Past Life Billionaires (Lost Songs Project)

Marfa, Texas, Early 1900s.

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Molly Hankins November 6, 2025

Welcome to the first Lost Songs Project, a new series telling the stories behind songs lost to the world. The vulnerability of being seen, particularly in an emotional state, can be overwhelming but  when all of that emotion is poured into a piece of music, it can sometimes feel too intimate to share. Those are exactly the type of songs this project was made for - the ones that didn’t fit an album, meet the expectations of a record label, or, in the case of the songs you're about to hear, were made by a couple of guys in Marfa, Texas helping their friend Dustin turn a broken heart into an album. 

This is the story of an east Texas painter, builder and mechanic named Dustin Pevey, co-founder and singer of the short-lived band, Past Life Billionaires. They released their self-titled album on SoundCloud in 2012, and deleted it less than two years later. We spoke with Tavahn Ghazi, one of the producers, musicians and friends that brought these songs to life. After learning that Dustin, who'd never sang before, had “the voice of an angel,” Tavahn gave himself fully to the project knowing it might never be heard. With the help of Joe Trent, the only classically trained musician of the three, they recorded Dustin's heart-wrenching vocals on an iPad borrowed from the public school Joe was teaching at. Joe made the backing tracks to sketch out the songs, then Tavahn recorded all the instruments for each one in an art gallery-turned-crash-pad next to the train tracks. His recording set-up consisted of a laptop running GarageBand placed next to the drums, keyboard or guitar amp. 

It is worth contemplating while listening to these heart-wrenching songs that the woman Dustin wrote this album about is now his wife. He declined to participate in the interview, but trusted his friend and former bandmate Tavahn to tell the story of how Past Life Billionaires came to be and not be. 

1. Nothin’ But Your Tail Lights 2. Call Me 3. Right On The Money 4. Left Me Cold 5. Lohan Stain
   6. Diamond Pillowcase 7. Winning Lotto Ticket. 8. Mercedes Benz Bounce 9. Criminals

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MH: What were the conditions that created the anomaly known as Past Life Billionaires?

TG: We were all sitting in Marfa, and there's not much to do. And that's kind of the point. I’d been in Marfa seven years, and you become friends with all the other weirdos who have decided to isolate themselves entirely from reality or bill paying jobs and get a shed in the middle of the Chihuahuan plains, and figure yourself out. I bumped into these two characters from East Texas named Dustin Pevey and Joe Trent. Joe was a high school teacher, and Dustin was making paintings that were phenomenal. And we all had a musical background, but it was like, in Marfa, there's just nothing else to do. So  the nothing of just getting the freedom to sit around and write or play music is almost too much. You think, ‘maybe I should watch the shadows move across that plane just for a few more days’ and see if that works. 

Ultimately, that grows sort of old. I got this old guitar, and Joe just got an iPad from the school.  We were using GarageBand and then something called iPad studio which was the most cursory software. That project started happening really quick, and it ended really quick because Dustin would just keep showing up to my house. I was living in a kind of gallery next to the train so my house would vibrate 22 times a day. We'd be recording and have to pause to feel an earthquake. Past Life Billionaires was that. It just started with learning that my friend Dustin had this soul singer inside of him, that this stoic East Texas mechanic kind of person had this vibrant, heartbroken soul singer inside of him was just wild. 

We all knew that we're doing this for the sake of doing it, but we were listening to Miguel and Frank Ocean and these kind of ethereal, sad boy, R&B guys, but we're sitting in the country. And these kids are from East Texas, so they got twang in their hearts. And I'm from God knows where, and so I've got the whole universe in my heart. 

MH: What was the recording process like? Were you just holding your MacBook up to the instruments?

TG: Oftentimes in underpants, with some just ferocious hangover and getting blasted by drums and guitar. We would just set the laptop up in front of the amp and just go. They would give me these sketches, and then I would work them out, and we'd expand them. And then after a few days, the whole thing was done.  Dustin was going through this renaissance in himself of power and heartbreak and that's why that the record’s good, because it's very honest and direct, and you can feel that, and it doesn't need to be from someone who has had a music career or who had a background. I think that the transcendent aspect of it is just the direct, immediate honesty. 

And you can relate to that, can tell it was done for the right reason. So at that point, we've already satisfied the whole experience, and then everything after that kind of would be, you know, how much does my ego need to be fed? And what am I willing to do to bring myself into that level of light? When it's that intimate, it doesn't really have to extend that far for it to have fulfilled its purpose. It was a whirlwind because neither of us were making music. I had gone to Marfa to produce for this other band, and they stopped making music, so I just sat there quietly and learned how to produce on my own. And it was nice to be given some project that I liked a lot with a dear friend that was a really exploratory, cathartic adventure. It just so happens to sound cool, so that's good. 

MH: What's your musical background? 

TG: I got a leftover guitar from my brother when he went to college, and I started listening to Jerry Garcia really intensely, taught myself to play guitar, and then failed out of high school miserably. I went to music school to make up for it, and learnt how to translate dreams or feelings through instruments, and then came home and didn't do much with it.  So I went to Marfa  to learn, and started producing. 

I've just been making music non stop since I was a kid, and not releasing any of it.

MH: So Joe and Dustin would come to you with these ideas and then you'd bring them to life?

TG: Yeah, they'd do little beds, little chords, really cool changes. Dustin had a strange ability to capture melodies from other songs like you could put on any radio station in the world. He knows every lyric and every melodic run. He has a brain that sees those options and sees sort of how to fumble through which options you're gonna make, which choices you're gonna make. He was somehow also very fast at distilling that and then finding something. 

People have such stringent ideas of their categories, like ‘I'm a singer, so you have to filter me as a person through this identity that I've chosen for myself’. But when you don’t define yourself by that, and it just becomes another tool or medium to figure out what's happening to you, and, it's just significantly more interesting.

Marfa at that time was full of a sense of  ‘I'm here to be alone and to work on my craft’, but then the sheer vast loneliness will get you. And I watched a lot of people leave after six months. I think there were a handful of us that were just so committed to that, that emptiness. And the scene there was, how do you fill that in? 

We knew Dustin didn't want to be in front of people playing music and so we already knew what the future of it was, which is a blessing and a curse.  But we knew we weren't going to really support it or push it. Dustin was friends with Pat Carney, who's the drummer of The Black Keys, and had played it for him. And he's like, “Yo, this is, like, one of the best records I've heard this year.” Like, and so, like, we had people who were interested in that record in a very serious way. And somehow we got on NPR’s All Songs Considered.

But the scene in Marfa, there's really nothing there. Dustin was experiencing something that hurt him, and he's a  person who happens to have a variety of tools with which to describe that. He had been, at that point, a visual artist, but has a background in just being able to do anything.  Joe is this masterful human being, and really knew what chords are supposed to happen when and why, in a way Dustin and I didn't.  

And so he would just give Dustin a little bed to lay on. I think they just trusted each other, having this old familial background. And then I'm likely to come into that process and want to throw every wrench I can find at it, because it's how you manage insecurity when you're talented and you don't know what to do with it. I've engaged with the recording process in so many different ways, and I've just never felt this immediate sense of ‘I get it and I'm doing it correctly, that's weird.’ And so it kind of blew us all away to feel that.

MH: So between writing and recording, how long do you think it took to make these songs? 

TG: Oh, I mean, each of those songs would would take a day to sketch up, and then Dustin would go home and lay in bed and sing into the fucking iPad and and he next day they'd essentially be done. Then we just spent all this time on YouTube trying to learn how to mix in Garage Band, because none of us knew shit about a computer. So I think it took four years, but probably only two hours of work. 

You know, this the last record I made, the releasing had to happen, sort of because of a tragedy that happened regarding that. But part of what stopped me from really giving it more credence was the question, ‘What am I going to do with it?’ It's almost going to be more heartbreaking to stretch that out. In Past Life Billionaires we were never really doing it, like, professionally. 

Having known that earlier in the process was really cool, because you don't build this big idea up of what it's going to be and how people are going to react, you're just like, fuck, it's going to die on the vine with a lot of other delicious fruit.

There's a song “Diamond Pillowcases” that was the first song that was made, and the lyrics are so good. He says  “A rock and roll souvenir that you bought with predatory lending from a Shell cashier.” And I was like, ‘What are you doing? What's happening inside of you?’ I love whatever story you're trying to tell me. 

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Towards an Interspecies Architecture

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Robin Sparkes November 4, 2025

Bird’s songs are swallowed by human cacophony. The low hum of industrial noise, the pulse of traffic, the ongoing percussion of construction, drown out their call. Noise pollution erodes communication across the living networks, our resonant ecology. Birds, like so many species, are disrupted by the presence of humans in the places we build and live. 

As architects and as humans, it is our responsibility to design for multispecies resilience in acts of attunement. It requires a sensitivity, a listening to the subtle soundscape of cohabitation. From the materiality and form of space - its orientation, its ecological companions - to trees and shrubs, wind and sun. Design, in this sense, becomes an instrument capable of amplifying or softening the audible world. Our task is to compose spaces that listen as much as they speak, acknowledging the lives of our neighbours as part of the living score.

To design for birds is to think like a bird. What works, they learn, what they learn, they remember, and what they remember, they refine, and adapt. "Cognition in birds is subject to a positive feedback loop involving niche breadth. Greater cognitive potentials permit more elaborate nests, which can enable species to enjoy broader niches" (Gould 2007). In this way, birds are architects of their own worlds, shaping and reshaping their environments in response to sound, space, and shelter. Therefore, when we observe the bird, we can begin to understand what needs are specific to their environment.

Just as it does for the bird, every element participates in shaping our domestic space. This is a matter of materials; vegetation shapes space and dampens intrusive noise. We can create acoustic shadows, subtly linking structure to substructure and the life around it. Porous, absorptive or diffusive surfaces help dissipate low-frequency noise, reducing reverberation. Precise orientation, elevation and spatial arrangement can preserve communication exchange. 

How can we begin to imagine interventions in our design choices that sustain life in an anthropocentric world? Birdhouses and nesting niches can be incorporated into the surfaces, ornamentation and rhythm of a building, where we provide space to live alongside other species.

When we design with research-led intentions, paying close attention to how birds think, we engage in what Donna Haraway describes as "tentacular thinking”. Haraway uses the metaphor of tentacles to suggest that life is threaded, interconnected, and networked. Instead of thinking of individual beings as isolated points or bounded spheres, she urges us to see them  connected by many lines, paths of relationship, influence, response, and affect. When we listen to the birds, we begin to hear our own environment anew. We can apply through the act of research and design, both the lives we neighbour and the spaces we ourselves inhabit.

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“Designing with birds teaches us to listen differently”

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History offers both architectural precedents and spiritual connection to living with birds. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, during the Ottoman empire, architects integrated birdhouses, known as kuş köşkü, serçe saray, or güvercinlik, into the walls of mosques, madrasas, fountains, mausolea, and other public and religious buildings. These miniature palaces were often ornately detailed, harmonizing with the aesthetic of the host structure. They were placed high to receive sunlight, oriented away from human made noise, and sheltered from predators. This careful integration reflects a cultural ethic of respect for birds and an understanding of their role in urban biodiversity. Many of these birdhouses still survive on the façades of Istanbul’s historical architecture.

Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell (1900–1914) offers a modern parallel in Barcelona. Terraced walls and walkways incorporate built-in bird nests, while abundant vegetation and stonework create habitat niches, perches, and feeding grounds. The sheltered cavities reduce mortality from cold and rain and, acoustically, offer places where quieter calls have space to be heard. The park supports many bird species, for both resident and migratory birds. It uses organic geometries, local materials, and the subtle integration of built and natural elements to merge urban environment and nature. In this way, architecture, material choices, spatial arrangement, and flora converge to create spaces where birds thrive. 

Both precedents demonstrate that designing for birds can be an act of cohabitation. Ottoman birdhouses and Gaudí’s integrated nests show that ornament and function can coexist. Vegetation continues to play a critical role by absorbing noise, partitioning space, and creating acoustic shadows. Elevation, orientation, and exposure to sunlight and wind enhance the transmission of high-frequency calls while also preserving cultural and spiritual practices in connecting us to nature. 

Designing with birds teaches us to listen differently and to carefully observe the interplay of sound, space, and life. Through attentive research and considered intervention, we can learn about the birds and also about the sites we inhabit, the environments we shape, and the connections between human and nonhuman life. Here we can discover new ways of inhabiting the world ourselves. Architecture, therefore, can become a bridge across species, a reminder that responsible design is an act of listening, learning, and responding.

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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.

The Trigrams

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A diagram of I Ching hexagrams sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Joachim Bouvet.

Chris Gabriel November 1, 2025

The Trigrams are the eight base elements which make up all of the hexagrams of the I Ching, they are made of three solid or broken lines, which form simple pictures of their elements. Their ideogrammic names can also help us understand the character of each element. Together they form a sort of visual poem from which we can feel the state of nature they signify.

A solid grasp of these eight elements and their names will allow you to intuitively grasp their combinations.

☰ 

Heaven 

Heaven is the purest expression of Yang: positive, light, creative - it is natural harmony. Within a hexagram this can be “treasure”, divine manifestation, or clear sky.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the three solid lines as a clear, bright sky.

乾

When we look at the ideogram for Heaven, we can see the motion of the Sun through the sky, a little man, and a growing plant. Together, this is akin to Heaven as “Natural Order”.

Qabalistically, Heaven is given to Daath, the veil over the Supernal Triad of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah. But to simplify things, it is essentially Kether, the highest expression of the Divine among the trigrams. 

☷

Earth 

Earth is the purest expression of Yin: negative, dark, receptive - it is material reality. Within a hexagram this can be dirt or darkness.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the three broken lines as dark fertile soil, a tilled field.

坤

In the ideogram for Earth, we see soil and God. The good Earth.

Qabalistically, Earth is Malkuth, “the Kingdom”, the lowest part of the Tree and relates to Saturn and Earth.

☲

Fire

Fire is the second expression of Yang. It is called Clinging, for the way that fire clings to what it consumes. In a hexagram this can be either the Sun or fire itself.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the broken line as a piece of wood and the two solid lines as flames. 

 離

Looking at the ideogram for Fire, we see “Legendary” - a little creature with a tail, an X face, a crown, and a Bird. Together, these become “Legendary Bird” and I relate this to the Phoenix. In modern usage, the character means ‘to depart’, to fly away.

Qabalistically, Fire is Tiphereth, the sixth Sephiroth “Beauty”, and the Sun.

☵

Water

Water is the second expression of Yin. It is the Abysmal, in the way water falls. In a hexagram it can be a puddle, a body of water, or rain.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the solid line as a piece of wood floating and the two broken lines as the water upon which it floats.

埳

As we look at the ideogram for Water we see earth, and a man falling into an abyss.

Qabalistically, Water is Yesod, the ninth Sephiroth “Foundation”, and the Moon.

☳

Thunder

Thunder is the third expression of Yang. It is the Arousing or exciting. In a hexagram this can be thunder directly, or simply an excited movement.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the two broken lines as a dark sky, and the solid line below as the explosion of a lightning strike.

震

When we look at the ideogram for Thunder, we see rain, which is made up of sky 天, a big man, and the little drops of rain in his chest. Below is the character for shake, which is a cutting tool. Thunder is the shaking that accompanies rain.

Qabalistically, Thunder is Gevurah, the fifth Sephiroth “Severity”, and Mars.

☶

Mountain

Mountain is the third expression of Yin. It is stillness, focus, and heaviness. In a hexagram, this can be a mountain directly or simply something heavy.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the two broken lines as the dark mountain and the solid line as the point where the peaks reach the sky.

艮

The ideogram depicts an eye with legs, literally focusing.

Qabalistically, Mountain is Netzach, the seventh Sephiroth “Beauty”, and Venus.

☴

Wind/Wood

Wind is the fourth expression of Yang. It is subtle, gentle, and penetrating. In a hexagram this can be wind directly, a tree, or wood in general.

When we see this trigram we can visualize a growing tree reaching for the sky, the broken line below is the tree, the two solid lines are the sky.

巽

Fittingly, the ideogram for Wind depicts two serpents or two people kneeling at a table. 

Qabalistically, Wind is Hod, the eighth Sephiroth “Intelligence”, and Mercury (the two serpents perfectly fit with his Caduceus)

☱

Lake

Lake is the fourth expression of Yin. It is joyous, pleasant, and easy. Unlike Water, the lake is contained, just as a cup contains. In a hexagram this can mean a literal lake, or pleasant easy movement.

When we see this trigram we can visualize the two solid lines as the depths of the lake and the broken line as the surface. Consider how the surface of water ripples and makes waves, but the depths remain calm.

兌

The ideogram for lake is a dancing man, a smiling face with arms and legs.

Qabalistically, Lake is Chesed, the fourth Sephiroth “Mercy”, and Jupiter (the Bringer of Joy).

Elements

In these eight trigrams we are given a doubling of the traditional four Western elements. Unlike Tarot, which draws from planets, signs, and elements, here we are dealing with a much more streamlined system. If you can grasp these eight elements, their interactions across the hexagrams will be much easier to understand. They form images of natural phenomena, rather than human characters.

By utilizing Qabalah and Astrology, we can make fascinating connections between the Tarot and I Ching. Consider the opposition of Thunder and Mountain, one excited and one still, their corresponding planets, Mars and Venus, function in exactly the same way. If you are familiar with Qabalah or Astrology, this will make the hexagrams far more accessible.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

Art Today and The Film (1965)

Still from Federico Fellini’s ‘8 1/2’, 1963.

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Written in a moment of existential change for Cinema, the great theorist of his time, Rudolf Arnheim, makes an impassioned plea for the continued importance of the medium. In a liberated, confused, post-war world that was moving away from detached, representational images and toward a more direct engagement with reality and physical existence, Cinema seemed particularly under threat. As the art form perhaps most directly built upon a mimesis of everyday life, it had to adapt or die. Arnheim makes the argument that, in 1965, this adaptation was already underway with a burgeoning new wave able to, by portraying reality itself as strange, ghostly, and disoriented, express the same existential unease that drives other modern arts away from images. Cinema, he argues, has the unique ability to explore the interior world of the mind, while other mediums must move towards a physicality.

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Rudolf Arnheim October 30, 2025

If the various arts of our time share certain traits and tendencies they probably do so in different ways, depending on the character of each medium. At first glance, the photographic image, technically committed to mechanical reproduction, might be expected to fit modern art badly—a theoretical prediction not borne out, however, by some of the recent work of photographers and film directors. In the following I shall choose a key notion to describe central aspects of today's art and then apply this notion to the film, thereby suggesting particular ways in which the photochemical picture responds to some aesthetic demands of our time.

In search of the most characteristic feature of our visual art, one can conclude that it is the attempt of getting away from the detached images by which artists have been portraying physical reality. In the course of our civilization we have come to use images as tools of contemplation. We have set them up as a world of their own, separate from the world they depict, so that they may have their own completeness and develop more freely their particular style. These virtues, however, are outweighed by the anxiety such a detachment arouses when the mind cannot afford it because its own hold on reality has loosened too much. Under such conditions, the footlights separating a world of make-believe from its counterpart and the frame which protects the picture from merging with its surroundings become a handicap.

In a broader sense, the very nature of a recognizable likeness suffices to produce the frightening dichotomy, even without any explicit detachment of the image. A marble statue points to a world of flesh and blood, to which, however, it confesses not to belong—which leaves it without a dwelling-place in that world. It can acquire such a dwelling-place only by insisting that it is more than an image, and the most radical way of accomplishing it is to abandon the portrayal of the things of nature altogether. This is, of course, what modern art has done. By renouncing portrayal, the work of art establishes itself dearly as an object possessing an independent existence of its own.

But once this radical step has been taken, another, even more decisive one suggests itself forcefully. It consists in giving up image-making entirely. This can be illustrated by recent developments in painting. When the abstractionists had abandoned the portrayal of natural objects, their paintings were still representing colored shapes dwelling in pictorial space, that is, they were still pretending the presence of something that was not there. Painters tried various remedies. They resorted to collage, which introduced the "real object" into the world of visual illusion. They reverted to trompe l'oeil effects of the most humiliating dullness. They discredited picturemaking by mimicking its most commercialized products. They fastened plumbing fixtures to their canvases. None of these attempts carries conviction, except one, which seems most promising, namely, the attachment of abstract painting to architecture. Abstract painting fits the wall as no representational painting ever has, and in doing so it relinquishes the illusion of pictorial space and becomes, instead, the surface-texture of the three-dimensional block of stone.

In this three-dimensional space of physical existence, to which painting thus escapes, sculpture has always been settled. Even so, sculpture, as much as painting, has felt the need to get away from image-making. It replaces imitative shape with the left-overs of industrial machinery, it uses plaster casts, and it presents real objects as artifacts. All these characteristic tendencies in the realm of objectmaking are overshadowed, however, by the spectacular aesthetic success of industrial design. The machines, the bridges, the tools and surgical instruments enjoy all the closeness to the practical needs of society which the fine arts have lost. These useful objects are bona fide inhabitants of the physical world, with no pretense of imagemaking, and yet they mirror the condition of modern man with a purity and intensity that is hard to match.

To complete our rapid survey, we glance at the performing arts and note that the mimetic theatre, in spite of an occasional excellent production in the traditional style, has sprouted few shoots that would qualify it as a living medium. Significantly, its most vital branch has been Brecht's epic theatre, which spurns illusionism in its language, its style of acting, and its stage setting, and uses its actors as story-tellers and demonstrators of ideas. Musical comedy, although so different from the epic theatre otherwise, owes its success also to the playing down of narrative illusion. The spectacle of graceful and rhythmical motion addresses the audience as directly as do Brecht's pedagogical expositions. And the modern dance can be said to have made its victorious entrance where the costumed pantomime left off. The most drastic move toward undisguised action seems to have been made by the so-called happenings. They dispense the raw material of thrill, fear, curiosity, and prurience in a setting that unites actors and spectators in a common adventure.

If we have read the signs of the times at all correctly, the prospect of the cinema would seem to look dim—not because it lacks potential but because what it has to offer might appear to be the opposite of what is wanted. The film is mimetic by its very nature. As a branch of photography, it owes its existence to the imprint of things upon a sensitive surface. It is the image-maker par excellence, and much of its success derives from the mechanical faithfulness of its portrayals. What is such a medium to do when the artificiality of the detached image makes the minds uneasy?

Ironically, the motion picture must be viewed by the historian as a late product of a long development that began as a reaction to a detachment from reality. The motion picture is a grandchild of the Renaissance. It goes back to the birth of natural science, the search for techniques by which to reproduce and measure nature more reliably, back to the camera obscura, which for centuries was used by painters as a welcome crutch, back to the tracings of shadow profiles, which created a vogue of objective portraiture shortly before photography was invented. The moving photograph was a late victory in the struggle for the grasp of concrete reality. But there are two ways of losing contact with the World of perceivable objects, to which our senses and feelings are attuned. One can move away from this world to find reality in abstract speculation, as did the pre-Renaissance era of the Middle Ages, or one can lose this World by piercing the visible surface of things and finding reality in their inside, as did post-Renaissance science—physics, chemistry, psychology. Thus our very concern with factual concreteness has led us beyond the surfaces to which our eyes respond. At the same time, a surfeit of pictures in magazines and newspapers, in the movies and on television has blunted our reactions to the indiscretions and even the horrors of the journalistic snapshot and the Grand Guignol. Today's children look at the tears of tragedy and at maimed corpses every day.

The cinema responded to the demand for concreteness by making the photographic image look more and more like reality. It added sound, it added color, and the latest developments of photography promise us a new technique that will not only produce genuine three-dimensionality but also abolish the fixed perspective, thus replacing the image with total illusion. The live television show got rid of the time gap between the pieture and the pictured event. And as the painters took to large-size canvases in order to immerse the eye in an endless spectacle of color, blurring the border between the figment and the outer world, the cinema expanded the screen for similar purposes. This openness of form was supplemented by an openness of content: the short-story type of episode no longer presented a closed and detached entity but seemed to emerge briefly from real life only to vanish again in the continuum of everyday existence.

The extreme attempt of capturing the scenes of life unposed and unrehearsed, by means of hidden cameras was received with no more than a mild, temporary stir—somewhere between the keyhole pleasures of the peeping Tom and those of the sidewalk superintendent. For the curious paradox in the nature of any image is, of course, that the more faithful it becomes, the more it loses the highest function of imagery, namely, that of synthesizing and interpreting what it represents. And thereby it loses the interest. In this sense, even the original addition of motion to the still photograph was a risky step to take because the enormous enrichment gained by action in the time dimension had to be paid with the loss of the capacity to preserve the lasting character of things, safely reomoved from their constant changes in time.

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“The cinema remains faithful to its nature. It derives its new nightmares from old authenticity.”

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Following the example of painting, the cinema has tried the remedy of abstraction. But the experiments, from Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling to Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren and Len Lye, have amounted mainly to a museum's collection of venerable curiosities. This may seem surprising, considering the great aesthetic potential of colored shapes in motion. But since abstract painting is also on the decline, my guess is that once the artist abandons image-making he has no longer a good reason to cling to the two-dimensional surface, that is, to the twilight area between image-making and object-making. Hence the temporary or permanent desertion of so many artists from painting to sculpture and, as I said, the attempts to make painting three-dimensional or attach it to architecture.

The film cannot do this. There seems to be general agreement that the cinema has scored its most lasting and most specifically cinematic successes when it drew its interpretations of life from authentic realism. This has been true all the way from Lumière to Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Robert Flaherty and more recently de Sica and Zavattini. And I would find it hard to argue with somebody who maintained that he would be willing to give the entire film production of the last few years for Jacques-Yves Cousteau's recent under-water documentary, World Without Sun.

However—and this brings me to the main point of my argument—Cousteau's film creates fascination not simply as an extension of our visual knowledge obtained by the documentary presentation of an unexplored area of our earth. These most authentically realistic pictures reveal a world of profound mystery, a darkness momentarily lifted by flashes of unnatural light, a complete suspension of the familiar vertical and horizontal coordinates of space. Spatial orientation is upset also by the weightlessness of these animals and dehumanized humans, floating up and down without effort, emerging nowhere and disappearing into nothingness, constantly in motion without any recognizable purpose, and totally indifferent to each other. There is an overwhelming display of dazzling color and intricate motion, tied to no experience we ever had and performed for the discernible benefit of nobody. There are innumerable monstrous variations of faces and bodies as we know them, passing by with the matter-of-factness of herring or perch, in a profound silence, most unnatural for such visual commotion and rioting color, and interrupted only by noises nobody ever heard. What we have here, if a nasty pun is permissible, is the New Wave under water.

For it seems evident that what captures us in this documentary film is a most successful although surely unintentional display of what the most impressive films of the last few years have been trying to do, namely, to interpret the ghostliness of the visible world by means of authentic appearances drawn directly from that world. The cinema has been making its best contribution to the general trend I have tried to describe, not by withdrawing from imagery, as the other arts have, but by using imagery to describe reality as a ghostly figment. It thereby seizes and interprets the experience from which the other visual arts tend to escape and to which they are reacting.

In exploiting this opportunity, the cinema remains faithful to its nature. It derives its new nightmares from old authenticity. Take the spell-binding opening of Fellini's 8½, the scene of the heart attack in the closed car, stared at without reaction by the other drivers, so near by and yet so distant in their glass and steel containers, take the complete paralysis of motion, realistically justified by the traffic jam in the tunnel, and compare this frightening mystery with the immediately following escape of the soul, which has all the ludicrous clumsiness of the special-effects department. How much more truly unreal are the mosquito swarms of the reporters persecuting the widowed woman in La Dolce Vita than is the supposedly fantastic harem bath of the hero in 8½ And how unforgettable, on the other hand, is the grey nothingness of the steam bath in which the pathetic movie makers do penitence and which transfigures the ancient cardinal.

The actors of Alain Robbe-Griilet move without reason like Cousteau's fishes and contemplate each other with a similar indifference. They practice absent-mindedness as a way of life and they cohabit across long distances of empty floor. In their editing technique, the directors of the Nouvelle Vague destroy the relations of time, which is the dimension of action, and of space,. which is the dimension of human contact, by violating all the rules in the book—and some readers will guess what book I am referring to. Those rules, of course, presupposed that the film maker wished to portray the physical continuity of time and space by the discontinuity of the pictures.

The destruction of the continuity of time and space is a nightmare when applied to the physical world but it is a sensible order in the realm of the mind. The human mind, in fact, stores the experiences of the past as memory traces, and in a storage vault there are no time sequences or spatial connections, only affinities and associations based on similarity or contrast. It is this different but positive order of the mind that novelists and film directors of the last few years have presented as a new reality while demolishing the old. By eliminating the difference between what is presently perceived and what is only remembered from the past, they have created a new homogeneity and unity of all experience, independent of the order of physical things. When in Michel Butor's novel, La Modification, the sequence of the train voyage from Paris to Rome constantly interacts with a spray of atomized episodes of the past, the dismemberment of physical time and space creates a new time sequence and a new spatial continuum, namely, those of the mind.

It is the creation and exploitation of this new order of the mind in its independence of the order of physical things which, I believe, will keep the cinema busy while the other visual arts explore the other side of the dichotomy—the world of physical things from which the mind seems so pleasantly absent.

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Rudolf Arnheim (1904 – 2007) was a German-born film theorist, writer, art critic, and psychologist, who helped develop an academic language around cinema.

The Healing Wisdom in a Cup of Sayu

Woodblock Print, c.1800.

Tuukka Toivonen October 28, 2025

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“It means that this ability to improve, to be healthy and happy, is always within us. […] Illness occurs when we don’t live according to the law of nature—when we are in dis-ease with nature.” —Kazuko Hillyer Tatsumura, in Healing Your Healing Power (2020)

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Contemporary society has invented a virtually infinite variety of beverages to help keep us hydrated and provide us with refreshment. The mere act of selecting a coffee, tea, soda, smoothie or milk to suit our taste has become a feat of some complexity, requiring special attention. But, in the midst of such abundance, how often do we pay serious attention to the temperature of the drink we choose? Beyond opting for cold drinks in the summer or hot teas and coffees in cooler seasons, how likely are we to think about temperature beyond this crude hot-cold binary? And how attuned are we to sensing which drink temperature might actually feel best and have a beneficial effect on our bodies?

I gave little attention to such subtleties until recently, when I began to notice a strange habit proliferating among my Japanese friends. Instead of unthinkingly accepting the usual offer of cold water with ice while sitting at a Tokyo restaurant, they would insist on being served sayu instead. While the word literally translates as ‘white’ or plain hot water (白湯), what normally arrives is a cup of warm water that is comfortable to drink—neither too hot or tepid. 

The standard response to a casual inquiry about a person’s preference for sayu is that it helps one’s body and intestines remain warm. Prodded further, a sayu drinker usually goes on to explain that excessively cooling the insides of one’s body is not only unnecessary and uncomfortable but also harmful to health, especially for women. The slight inconvenience of politely refusing icy drinks therefore seems well worth the effort as it is viewed as a way to ward off disease.¹ For many of my friends it therefore appears to be the natural and obvious thing to do (even if the vast majority of restaurants in Japan do not appreciate this preference just yet!).

When the opportunity arose, a few months back, to join a well-known Japanese holistic summer retreat rooted in East Asian notions of self-healing I began to reflect further on the significance of sayu. I began to see how the simple practice of ingesting warm water might conceal within it an entire system of thought, built around notions of energy, balance, and non-interference in natural processes. 

The minimalistic retreat in the foothills of Mt. Ariake—housed in calming wooden buildings carefully embedded in the local terrain—was designed around the three simple pillars of food, rest and light movement. Nurtured by two daily macrobiotic meals, ample sleep and long walks along pristine mountain rivers and forest paths away from urban noise, I proceeded to undergo an unexpected, quiet transformation during my five-day stay. This culminated in a profound sense of lightness, insight and joy and there was a sensation of simultaneous physical and mental healing and wholeness. I found myself leaving the retreat with a greatly strengthened interest in the nature of self-healing.

Soon after returning to my urban life I began to perceive how, my regenerative research interests notwithstanding, I had previously hesitated to fully embrace the total intelligence of my own body, from astonishing intrinsic ability to heal to its tendency to align with myriad rhythms beyond its boundaries. I had not appreciated deeply enough the ways that such intelligence—from subtle bodily sensations to circadian rhythms, the fluctuations of the nervous system and the aliveness of the microbiome—sustain us as living beings and constantly interact with and adapt to the world around us. 

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“The underlying system of healing views nature’s energy as immensely more powerful and superior to anything that humans might themselves invent or implement.”

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Having been through a powerful healing experience in a setting that was distinctly non-interventionist was, therefore, a rather humbling experience. I began to wonder anew whether our conscious rational selves had much to do at all with fundamental healing processes. Perhaps we were no more in charge of the dynamics of our bodily health than we were able to consciously control our billions of gut microbes. Is our equating of self-healing with ‘self-care’ a delusion, owing to a misplaced confidence in the ability of the self to direct and, indeed, lead the healing process? Just as millions of cells within our body regenerate second-by-second through what is an essentially automated process, perhaps healing in general was simply something that our bodies did naturally when not disrupted or hampered in some way. I came to understand that the essential thing to do—very nearly the only thing we could do—was to create the conditions that would allow natural processes to unfold to their fullest extent, without disturbance from things like chronic stress, excessive stimulation or the ingestion of harmful foods and drinks. 

This basic principle—doing what we can to enact ideal conditions for self-healing while minimizing harmful disruptions—lies at the very heart of East Asian medicine as it is generally practiced in Japan, China and beyond. Though rarely articulated at this level of abstraction, the daily nutritional choices and other health-related behaviors of contemporary Japanese people (including those that have to do with temperatures) still reflect this central principle and it is through this lens that they can be situated and understood as a coherent whole. Part of an expansive field of richly diverse practices, the underlying system of healing views nature’s energy (expressed as ki in Japan and chi in China) as immensely more powerful and superior to anything that humans might themselves invent or implement. This means that even medicinal herbs, central as they are for Eastern medicine, are administered with great caution and moderation, so as to avoid negative effects from excessive energy. Humans may seek to borrow from nature’s wisdom and power, but we must do so from a position of humility and great care. In the final instance, Eastern traditions hold that the natural flows of energy and unimpeded healing processes ultimately sustain health and vitality. This transcends the restoration of health after disease: those who engage in resonant practices can hope to reach tremendous levels of vitality, energy and thriving well beyond minimal standards of health, defined as the absence of illness.

Although too vast a topic to properly explore here, the more one begins to engage with Eastern healing beliefs and practices, the more one starts to also question the role of the self in relation to healing. Could it be that genuine self-healing can only unfold when we side-step, or overcome, our conventional or habitual focus on the self and the ego? Perhaps a more helpful way to understand ‘self-healing’ as a phenomenon is through a paradoxical inversion of terms: rather than perceiving it as a process of ‘healing by yourself’ or ‘through a self-led practice or process’, it seems to be equally—or perhaps even primarily—about ‘healing from the self’ and from its afflictions. A part of me was left with a strong intuition that it was only through reducing the centrality of the self could we allow organic healing processes to reach their fullest potential. 

Through all these experiences and reflections, my friends’ preference for sayu over water with ice began to make a lot more sense. Even if the drinkers themselves could not always fully articulate the underlying philosophy, theirs was a practice that sought to be in tune with the body’s naturally occurring processes and energies, causing the least amount of disturbance and stress on internal organs and the body as a whole. With time, I have also personally become more attuned to how it feels to ingest drinks of different temperatures and I pay much more attention to keeping myself warm as the seasons change, especially when short on sleep or healthy food. 

In the meantime, even as adjustments such as these tend to be made by individuals in the context of private lives, I have noticed that in some cases their influence can reverberate more widely, encouraging social change. Beyond merely fulfilling their own preferences and protecting their own bodies, perhaps my sayu-drinking friends are subconsciously quietly reshaping their wider environment by gently prompting others to get curious about what they ingest and why. With a bit of luck, maybe even the baffled restaurant staff asked to serve warm water instead of cold drinks will one day start inquiring into the healing secrets concealed in a plain cup of sayu.

*I would like to thank my wife, Eri, for first opening my eyes to Eastern healing systems — including the subtle benefits of sayu — and for so beautifully embodying that wisdom in her own gentle way of being.

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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. 

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¹ There is a vast health literature in Japan that echoes this belief. For instance, the highly regarded immunologist Toru Abo (1947-2016) elaborated as follows: “Since energy is utilized more easily when it is first burned or transformed, when you’re deprived of heat you waste energy. In other words, if your body is cold, you need a certain amount of energy to warm it. Wearing something that makes your body cold, staying too long in a cold environment such as an air-conditioned room, or making your intestines cold by drinking too many cold drinks all cause you to lose energy. If you’re already in a weakened state, this can lead to illness.” (From Toru Abo’s Secret of Immunity, 2020, p.31)

The I Ching

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A diagram of I Ching hexagrams sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz from Joachim Bouvet.

Chris Gabriel October 25, 2025

What is the I Ching?

If you have interacted with the I Ching, you may know it as a book of poetry used for divination. You throw coins, draw the hexagram, and check the guide in the back to find the number. You read the six line poem and contemplate. This is a very modern means of interacting with the oracle and misses the soul, the meat, and the true purpose of the work!

The I Ching is by far the oldest “book” in the world. In primordial times, the story goes, a dragon named Fu Xi sat patiently and studied nature. While looking at the shell of a turtle, the Trigrams came to him as an eightfold set of elements. From these, he constructed the I Ching and taught humanity his wisdom.

The Chinese written language is one of the oldest, nearly 5,000 years old, yet the trigrams predate it, and are in fact the basis for it. 

The Trigrams alone existed for a long time, then the 64 hexagrams came about, a stacking of two trigrams. Long after that, they were numbered and named. Far later, the accompanying poems were written. By our modern focus on the writing, we are essentially missing the whole picture.

In this exploration of the I Ching we will focus on the symbolism of the Trigrams, and the ideogrammic study of their names. By focusing on the oldest, and most visual parts of the text, we will illuminate the oracle.

This Translation

I studied the I Ching for 7 years before I started this translation in 2022. After reading Carl Jung’s work on the I Ching, I was moved enough to buy a copy, though I found the text academic, and harder to grasp than the visual Tarot.

It was after studying Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa’s “Ideogrammic Method” of interpreting Chinese characters that I began to grasp the nature of the I Ching as a  set of natural images, much like the Tarot, but “Eastern” enough for the ‘Western’ world to  be blind to. 

We are reading what we should be seeing.

Aleister Crowley recognized the 64 hexagrams as a direct mirror to the 32 paths of the Qabalah. He mapped the Tao, the Yin and Yang, and the eight trigrams to the Tree of Life, but did not follow through with his translation and commentary. I sought to complete the work he began, and as such have created the first fully corresponded I Ching.

My study of Nursery Rhymes then gave me the profoundly simple and effective language with which I could express the “simple and easy” truths of the text. I sought to make the I Ching accessible to anyone.

The Cosmology of the I Ching

As with all things, we start with the Tao.

1
Form of Tao
The Tao that is spoken
Is not the Tao

The Name that is Named
Is not the Name

The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The Name is the Mother of the ten thousand things

The Desireless sees its marvels 
The Desirer sees only its shadows

Two move as One
Yet their names are different

One is Mystery; Mystery within Mystery
This is the gate to all marvels

-Tao Te Ching

From the “Creative Nothing” of the Tao, duality emerged. Magickally, this is expressed as 0=2, but we can understand it also as, Yin and Yang, a feminine and a masculine energy. These are the black and white halves of the whole. Yang is light and masculine and is symbolized by a solid line —, Yin is dark and feminine and is symbolized by a broken line - -.

Within these halves exist a dot of the opposite, these are the “four elements”. Younger Yang is two solid lines, while Older Yang is a solid line topped by a broken one. Younger Yin is two broken lines, while Older Yin is a broken line topped by a solid line.

These four also mirror the first line of the I Ching: 

Heaven Origin Prosperity Reap Pure

The four characters following the first fill the rest of the book endlessly, they are essentially the four elemental virtues of the I Ching.

元 -Yen

亨 -Heng

利 -Li

貞- Ching

元
Yen depicts a Man with a big Head.

This is often translated as some form of “Origin” or, “Generation”, etc. It is “first”, in the way that the Head of an organization is - , the Capo.

亨
Heng depicts a Child and a Shrine.

Often translated as “progress” and “prosperity”, this is the prosperity in the way that the children of God, the Sons of Heaven experience prosper. Or, progress and prosperity through child sacrifice is an equally possible understanding.

利
Li depicts wheat and a knife

It is “harvesting” and “gaining”, reaping rewards gains after sowing work.

貞

Ching, or Ding depicts a vessel.

It is purity, like the Grail.

They can mapped to the Western elements as:

Fire: Yen, Younger Yang
Water: Ching, Younger Yin
Air: Heng, Older Yang
Earth: Li, Older Yin

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, THOUGHTS

The ALL In All of the Creative Process

Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 1652.

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Molly Hankins October 23, 2025

Hermetic teachings tell us that to be in the creative process is to engage with the very same energy which creates and sustains all of life. THE ALL of consciousness, known as God or The Creator,  becomes all there is in the material realm by way of directing divine will is an idea described by The Kybalion, which contains a comprehensive breakdown of Hermetic principles, as a vibratory transmission. “It is taught that the process consists of the lowering of vibration until a very low degree of vibratory energy is reached, at which point the grossest possible form of matter is manifested. This process is called the stage of involution, in which THE ALL becomes ‘involved’ or ‘wrapped up’ in its creation,” The Kybalion explains. The artist who becomes so immersed in their creation that they come to live inside it is mirroring the very act of divine creation emanating from the original source of consciousness. 

Eventually this involutionary process begins to reverse into an evolutionary process subject to the Hermetic principle of Rhythm which states that, like our breath, all must go in and out of being. During the outpouring of creative energy, the principle of Vibration brings inspiration into matter until the cause of this outpouring finally ceases. Only then does the evolutionary process of individualization begin, which will extend mental energy back from the material world towards the divine, as described by the principle of Mentalism. 

To engage mentally is to offer divine attention, the Latin root of the word attention coming from the Latin attendere,  to reach towards or stretch out. Attention leads to creation, creation leads to individualization, and that extension of mental energy reaches out to reconnect and unify us with the original source of divine, primordial creativity - THE ALL. We can experience this passively via the principle of Vibration just by giving our attention to the creative work of another. Thiscan have measurable, physical impact on us; changing our brainwave state, stimulating the nervous system and triggering the release of hormones.

For Hermeticists, offering our attention to THE ALL in meditation is the portal to access the endless well of divine creative energy. When we close our eyes in meditation and pry our attention away from the grip of the material world, we return attention to THE ALL, the source of all creation. the font of divine inspiration, the all which contains THE ALL.. In drawing from this well, the artist becomes a pure channel for the will of THE ALL. Much of the work of Hermetic students involves removing the blockages of subconscious programming in order to become a pure channel, unimpeded by human limitation and societal conditioning.

The Kybalion asks, “Have the Venus of Medici, the Sistine Madonna, the Apollo Belvidere, spirits and reality of their own, or do they represent the spiritual and mental power of their creators?” Both are true, and for Hermeticists the paradox of that truth is an indicator of its divinity. Only when we recognize paradox are we mentally extending and thereby evolving ourselves beyond the duality of life in the material realm back towards a more holistic, divine understanding. Of course some of Shakespeare’s personality complex is contained in his characters, but so are truths so universal we recognize THE ALL coming through them, even hundreds of years after these works were written. 

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“Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole.”

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“The ALL is in the earthworm, and yet the earthworm is far from being THE ALL,” The Kybalion states. “And still the wonder remains, that though the earthworm exists merely as a lowly thing, created and having its being solely within the mind of THE ALL - yet THE ALL is imminent in the earthworm, and in the particles that go to make up the earthworm. Can there be any greater mystery than this of ‘All in THE ALL; and THE ALL in all?” This explanation is both philosophically and technically grounded in the holographic model of reality, described by author Michael Talbot in his book The Holographic Universe. 

The holographic model suggests that every part of THE ALL, including the earthworm, contains all the information about the whole of THE ALL. In the same way a tiny piece of a holographic image contains the whole image but in lower resolution, so too is the ALL contained in every expression of life. Talbot explained that, “The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left hand. We could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. Every cell in our body enfolds the entire cosmos.” We see this when comparing the striking similarities between images of a neural network in the human brain to images of the interconnected webs of galaxies in outer space.

In keeping with the famous occult axiom, “As above so below, and as below so above,” we maximize our enjoyment of the human experience by engaging in the creative dance of involution and evolution. As we engage in involution, pouring energy into our creations, we’re performing the same creative process as THE ALL. To share our creations with others is to kick off the evolutionary aspect of Rhythm and Mentalism, inviting the mental aspect of the process that extends our consciousness back towards THE ALL to begin. The Kybalion encourages us not to get hung up on asking ourselves why THE ALL creates, because to speculate is useless from our limited human perspective, a low-resolution experience of divine consciousness. From this place we can’t conceive how THE ALL in high-resolution expresses itself creatively, much less why.

The Kybalion does make one concession for those seeking to understand why THE ALL creates, which is that there must be some satisfaction derived from the creative act. We access this divine satisfaction in the material world through giving our attention to creating and to experiencing the creations of others. As conscious fragments of THE ALL, perhaps our ability to participate in this process is why we were created. 

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

The Language of the Body (1992)

Roper’s Gymnasium, 1831.

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One of the leading figures of the late 1970s and early 80s literary Punk movement, Kathy Acker was a radical in every sense. Her writing pioneered an experimental auto-fiction and incorporated cut-up techniques, developed some thirty years earlier by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Consistently, she wanted to push the boundaries of language and redefine the meaning of the novel. So too in this text, written towards the end of her life, Acker considers the inexpressibility of bodybuilding through traditional language. Drawing on thinkers like Elias Canetti, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, the essay links the meditative rhythms of training to deeper existential questions: Can we know the body? What is the relationship between control, chaos, and meaning? And what can we learn about art and creation through pushing our bodies.

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Kathy Acker October 21, 2025

Preface Diary 

I have now been bodybuilding for ten years, seriously for almost five years. During the past few years, I have been trying to write about bodybuilding. Having failed time and time again, upon being offered the opportunity to write this essay, I made the following plan: I would attend the gym as usual. Immediately after each workout, I would describe all I had just experienced, thought and done. Such diary descriptions would provide the raw material. After each workout, I forgot: to write. Repeatedly. I...some part of me... the part of the ‘I’ who bodybuilds... was rejecting language, any verbal description of the processes of bodybuilding. I shall begin describing, writing about bodybuilding in the only way that I can: I shall begin by analyzing this rejection of ordinary or verbal language. What is the picture of the antagonism between bodybuilding and verbal language?

A Language Which is Speechless 

Imagine that you are in a foreign country. Since you are going to be in this place for some time, you are trying to learn the language. At the point of commencing to learn the new language, just before having started to understand anything, you begin forgetting your own. Within strangeness, you find yourself without a language. 

It is here, in this geography of no language, this negative space, that I can start to describe bodybuilding. For I am describing that which rejects language. 

Elias Canetti, who grew up within a multitude of spoken languages, began his autobiography by recounting a memory. In this, his earliest remembrance, the loss of language is threatened: “My earliest memory is dipped in red. I come out of a door on the arm of a maid, the door in front of me is red, and to the left a staircase goes down, equally red...” A smiling man walks up to the child; the child, upon request, sticks out his tongue whereupon the man flips open a jackknife and holds the sharp blade against the red tongue. 

“...He says: ‘Now we’ll cut off his tongue.“’ 

At the last moment, the man pulls the knife back. 

According to memory, this sequence happens every day. “That’s how the day starts,” Canetti adds, “and it happens very often.” ’ I am in the gym every three out of four days. What happens there? What does language in that place look like? According to cliche, athletes are stupid. Meaning: they are inarticulate. The spoken language of bodybuilders makes this cliche real. The verbal language in the gym is minimal and almost senseless, reduced to numbers and a few nouns. “Sets”, “squats”, “reps”,... The only verbs are “do” or “fail” adjectives and adverbs no longer exist; sentences, if they are at all, are simple. 

This spoken language is kin to the “language games” Wittgenstein proposes in his The Brown Book.  In a gym, verbal language or language whose purpose is meaning occurs, if at all, only at the edge of its becoming lost.

But when I am in the gym, my experience is that I am immersed in a complex and rich world. 

What actually takes place when I bodybuild? 

The crossing of the threshold from the world defined by verbal language into the gym in which the outside world is not allowed (and all of its languages) (in this sense, the gym is sacred) takes several minutes. What happens during these minutes is that I forget. Masse’s of swirling thought, verbalized insofar as I am conscious of them, disappear as mind or thought begins to focus. 

In order to analyze this focusing, I must first describe bodybuilding in terms of intentionality. 

Bodybuilding is a process, perhaps a sport, by which a person shapes her or his own body. This shaping is always related to the growth of muscular mass. 

During aerobic and circuit training, the heart and lungs are exercised. But muscles will grow only if they are, not exercised or moved, but actually broken down. The general law behind bodybuilding is that muscle, if broken down in a controlled fashion and then provided with the proper growth factors such as nutrients and rest, will grow back larger than before. 

Domenico de Rossi, Dancing Faun. c.1704

In order to break down specific areas of muscles, whatever areas one wants to enlarge, it is necessary to work these areas in isolation up to failure. 

Bodybuilding can be seen to be about nothing but failure. A bodybuilder is always working around failure. Either I work an isolated muscle mass, for instance one of the tricep heads, up to failure. In order to do this, I exert the muscle group almost until the point that it can no longer move. 

But if I work the same muscle group to the point that it can no longer move, I must move it through failure. I am then doing what are named “negative reps”, working the muscle group beyond its power to move. Here is the second method of working with failure. 

Whatever way I chose, I always want to work my muscle, muscular group, until it can no longer move: I want to fail. As soon as I can accomplish a certain task, so much weight for so many reps during a certain time span, I must always increase one aspect of this equation, weights reps or intensity, so that I can again come to failure. 

I want to break muscle so that it can grow back larger, but I do not want to destroy muscle so that growth is prevented. In order to avoid injury, I first warm up the muscular group, then carefully bring it up to failure. I do this by working the muscular group through a calculated number of sets during a calculated time span. If I tried immediately to bring a muscle group up to failure by lifting the heaviest weight I could handle, I might injure myself. 

I want to shock my body into growth; I do not want to hurt it. 

Therefore, in bodybuilding, failure is always connected to counting. I calculate which weight to use; I then count off how many times I lift that weight and the seconds between each lift. This is how I control the intensity of my workout. 

Intensity times movement of maximum weight equals muscular destruction (muscular growth). 

Is the equation between destruction and growth also a formula for art’ 

Bodybuilding is about failure because bodybuilding, body growth and shaping, occurs in the face of the material, of the body’s inexorable movement toward its final failure, toward death. 

To break down a muscle group, I want to make that group work up to, even beyond, capacity. To do this, it helps and even is necessary to visualize the part of the body that is involved. Mind or thought, then, while bodybuilding, is always focused on number or counting and often on precise visualizations. 

Certain bodybuilders have said that bodybuilding is a form of meditation. 

What do I do when I bodybuild? I visualize and I count. I estimate weight; I count sets; I count repetitions; I count seconds between repetitions; I count time, seconds or minutes, between sets: From the beginning to the end of each workout, in order to maintain intensity, I must continually count. 

For this reason, a bodybuilder’s language is reduced to a minimal, even a closed, set of nouns and to numerical repetition, to one of the simplest of language games. 

Let us name this language game, the language of the body.

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“In ordinary language, meaning is contextual. Whereas the cry of the beggar means nothing other than what it is; in the cry of the beggar, the impossible… occurs in that meaning and breath become one.”

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The Richness Of The Language Of The Body 

In order to examine such a language, a language game which resists ordinary language, through the lens of ordinary language or language whose tendency is to generate syntax or to make meanings proliferate, I must use an indirect route. 

In another of his books, Elias Canetti begins talking from and about that geography that is without verbal language: 

A marvellously luminous, viscid substance is left behind in me, defying words... 

A dream: a man who unlearns the world’s languages until nowhere on earth does he understand what people are saying.  

Being in Marrakesh is Canetti’s dream made actual. There are languages here, he says, but I understand none of them. The closer I am moving toward foreignness, into strangeness, toward understanding foreignness and strangeness, the more I am losing my own language. The small loss of language occurs when I journey to and into my own body. Is my body a foreign land to me? What is this picture of “my body” and “I”? For years, I said in the beginning of this essay, I have wanted to describe bodybuilding; whenever I tried to do so, ordinary language fled from me. r 

“Man,” Heidegger says, “is, the strangest.” Why! Because everywhere he or she belongs to being or to strangeness or chaos, and yet everywhere he or she attempts to carve a path through chaos: 

Everywhere man makes himself a path; he ventures into all realms of the essent, of the overpowering power, and in so doing he is flung out of all paths. ’ 

The physical or material, that which is, is constantly and unpredictably changing: it is chaotic. This chaos twines around death. For it is death that rejects all of our paths, all of our meanings. 

Whenever anyone bodybuilds, he or she is always trying to understand and control the physical in the face of this death. No wonder bodybuilding is centered around failure. 

The antithesis between meaning and essence has often been noted. Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus: 

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen - in it no values exist, and if they did, they’d have no value.

For all that happens and is the case is accidental.  

If ordinary language or meanings lie outside essence, what is the position of that language game which I have named the language of the body? For bodybuilding (a language of the body) rejects ordinary language and yet itself constitutes a language, a method for understanding and controlling the physical which in this case is also the self. 

I can now directly talk about bodybuilding. (As if speech is ever direct.) 

The language game named the language of the body is not arbitrary. When a bodybuilder is counting, he or she is counting his or her own breath. 

Canetti speaks of the beggars of Marrakesh who possess a similar and even simpler language game: they repeat the name of God. 

In ordinary language, meaning is contextual. Whereas the cry of the beggar means nothing other than what it is; in the cry of the beggar, the impossible (as the Wittgenstein of the Tructutus and Heidegger see it) occurs in that meaning and breath become one. 

Here is the language of the body; here, perhaps, is the reason why bodybuilders experience bodybuilding as a form of meditation. 

“I understood the seduction there is in a life that reduces everything to the simplest kind of repetition,” Canetti says. A life in which meaning and essence no longer oppose each other. A life of meditation. 

“I understood what those blind beggars really are: the saints of repetition…”

The Repetition Of The One: The Glimpse Into Chaos Or Essence

Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyons. 1980.

I am in the gym. I am beginning to work out. I either say the name “bench press”, then walk over to it, or simply walk over to it. Then, I might picture the number of my first weight; I probably, since I usually begin with the same warm-up weight, just place the appropriate weights on the bar. Lifting this bar off its rests, then down to my lower chest, I count “1”. I am visualizing this bar, making sure it touches my chest at the right spot, placing it back on its rests. “2”. I repeat the same exact motions. “3”... After twelve repetitions, I count off thirty seconds while increasing my weights. “1 “.. The identical process begins again only this time I finish at “10”... All these repetitions end only when I finish my work-out.

On counting: Each number equals one inhalation and one exhalation. If I stop my counting or in any other way lose focus, I risk dropping or otherwise mishandling a weight and so damaging my body.

In this world of the continual repetition of a minimal number of elements, in this aural labyrinth, it is easy to lose one’s way. When all is repetition rather than the production of meaning, every path resembles every other path. 

Every day, in the gym, I repeat the same controlled gestures with the same weights, the same reps,... The same breath patterns. But now and then, wandering within the labyrinths of my body, I come upon something. Something I can know because knowledge depends on difference. An unexpected event. For though I am only repeating certain gestures during certain time spans, my body, being material, is never the same; my body is controlled by change and by chance. 

For instance, yesterday, I worked chest. Usually I easily benchpress the bar plus sixty pounds for six reps. Yesterday, unexpectedly, I barely managed to lift this weight at the sixth rep. I looked for a reason. Sleep? Diet’ Both were usual. Emotional or work stress? No more ban usual. The weather? Not good enough. My unexpected failure at the sixth rep was allowing me to see, as if through a window, not to any outside, but inside my own body, to its workings. I was being permitted to glimpse the laws that control my body, those of change or chance, laws that are barely, if at all, knowable. 

By trying to control, to shape, my body through the calculated tools and methods of bodybuilding, and time and again, in following these methods, failing to do so, I am able to meet that which cannot be finally controlled and known: the body. 

In this meeting lies the fascination, if not the purpose, of bodybuilding. To come face to face with chaos, with my own failure or a form of death. 

Canetti describes the architecture of a typical house in the geographical labyrinth of Marrakesh. The house’s insides are cool, dark. Few, if any, windows lookout into the street. For the entire construction of this house, windows, etc., is directed inward, to the central courtyard where only openness to the sun exists. 

Such an architecture is a mirror of the body: When I reduce verbal language to minimal meaning, to repetition, I close the body’s outer windows. Meaning approaches breath as I bodybuild, as I begin to move through the body’s labyrinths, to meet, if only for a second, that which my consciousness ordinarily cannot see. Heidegger: “The. being-there of historical man means: to be posited as the breach into which the preponderant power of being bursts in its appearing, in order that this breach itself should shatter against being.” 

In our culture, we simultaneously fetishize and disdain the athlete, a worker in the body. For we still live under the sign of Descartes. This sign is also the sign of patriarchy. As long as we continue to regard the body, that which is subject to change, chance, and death, as disgusting and inimical, so long shall we continue to regard our own selves as dangerous others.

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Kathy Acker (1947–1997) was an American experimental novelist, poet, playwright, performance artist, and postmodernist writer, whose idiosyncratic style redefined contemporary writing and made her one of the most insightful and influential voices of her generation.

Rivering (Museum of Suspense IV)

Charles François Daubigny, River Landscape with Moon. c. 1860, Leopold Museum, Vienna.

Ale Nodarse October 16, 2025

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“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.

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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. 

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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

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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. 

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“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.”

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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.

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

Holy Water (1977)

Opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 1913.

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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.

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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. 

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“This is a California parable, but a true one.”

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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.

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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

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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Leonard Cohen (1934 – 2016) was a Canadian songwriter, singer, poet, and novelist.

Quantum Entanglement and the Ho'oponopono Prayer

Two carved Hawaiian figures, J. M. Booth. 1930s.

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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.

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“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.”

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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. 

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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)

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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.

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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. 

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“A language comes into existence by means of brutal necessity, and the rules of the language are dictated by what the language must convey.”

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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.

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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

Anonymous portrait of Vivaldi, c.1723.

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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.

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“Studios functioned as infrastructures of autonomy, transmitting sonic agency to shape how we think, feel, and inhabit place and space.”

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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.

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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)

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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. 

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“‘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.”

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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.

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Ana Roberts is a writer, musician, and cultural critic.

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The Fool (Again)

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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.

*

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

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, CARDS

Physics, Biology and the Seven Hermetic Principles

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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.”

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“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.”

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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.” 

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

View from the Bandstand (1966)

Illustration from Aspen Magazine, Issue 3. 1966.

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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.

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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"

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“The level of culture that mankind attained in classical antiquity can no longer be reached back to from man’s mind.”

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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.

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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.