I Am For An Art… (1961)

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Oldenburg in The Store, 107 East Second Street, New York, 1961. Robert R. McElroy.

Claes Oldenburg August 22 2024

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.

I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top.

I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.

I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways.

I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky.

I am for art that spills out of an old man's purse when he is bounced off a passing fender.

I am for the art out of a doggy's mouth, falling five stories from the roof.

I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper. I am for an art that joggles like everyones knees, when the bus traverses an excavation.

I am for art that is smoked, like a cigarette, smells, like a pair of shoes.

I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses, like a handkerchief.

Pastry Case, 1961. Claes Oldenburg.

I am for art that is put on and taken off, like pants, which develops holes, like socks, which is eaten, like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt, like a piece of shit.

I am for art covered with bandages, I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps. I am for art that comes in a can or washes up on the shore.

I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair.

I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on.

I am for art from a pocket, from deep channels of the ear, from the edge of a knife, from the corners of the mouth, stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist.

I am for art under the skirts, and the art of pinching cockroaches.

I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind mans metal stick.

I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds and growls. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch.

I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweetys arm, or kiss, like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks, like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on, like an old tablecloth.

I am for an art that you can hammer with, stitch with, sew with, paste with, file with.

I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is.

I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

I am for the art of the washing machine. I am for the art of a government check. I am for the art of last wars raincoat.

I am for the art that comes up in fogs from sewer-holes in winter. I am for the art that splits when you step on a frozen puddle. I am for the worms art inside the apple. I am for the art of sweat that develops between crossed legs.

I am for the art of neck-hair and caked tea-cups, for the art between the tines of restaurant forks, for the odor of boiling dishwater.

I am for the art of sailing on Sunday, and the art of red and white gasoline pumps.

I am for the art of bright blue factory columns and blinking biscuit signs.

I am for the art of cheap plaster and enamel. I am for the art of worn marble and smashed slate. I am for the art of rolling cobblestones and sliding sand. I am for the art of slag and black coal. I am for the art of dead birds.

I am for the art of scratchings in the asphalt, daubing at the walls. I am for the art of bending and kicking metal and breaking glass, and pulling at things to make them fall down.

I am for the art of punching and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the art of kids' smells. I am for the art of mama-babble.

I am for the art of bar-babble, tooth-picking, beerdrinking, egg-salting, in-suiting. I am for the art of falling off a barstool.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic art of dog-turds, rising like cathedrals.

I am for the blinking arts, lighting up the night. I am for art falling, splashing, wiggling, jumping, going on and off.

I am for the art of fat truck-tires and black eyes.

Performances at Oldenburg's The Store, 1962. Robert R. McElroy.

I am for Kool-art, 7-UP art, Pepsi-art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol art, Dro-bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L & M art, Ex-lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art.

I am for the art of bread wet by rain. I am for the rat's dance between floors.

I am for the art of flies walking on a slick pear in the electric light. I am for the art of soggy onions and firm green shoots. I am for the art of clicking among the nuts when the roaches come and go. I am for the brown sad art of rotting apples.

I am for the art of meowls and clatter of cats and for the art of their dumb electric eyes.

I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings.

I am for the art of rust and mold. I am for the art of hearts, funeral hearts or sweetheart hearts, full of nougat. I am for the art of worn meathooks and singing barrels of red, white, blue and yellow meat.

I am for the art of things lost or thrown away, coming home from school. I am for the art of cock-and-ball trees and flying cows and the noise of rectangles and squares. I am for the art of crayons and weak grey pencil-lead, and grainy wash and sticky oil paint, and the art of windshield wipers and the art of the finger on a cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub.

I am for the art of teddy-bears and guns and decapitated rabbits, exploded umbrellas, raped beds, chairs with their brown bones broken, burning trees, firecracker ends, chicken bones, pigeon bones and boxes with men sleeping in them.

I am for the art of slightly rotten funeral flowers, hung bloody rabbits and wrinkly yellow chickens, bass drums & tambourines, and plastic phonographs. I am for the art of abandoned boxes, tied like pharaohs. I am for an art of watertanks and speeding clouds and flapping shades.

I am for U.S. Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-eat art, Best-for-less art, Ready-tocook art, Fully cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art.

add:

I am for an art that is combed down, that is hung from each ear, that is laid on the lips and under the eyes, that is shaved from the legs, that is brushed on the teeth, that is fixed on the thighs, that is slipped on the foot.

square which becomes blobby

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Claes Oldenburg, 1929 – 2022, was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. In 1961 he opened The Store in Downtown New York which hosted performances, conceptual art pieces and happenings, as well as selling work he made in the space to punters and passerbys, removing the middle-man from the commercialisation of the art world. He wrote this text for an exhibition catalogue in 1961, reworked it when he opened the store and then republished it again in 1970 for an exhibition in London, from which this version is taken.

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Woody Harrelson

Mystery and Creation (1928)

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Piazza D'Italia, 1964. Giorgio de Chirico.

Giorgio de Chirico August 20 2024

To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.

Profound statements must be drawn by the artist from the most secret recesses of his being; there no murmuring torrent, no birdsong, no rustle of leaves can distract him.

What I hear is valueless; only what I see is living, and when I close my eyes my vision is even more powerful. It is most important that we should rid art of all that it has contained of recognizable material to date, all familiar subject matter, all traditional ideas, all popular symbols must be banished forthwith. More important still, we must hold enormous faith in ourselves: it is essential that the revelation we receive, the conception of an image which embraces a certain thing, which has no sense in itself, which has no subject, which means absolutely nothing from the logical point of view, I repeat, it is essential that such a revelation or conception should speak so strongly in us, evoke such agony or joy, that we feel compelled to paint, compelled by an impulse even more urgent than the hungry desperation which drives a man to tearing at a piece of bread like a savage beast.

I remember one vivid winter's day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned supreme. Everything gazed at me with mysterious, questioning eyes. And then I realized that every corner of the palace, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which pours down on us without love, like perfect song. A bird was warbling in a window cage. At that moment I grew aware of the mystery which urges men to create certain strange forms. And the creation appeared more extraordinary than the creators. Perhaps the most amazing sensation passed on to us by prehistoric man is that of presentiment. It will always continue. We might consider it as an eternal proof of the irrationality of the universe. Original man must have wandered through a world full of uncanny signs. He must have trembled at each step.

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Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in 1888, who founded the movement of Metaphysical Painting. He was inspired by Neitzsche and Shopenhauer in his philosophy, that informed both his visual and written work, and his own writing was a major source of inspiration to Andre Breton and the Surrealist Movement. This essay was first published in 1928 by Breton in ‘Surrealism and Painting’.

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Film

Hurriganes - Sixteen Golden Greats (Out of Print)

Matt Sweeney August 19, 2024

Finnish grease rock gods, huge in their home country and nowhere really else: astonishingly pre-Ramones, with a drummer singing in rock n roll nonsense language, crude propulsive nasty and joyful and badass. This record and so many other life-changing jamz were presented to me by savage genius Jesper Eklow of Endless Boogie. 

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

The Spell of the Sensuous

Five of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Defeat, the Five of Swords
Number: 5
Astrology: Air, Venus in Aquarius
Qabalah: Gevurah of Vau

Chris Gabriel August 17, 2024

The Five of Swords is a card of undoing, of our dreams that come crashing down. Here the Swords which have been gently building start to fall apart like a house of cards. This is the representation of a failed hypothesis.

In Rider, we find a smiling rogue picking up swords that have been lost in battle. Behind him two men mourn before a sea. The sky is cloudy. Two swords lay on the ground, and three are in hand. He is picking up the pieces, unmoved by what has occurred.

In Thoth, we find a reversed pentagram, a falling star made of chipped swords. Geometric figures sputter about it with falling petals. The card has the violet of Aquarius and the Green of Venus. Venus in Aquarius has dreams and desires, but lacks the grounding to actualize them, creating a distance and alienation.

In Marseille, we have a single central sword whose tip is weaving through the four arched around it. Through Qabalah, we find it signifies “The Anger of the Prince”. 

The Anger of the Prince is Defeat. It is an anger toward reality, after his expectations, measurements, methods and plans were undone..

This is not defeat at the hands of another, but self undoing.

My great grandfather was a Mason, and a piece of advice he gave me was to “measure twice, cut once”.This card occurs as a result of incorrect measurements. We can imagine a car stranded out of gas on the side of the road, a disappointed couple and an amused tow truck driver taking a modern form of the Rider card..

The suit of Swords pertains to the mental sphere, which is the origin of our many defeats, foibles, expectations, and visions which fall apart when they meet the real world. 

Aesop’s Astronomer, who despite his calculations of the stars falls into a well.

While the Five of Wands gives us the image of a tyrannical ruler who weighs too heavily upon his people, the Five of Swords is the image of a totally removed ruler, like Marie Antoinette, who when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: "Then let them eat cake."

While we often attribute the ‘airheadedness' of these dynamics to an ‘overdeveloped imagination’, it is in fact a failure of imagination.

It makes me think of how so many want to make art, only they need millions of dollars, expensive equipment, and the like, while the truly great artists find a way to bring their vision into reality with what they have in hand. They set aside unreal expectations for the sake of the art itself. Which requires more imagination?

The great thing about this card is that it functions as a prerequisite for the Six of Swords, which represents Science. These are the failed hypotheses, the experiments gone awry, the countless mistakes that are needed to develop a functional methodology.

When we pull this card, we are being shown a part of ourselves that holds these unreal ideas, illusions that we maintain which will be brought tumbling down by the world. 

This is not necessarily a bad thing, we can be like the smiling fellow, pick up the pieces and try again. This is how we develop a true understanding of the world.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Hannah Peel Playlist

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

Film

A Forager’s Take on Fairytales Pt. 1

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Izzy Johns August 15 2024

Long ago in Drumline, County Clare, in the late 19th Century, an old farmer and his wife huddled for warmth in a mud hut. Many a cold winter passed, and finally, the man agreed to build his wife a house  of bricks and mortar.  

He set to work the following Spring. Not a day had passed when the old man received a  visit from a traveler, who spoke these words:  

“I wouldn’t build there if I was you. That’s the wrong place. If you build there you won’t be  short of company, whatever else.” 

The old man paid him no mind, but sure enough, the moment he and his wife lay down to  rest in their new home, they were plagued by noise and disruption. Furniture was  knocked over, cutlery strewn across the floor, crockery smashed. They couldn’t get a wink of sleep. But, as sure as day, whenever they went to investigate, they found nothing and  no one. The old couple sought the help of the local preacher, who recognised this as the work of the Sidhe, the Little Folk of this land. He tried to exorcize the house, but to no avail.  

After five sleepless nights, the man wearily set off to the market to sell their cows. It was  the Gale day, the day that their rent was due, and money was sparse. English colonisers had seized land from the Irish farmers some years  before. Now they were renting it back to them, and the rent was high.  

The old man got a fair price for the cows, and he stopped at a roadside pub on the way  home. It was there that he encountered the traveler once again. In desperation, the man  begged the traveler for advice. He would do anything so that the Little Folk would let him  rest. The traveler walked him home, and took him to stand in the yard, on the far side of  the house.  

He said: 

“Now, look out there and tell me what you see.” 
[…] “The yard?” 
“No,” he says, “look again.” 
“The road?” 
“No. Look carefully.” 
“Oh, that old Whitethorn bush? Sure, that’s there forever. That could be there since the  start o’ the world.” 
“D’you tell me that now?” 
The old man walked out to the gable o’ the house, called [him], then says, “come over  here.” 
He did. 
“Look out there, and tell me what do you see?” 

He looked out from that gable end, and there, no farther away than the end o’ the garden,  was another Whitethorn bush, standing alone. 

“Now,” says the old man, “I told you. I warned you. The fairies’ path is between them  bushes and beyond. And you’re after building your house on it.” 

Upon the instruction of the traveler, the man built two doors in either side of the house, in line with the Whitethorns. From then on, the Little Folk had a clear passage, and  the man and his wife were not bothered again.¹

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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British Goblins, 1880. Wirt Sikes.

I was very struck by this account. It feels different to the rich, meandering folk-tale jewels I love so much, that are wrapped in mythos and allegory. Instead, this tale falls into the  realm of family and community stories, that are still “lived in”,  in this case, by the  old couple’s grandson, who told this story to Eddie Lenihan in the living room of the very  same house. He said that he still leaves the two doors ajar each night so as to let the fairies pass. There’s no use in locking them, he says, for they’ll only be open again by the morning. 

Make no mistake, this story is not hearsay. A book of fairy tales might read like a book of  fiction, but it isn’t. What we see in this tale, and so many others like it, is a relic of a complex faith system from times gone  by, and it’s important that we storytellers hold it in that way. This story comes from  Ireland, where the fairies are called Sídhe, or Sí, though often called by euphemisms to  avoid catching their attention. The Sidhe are the descendants of the people of Danu, the  Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of fallen Gods and Goddesses that dwell in the liminality  between our world and the otherworld, the An Saol Eile. It’s only fair to acknowledge their  providence, not least is it a crucial act of cultural preservation.  

Fairies have a range of habitats depending on where you are live. In Ireland, they are particularly fond of two places: a lone Whitethorn (Hawthorn) tree, and the forts -  those grand, grassy mounds of earth, often covered in a greater diversity of wild plants  than their surroundings. In this tale, the old couple has disturbed not a habitat, but a  passage between habitats. More savvy builders would have driven four hazel rods into the ground, marking out the proposed foundations of the house. If by the next day any rod had moved, the house should be built elsewhere.  

The fairies in this story star in a role that I’ve seen in countless tales; defending their  habitat from ecological destruction. Here, they were able to communicate with the  intruders and resolve the problem quickly. It’s a good thing that the old couple were  forthcoming. Fairies will always give warnings, but it’s perfectly within their power to  cause grave suffering if those warnings aren’t heeded. They can be at best didactic and  at worst violent, but they have no interest in troubling a person who isn’t troubling them. I  can’t condone the violence, but I marvel at how proficient they are at protecting and  stewarding the land. Plus, they greatly enrich the ecosystem. Various tales see fairies  fertilizing soil for generous farmers, and producing abundances of wildflowers and fungi.  It’s said that the rings of mushrooms we see in woodlands and meadows are where  they’ve danced. 

The Intruder, c.1860. John Anster Fitzgerald.

Thinking about this with an Ecologist’s gaze, fairies are a fascinating species. They might well be a larger genus with loads of regionally-specific variants like small  people, spriggans, buccas, elves, bockles and knockers, browneys, goblins, dryads,  gnomes and piskies. There’s a wealth of anecdotal evidence of their existence,   thousands and thousands of stories, stretching back millenia,  yet we’ve never successfully captured and studied  them. Perhaps what makes this species most unique is their ability to outwit ours. Their cunning gently prods at our human arrogance, contesting our claim to be the most  “developed” of species.

Far less frequently in the UK do we hear tales of the Little Folk interfering with larger  property developments. In London, for example, you’ll scarcely come across a piece of land that hasn’t been leveled ten times over, and most Whitethorns are confined to cultivated hedges. I wonder how many forts have been destroyed in my neighborhood. Our lack of understanding of the fairies’ life cycles and physiology makes it pointless to  speculate on why larger builds don’t experience ramifications from the little folk. It’s hard  not to wonder if heavy machinery, giant crews of contractors and big blocks of hundreds  of dwellings haven’t been too much for the fairies to contend with. I hate to think that,  unbeknownst to us, urbanization might have wiped them out. If fairies are still around, it’s  clear that they’re gravely endangered.  

If this is the case, then it makes fairies one of over two million species under threat of  extinction. It’d be such a shame if these creatures, these stories, and the feelings that  they represent, disappeared altogether. I love this tale for giving us such a tangible  example of humans making space for fairies and subsequently managing to co-exist  peacefully. The fairies in this story are model land guardians, and from that we humans  have a lot to learn.  

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Izzy Johns is a forager and storyteller. She teaches foraging under the monicker Rights  For Weeds and manages the Phytology medicine garden in East London. You can find her  work on Substack [rightsforweeds.substack.com] and Instagram [instagram.com/ rightsforweeds] .

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¹As recounted to Eddie Lenihan in 2001 by the couple’s grandson, recorded in ‘Meeting the Other Folk…”

beabadoobee

Against Fluency

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Arcadia Molinas August 13, 2024

Reading is a vice. It is a pleasurable, emotional and intellectual vice. But what distinguishes it from most vices, and relieves it from any association to immoral behaviour, is that it is somatic too, and has the potential to move you. A book can instantly transport you to cities, countries and worlds you’ve never set foot on. A book can take you to new climates, suggest the taste of new foods, introduce you to cultures and confront you with entirely different ways of being. It is a way to move and to travel without ever leaving the comfort of your chair.

Books in translation offer these readerly delights perhaps more readily than their native counterparts. Despite this, the work of translation is vastly overlooked and broadly underappreciated. In book reviews, the critique of the translation itself rarely takes up more than a throwaway line which comments on either the ‘sharpness’ or ‘clumsiness’ of the work. It is uncommon, too, to see the translator’s name on the cover of a book. A good translation, it seems, is meant to feel invisible. But is travelling meant to feel invisible – identical, seamless, homogenous? Or is travelling meant to provoke, cause discomfort, scream its presence in your face? The latter seems to me to be the more somatic, erotic, up in your body experience and thus, more conducive to the moral component of the vice of reading.

French translator Norman Shapiro describes the work of translation as “the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections— scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.” This view is shared by many: a good translation should show no evidence of the translator, and by consequence, no evidence that there was once another language involved in the first place at all. Fluency, naturalness, is what matters – any presence of the other must be smoothed out. For philosopher Friedreich Schlerimacher however, the matter is something else entirely. For him, “there are only two [methods of translation]. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.” He goes on to argue for the virtues of the former, for a translation that is visible, that moves the reader’s body and is seen and felt. It’s a matter of ethics for the philosopher – why and how do we translate? These are not minor questions when considering the stakes of erasing the presence of the other. The repercussions of such actions could reflect and accentuate larger cultural attitudes to difference and diversity as a whole.

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“The higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view”

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Guilliaume Apollinaire, 1918. Calligram.

Lawrence Venuti coins Schlerimacher’s two movements, from reader to author and author to reader, as ‘foreignization’ and ‘domestication’ in his book The Translator’s Invisibility. Foreignization is “leaving the author in peace and moving the reader towards him”, which means reflecting the cultural idiosyncrasies of the original language onto the translated/target one. It means making the translation visible. Domestication is the opposite, it irons out any awkwardness and imperfections caused by linguistic and cultural difference, “leaving the reader in peace and moving the author towards him”. It means making the translation invisible, and is the way translation is so often thought about today. Venuti says the aim of this type of translation is to “bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar; and this aim always risks a wholesale domestication of the foreign text, often in highly self- conscious projects, where translation serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political.”

The direction of movement in these two strategies makes all the difference. Foreignization makes you move and travel towards the author, while domestication leaves you alone and doesn’t disturb you. There is, Venuti says, a cost of being undisturbed. He writes of the “partly inevitable” violence of translation when thinking about the process of ironing out differences. When foreign cultures are understood through the lens of a language inscribed with its own codes, and which consequently carry their own embedded ways of regarding other cultures, there is a risk of homogenisation of diversity. “Foreignizing translation in English”, Venuti argues, “can be a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations.” The potential for this type of reading and of translating is by no means insignificant.

To embrace discomfort then, an uncomfortable practice of reading, is a moral endeavour. To read foreignizing works of translation is to expand one’s subjectivity and suspend one’s unified, blinkered understanding of culture and linguistics. Reading itself is a somatic practice, but to read a work in translation that purposefully alienates, is to travel even further, it’s to go abroad and stroll through foreign lands, feel the climate, chew the food. It’s well acknowledged that the higher you climb, the further you travel, the greater the view. And to get the bigger picture is as possible to do as sitting on your favourite chair, opening a book and welcoming alienation.

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Arcadia Molinas is a writer, editor, and translator from Madrid. She currently works as the online editor of Worms Magazine and has published a Spanish translation of Virginia Woolf’s diaries with Funambulista.

Film

Carlos Santana Playlist

Carlos Santana August 12, 2024

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Carlos Santana is an American guitarist from Mexico, best known for his band Santana. Delivered with a level of passion and soul equal to the legendary sonic charge of his guitar, the sound of Carlos Santana is one of the world’s best-known musical signatures. For more than four decades Carlos has been the visionary force behind artistry that transcends musical genres and generational, cultural and geographical boundaries.

The Universal One

The Ace of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Ace of Disks
Number: 1
Astrology: Earth
Qabalah: Kether of He ה

Chris Gabriel August 10, 2024

The Ace of Disks is the seed of the earthy suit, from it all the disks grow. This is the foundation or cornerstone of an establishment.It is, in some ways, the most important card in the suit, as nothing that lasts can be built on a weak foundation. 

The image is simple, that of a coin, and flowery growth.

In Rider, we have a divine hand bringing forth a pentacle, a coin bearing the five pointed star. Beneath is a garden and flowery terrace. There is a path leading to distant mountains.

In Thoth, we have a coin bearing a pentagram and a septagram within it. At the center is the personal seal of Crowley, three interlocked circles marked “666” and the Greek around the border reads “To Mega Therion” or “The Great Beast”, this is the autograph of the deck’s creator. Beyond the central coin we have helicopter seeds and verdant imagery.

In Marseille, a flowery coin is depicted with four flowers. Qabalistically, this card is the “Crown of the Princess”: the Princess of the Earth is crowned by a Seed, and crowned by her foundation.

The divine hand of Rider is absent from Marseille, where the hands of God appear only in the Ace of Wands and the Ace of Swords, as those two elements are considered “higher”. The Earth is the lowest element, the most mundane and it is only from this base place that we can reach the highest forces.

It calls to mind Matthew 7:25: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.

The Ace of Disks must be the rock of our further exploration. From this foundational anchor we can remain sturdy in the midst of spiritual chaos.

When we say that a loved one is “our rock”, this is the card.

Yet in Thoth, we find the helicopter seed, a moving seed, a seed that flies! Showing us that this foundation need not be literally set in the ground, a true firmness and foundation can move with us, for it comes from within.

When we pull this card, we are being shown a foundation, which can be material, whether it be a place where we can establish our work or where we are able to spiritually flourish. As for money, think of “seed capital”. 

This card represents both the necessary energy and the space to build.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Questlove Playlist

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

Film

Balancing on the Earth

Artificiosa Totius Logices Description (1614). Meurisse and Gaultier.

Tuukka Toivonen August 8, 2024

“Be aware of the contact between your feet and the Earth. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

Volumes have been written about how we humans might enter a more balanced relationship with the Earth. Such contributions tend to adopt a disembodied, impersonal perspective, building on a conceptual language removed from our daily experience. What would we discover if we instead approached the question of balance more literally? What new possibilities and inventions might be revealed if we looked anew at how we seek to balance on the Earth, in an embodied sense? And can such a way of thinking lead to a more resonant connection with the ground one stands, walks and dances upon?

From the moment our lives commence, we begin to manoeuvre our bodies in relation to other beings, to gravity and to the broader physical world that surrounds us, eventually gaining the ability to stand up and walk. As the contemporary German theorist of resonance and societal acceleration Hartmut Rosa suggests, this is precisely where we must start if we are to understand shared human ways of being and relating to the world:

“The most basic and obvious answer to the question ‘How are we situated in the world?’ is simply: on our feet. We stand upon the world. We feel it beneath us. It sustains our weight. The certainty that the ground we stand on will bear us up is among the most fundamental prerequisites of our ontological security. We must be able to depend on it, and we depend on it blindly in the normal course of everyday life. If the ground were to unexpectedly collapse, if the earth opened up beneath us, we would experience this as a shocking event, a traumatic loss of that very security.”¹

Illustration to Emerson’s Nature (c.1838). Christopher Pearse Cranch.

Given that our ability to stand and walk upon supportive ground defines a major part of our existence, it follows that the act of balancing – however unconsciously practised – must also be central to how we exist and situate ourselves within, and in relation to, the world. Without sufficient balancing, there can surely be no consistent experience of ontological security. 

Yet, it seems we have unwittingly lost, or at least narrowed, our ability to balance on the Earth as we have adjusted to contemporary styles of living. Could it be that in this process we might have degraded not only our sense of security and confidence – adding to the many anxieties our societies appear currently steeped in – but also our ability to enter into a genuine relationship with the world through our bodies?

We prefer to walk on smooth pavements rather than textured, uneven forest paths. We like to traverse our cities in high-tech vehicles that remove us from any direct contact with the ground. Some of us regularly ride a bicycle but we rarely develop our balancing skills beyond our initial learning spurts. Entire cultures and infrastructures seem to be designed to shield us from encountering balancing challenges or disturbances. Even the yoga classes we attend – planting our bare feet on tidy studio floors and mats – rarely push us to explore our bodies’ ability to find balance in alternative, subtle ways. As Rosa notes in his remarkable book on resonance, despite their seeming innocuousness, even the shoes enfolding our feet “establish a highly effective ‘buffering’ distance between body and world that allows us to move from a participative to an objectifying, reifying relationship to the world”. 

If the result of all this shielding is that we have weakened our ability to engage in balancing at the embodied level, how might we reclaim and strengthen that ability? We must reach for a sense of balance that is flexible and dynamic more than rigid and static, productive of a lively sense of security as well as relationality. The good news is that life offers abundant opportunities to experiment with diverse ways of balancing on the Earth if we choose to grasp them.

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“The Universe is a limitless circle with a limitless radius. This condensed becomes the one point in the lower abdomen which is the center of the Universe”

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Skateboarding, an early hobby growing up in Southern Finland, taught me some early lessons about the art of balance. First, learning to ride the streets on a wobbly board and mastering a range of jumps and pivots turned balancing into a playful, addictive challenge. Inevitably, I also quickly learned a second lesson: failing to balance could lead to tremendous pain. The feedback from losing one’s footing was immediate and merciless – there were no verbal excuses or buffers that could render impact with the pavement any less punishing. Yet for all these important learnings, I subsequently realized that not only did skateboarding ultimately keep me at a certain distance from the ground (through shoes, boards and asphaltic surfaces) but it also imposed limits on how I could connect with my own body.

By contrast, contemporary improvisational dance offers a form of playful movement that promotes a more nuanced and experimental connection with one’s body. It invites us to explore unfamiliar ways of moving ourselves upon the ground and through the air while responding fluidly to others around us. The neuroscientist and brain health champion Hanna Poikonen of ETH Zurich suggests that it is the way in which those engaged in improvisational dance listen to their internal signals that sets this form of dance apart. By becoming so attuned to their bodies, improv dancers allow embodied sensations to guide their next actions in the moment. This bodily intelligence invites one to explore diverse ways of balancing in an emergent fashion. Practitioners may choose to intentionally confront and experiment with various sources of stiffness, shakiness and difficulty in relation to balance. What emerges (along with improvements to one’s health) is a certain sense of comfort with feeling unbalanced, and from this the profound realization that as living and moving human beings, we are constantly engaged in balancing rather than “in balance”. Perfect balance is neither possible nor desirable, for it would fix us in place, like lifeless statues. Instead, the options available to us are not binary (being in balance vs losing one’s balance) but dynamic and infinite in character: it is always possible for us to discover new, lively ways of balancing. 

Anatomical Flap Book (1667). Remmelin.

Japanese martial arts such as karate and aikido offer a more spiritually tuned approach to balance and movement. Sharing with improvisational dance a strict preference for encountering the ground, floor or tatami barefoot, traditional martial arts place central importance, both philosophically and practically, on a specific area roughly two inches below the bellybutton. Known as tanden or sometimes as hara, this special area inside the lower abdomen is considered key to accessing one’s highest powers through the unification of body, mind and spirit. 

While Japanese martial arts and movement instructors often point out that tanden is located at or near the body’s centre of gravity in a physical sense, it is tanden’s role as a focal point or container for universal energy that is given far more primacy. In the words of the aikido master and Ki Society founder Tohei Koichi (1920-2011), “[t]he Universe is a limitless circle with a limitless radius. This condensed becomes the one point in the lower abdomen which is the center of the Universe”.²  

In practice, it is through mindful breathing that outside energy is thought to enter the body, allowing the practitioner to feel that they exist as part of nature and its ongoing cycles, as observed by Nagatomo Shigenori in Attunement Through the Body (1992).

Remarkably, then, power and balance in martial arts are achieved not only through the efforts of the individual practitioner but through an embodied and flowing sense of connection with the natural world that envelopes them. Here, breath serves as the ongoing link between outer and inner energies, between the individual and the world..Balance is found when both come together through vital ki energy and when that energy is harmonized with movement.

So, it seems that balancing on the Earth is not quite as ordinary or narrow a process as we might have initially suspected. Once you begin to reconnect with your body and its ability to balance in subtly, or dramatically, different ways, potent insights start to emerge. We are never “in balance” but rather always balancing. That act of balancing – which we normally carry out unconsciously – can be made more intentional and vibrant. It can even offer paths to “embodied integration” with the living world and the universe, through the alignment of breath and movement. Through dance and other playful forms, it is entirely possible to become more comfortable with fluidity and lack of stability. Falling out of balance is not always a bad thing, even if it leads to temporary pain. Rather, it is the refusal to fully engage with our bodies, their incredible capacities for motion and the rich textures of the Earth that may leave us with a chronic sense of unsteadiness. 

One secret to making our existence genuinely lively and resonant may be to redefine balancing as a conversation we can have with the Earth with our bodies. As with any dialogue that transcends conventional boundaries, binary distinctions and assumptions, it might prove as nurturing and transformative as the conversations you have with the people you most gravitate towards. 

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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 Rosa, Hartmut (2019). Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity Press, p. 38.
² Tohei, Koichi (2022). Ki Sayings. Ki Society HQ, p.5

Mark McAfee