing time with you. In this and many other insidious and subtle ways, distorted takes on what constitutes primary reality have the power to corrupt our experiential fabric and the very foundations of our wellbeing.
Exploring the space between our familiar social realities and the awesome quantum worlds investigated by physicists, I feel that our prevailing assumptions about human reality need to be subjected to a profound test at an earthly level. Although I do not believe our universe is the product of a computer simulation, we have entered a simulated situation all the same by assigning the status of reality almost exclusively to the words, concepts and technologies we have invented rather than to the interconnected, mysterious and experientially rich reality that underpins our existence. This is a trap we cannot easily escape at a collective level, but at an individual level there is a lot that we can do to transcend the limits of our increasingly controlled experiential realities. Spending more time deeply immersed in art, music, meditation and natural environments is one enjoyable way to begin a journey back into living reality. For more ambitious moments, consider open discussions with those around you on which realities we might treat as primary and how we might define the ground upon which new ideas and technologies are to be built. Such engagements might reveal that many of us are much more seriously interested in exploring new ways to “live in the presence of the world” than common representations of our proclivities would have us believe.
Tuukka Toivonen, Ph.D. (Oxon.) is a sociologist interested in ways of being, relating and creating that can help us to reconnect with – and regenerate – the living world. Alongside his academic research, Tuukka works directly with emerging regenerative designers and startups in the creative, material innovation and technology sectors.
¹ This distinction between favouring specific solutions or products rather than the underlying life-giving wholes they are derived from offers a basis for assessing whether an action or enterprise is genuinely regenerative or not.
² McGilchrist traces this overwhelming tendency in contemporary culture back to the way society has systematically over-emphasized and amplified the linear, grasping disposition of the left side of the brain at the expense of the more integrative and holistic orientation of the right hemisphere, owing partly to the preponderance of Cartesian thought and economic ideologies of extraction. McGilchrist has an extensive background in neuroscience research and his work differs decisively with how pop neuroscience and psychology have contrasted the hemispheres and created simplified images of “left-brain” vs “right-brain” thinkers.
³ McGilchrist, I., 2021. The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world. Perspectiva Press, London, pp. 17-18.