Hannah Peel Playlist

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

The Ten of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Ruin, the Ten of Swords
Number: 10
Astrology: Sun in Gemini
Qabalah: Malkuth of Vau

Chris Gabriel December 7, 2024

The Ten of Swords is the end of all the plots and schemes of the suit of swords. Here all of the lofty ideas are brought down to their material conclusion - ruin.

In Rider, we see a man bled out, struck through by ten swords in an act of excessive violence. His hand points two fingers down. The sun has set, and darkness rolls in. All the swords of the suit are brought down to Earth, the craftsman is killed by his own work.

In Thoth, we have ten swords breaking at their points. Together, they form the Tree of Life. Their handles are, respectively, the sun and moon, a scale, stars, crosses, and compasses. All about them are jagged, deformed geometric figures. Astrologically this is the Sun in Gemini.

In Marseille, we have eight curved swords, and two swords crossing one another from outside the oval. Here the ideas formed throughout the suit come into reality. A positive view of the placement in comparison with Rider and Thoth. Qabalistically this is the Kingdom of the Prince.

This is the material end of high ideas. Rider’s depiction calls to mind Julius Caesar, whose visions of domination and rulership ended in 23 stab wounds. This is expressed perfectly in Ezekiel 28:9: “Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.”

Like the tragic ending of Hamlet, who is ultimately killed by his own mind, his dreams, and an unwillingness to deal with the reality of his opponent’s blade, this is a card concerned with the simple, material ending of death in the face of lofty ambition.. 

For Rider, we can imagine that beyond ten enemies stabbing a man in the back, his own hubris wielded those deathly blades. Just as the Nine of Swords was like the Sword of Damocles, here the thread breaks and the sword falls.

When read positively as in Marseille, we see the painstaking process of bringing ideas into reality  that can leave the artist feeling like the man struck in Rider. The artist’s vision of beauty is never translated into reality, instead they must make compromises to bring something into the world. This is necessary and good for we must materialize and not simply ideate. The negativity of Rider and Thoth hinges upon the bad nature of the ideas brought to fruition but Marseille shows us that a good idea brought to reality is the ultimate good. Only when ideas remain in the mind for too long do they rot and fester.

It calls to mind an allegory from the Upanishads. 

“We are like the spider,” said the king. “We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.

“This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, ‘Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it’.

“This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world that we have created. When our hearts are pure, then we create the beautiful, enlightened life we have wished for.”

When we pull this card, we can expect the end of a project. If executed well, it will be  a great thing. Otherwise, the plots and schemes we’ve formed will come crashing down. Our ideas, good and bad, will here be brought into reality.

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

The Subtle and The Gross (Alchemy I)

Illustration from “Thesaurus of Alchemy”. c.1725.

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Molly Hankins December 5, 2024

When it comes to magic, alchemy, or the transformation of matter, can be taken literally or metaphorically. According to the Bulgarian philosopher and spiritual movement UWB founder Peter Deunov’s teachings on Kabbalist philosophy, life on Earth is spirit condensed into matter and so to practice magic inherently involves both literal and metaphorical alchemy. 

His disciple author Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov used the Latin phrase ‘solve et coagula’ to describe the alchemical process, meaning to dissolve and coagulate. Catherine MacCoun, author of On Becoming An Alchemist, uses the Emerald Tablets language of ‘separating the subtle from the gross’ to describe the same phenomena. “Alchemical magic never defies the laws of nature.”, she writes, “Instead, it observes the workings of those laws at an earlier stage than is evident to the physical senses. Whatever manifests on the physical level begins with an idea or intention. While matter is too dense, too heavy, to be altered by the mind alone, ideas and intentions are the mind’s natural medium.”

If physical reality is too dense to be altered by will alone, then using our will to cause such change to occur must inherently involve some dissolution of this density. In order to work with the ‘gross’ body by way of the subtle, according to Deunov’s teachings, involves the life-long alchemical process of consciously disintegrating condensed matter. As Aïvanhov wrote in Fruits of the Tree of Life, “All that is dense, compact and heavy represents unorganized matter in which energy is held prisoner. And the more energy one imprisons oneself with, like those who overeat, the more harm one does to oneself. We must, on the contrary, liberate energy.” 

The Universal White Brotherhood believed that using our consciousness to transform the gross into the subtle simply was the great secret of mastering life itself. There are seven stages of alchemy which are recognized as being both physical and spiritual. MacCoun describes each phase in terms of the base matter to be alchemized and the result of what that matter is ultimately transmuted into.

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“Separation is our phase of spiritual adolescence because we can’t become magical adults without maturing beyond egoic impulses to defend our existential territory.”

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The first is calcination, which technically means burning something to ashes, but according to her interpretation also means suffering caused by attachment to what will inevitably be lost. She posits that every human life is marked by a series of losses that burns away all which is not our true essence. The result of this calcination of ‘false roots’ or over-identification with the material world is self-confidence by way of strengthening the connection to who we truly are. 

The next stage is dissolution, where physically ashes are dissolved into fluid, and existentially, our desires are dissolved into devotion. MacCoun believes this process occurs when we get impatient waiting for our desires to be fulfilled. That gap between our wants and attainments begs the question of whether our desires are true and useful, an essential step in coming to know our true selves. The result is that ultimately we not only get to know ourselves, but also learn to let go of attachment to outcome, which paradoxically results in more favorable outcomes. Our desires themselves transmute from gross to subtle.

From “Compendiolum de Praeparatione Auri Potabilis Veri”, attributed to M. E. Bonacina. c.1790.

Separation occurs next, which involves the physical extraction of matter left in the dissolved substance. Metaphorically, separation refers to extraction of the true self from the personalities acquired through of various life experiences and trauma responses. The base matter is territoriality, which can be anything defining us in relation to others that we have an ego-driven instinct to protect. The transmuted result, then, is integrity, and MacCoun contends that separation is our phase of spiritual adolescence because we can’t become magical adults without maturing beyond egoic impulses to defend our existential territory. 

The fourth stage is conjunction, a combining of the results from the previous three stages. In the physical sense, the process has altered from changing a substance through natural processes to changing a substance using a combination of the other substances generated in each stage of the process. Existentially, it refers to being able to hold opposing forces, transmuting vulnerability into compassion by way of the heart. Rather than trying to make sense of conflict in our heads, we hold it in our hearts and offer hospitality to the opposing forces,  compassion.

Fermentation happens next, which physically involves leaving the substance alone in the dark until it putrefies. In existential terms, this is the “dark night of the soul” that transmutes the base material of obsolete desires and ambitions into magical will. One’s inner life overtakes the outer life because an aspect of our will is an obstacle to what our spirit wishes to express through our physical reality.

Sublimation is the penultimate stage, where the physical substance is heated up until the essence rises to the surface. On a personal level, this is the phase where we realize we’re disconnected from our true intentions. The transmuting of thoughts into deeds starts with the internal panic or “heat” of recognizing when our mentality is misaligned with what we’re doing. After this phase, our will becomes wise because it’s more connected to our spirit. The subtlety of our true essence moves beyond gross matter, freed by being subjected to each stage of the alchemical process.

MacCoun named the final stage radiation, which is where ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’ is formed in medieval alchemy. This essential concept will be covered in part II, but both physically and existentially this phase is one of coagulation. The base matter is arbitrary magic and the transmutation is sacred magic. According to MacCoun, Aleister Crowley’s famous quote, “Do what thou whilst shall be the whole of the law,” is the very definition of arbitrary magic. By contrast, Deunov’s Universal White Brotherhood believe that magical results are achieved by treating everyone and everything as sacred, that we must always be infusing positive vibrations into both the subtle and gross in order to direct our will.

Unlike physical, linear alchemy of a single substance, any number of these existential processes can occur simultaneously,  and through our lifetimes. In part II we’ll explore the true meaning of The Philosopher’s Stone, the supposed secret key to successful alchemy.

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

Pharrell Williams

Film

Theaters of Authenticity

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Ana Roberts December 3, 2024

David Bowie released his first album in 1967 to little acclaim or success, and there are many who say it rightly deserved neither. A peculiar blend of psychedelic rock, folk and whimsical music hall acts, the album is incompatible with the rest of his career. It is a combination of twee songs of pastoral England, saccharine love songs and quaint lyrics that seem to come from an oral tradition of medieval story telling. It is an album mostly not worth talking about, save for a single track ‘We Are Hungry Men’ undoubtedly amongst the few embarrassing moments in Bowies career. It is a muddled song telling a rather shallow story, feeling halfway between a radio play and a song, with an undeniably catchy chorus, yet in it Bowie plays the part of a Messiah, come to earth to warn of overpopulation. The lyrics read like a pulp science-fiction novel of the 50s, a known influence on Bowie, but it is not ludicrous to suggest that Bowie had seen how Dylan had created himself as a prophet and began flirting with the idea. In fact some four years later, on Hunky Dory, he paid direct homage to his influence on ‘Song for Bob Dylan’, illustrating how deeply he understood the power of Dylan’s creation, ‘You sat behind a million pair of eyes / And told them how they saw’. Bowie understood the power of Dylan’s ability to transplant his truth on others, rather than make any claims for himself but more importantly, he understood that Dylan was playing a character, addressing him by his given name and referring to Dylan as a separate entity entirely; ‘Now, hear this, Robert Zimmerman / Though I don’t suppose we’ll meet / Ask your good friend Dylan / If he’d gaze on down the street’.

Bowie saw that Dylan was a created character, and that his mythology as a prophet was a tool of genius, but even on ‘We Are The Hungry Men’ Bowie took this tool far further than Dylan ever did, on this very first outing he presents himself directly as a prophet, something Dylan never dared to do throughout his career. In a mostly forgettable album, this single moment shows that Bowie, so early in his career, is already comfortable with playing characters, willingly inauthentic at his very origin and entirely aware of how Dylan has created himself, and dealt with his own problem of authenticity. It would be another five years until the Bowie’s journey of the created prophet would reach it’s origin with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars.

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“Bowie created a prophet, and created for him a prophecy he knew would come true. While Dylan ensured that his work could not be falsifiable, Bowie ensured that his was able to be proven true.”

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Fans waiting outside the concert in D.A. Pennebacker’s ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’, 1979.

In the D.A. Pennebacker, who had made the Bob Dylan film ‘Dont Look Back’ some 6 years earlier, concert film of Ziggy’s last performance we open with glimpses of a crowd waiting outside. One by one, boys and girls alike, are seen in makeup, in crimson hair, dressed as mime artists, as aliens, as the lost population of Ziggy’s world. These are not just fans, they are inhabitants, they are part of the performance, they are the disciples of Ziggy who have followed him from outer space to earth to revel in his glory, in his sex, in his pure rock’n’roll. This is the genius of Ziggy and the genius of Bowie; it is in this that he is able to become entirely authentic through playing a created character. Bowie does not have to comment on or confront whether he is authentic because through creating the character of Ziggy Stardust, he has created a theater. His understanding of mime and comedia dell’arte, studied in the interim years between his first album and this, he was able to create a world through himself alone. The reduction of comedia dell’arte into purest forms of emotion to convey character allowed him to forget about the particulars. It is why Ziggy Stardust doesn’t tell a cohesive story and still creates a world. It is a masterpiece of maximalist reductionism. Bowie did not create a glass onion, he created an alien, and presented him openly for the world to see. He created a singular narrative, rejecting the need for a continuous one. Though his albums before all built up to this, they have no relation to it. David Bowie needs to be authentic, needs to create a glass onion, but Ziggy Stardust has no such requirements. Watching the opening minutes of the concert film, with a gaggle of kids dressed up as freaks, it is clear that this is true. The audience believes in the world, and they believe in Ziggy, so they become part of the world. They no longer question whether he is being authentic, because they have authentically inhabited the same created world as him. It is easier to create worlds than to change them.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars ends as promised, with a fall. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ offers the most cohesive chronicling of the events of the album so far, and, sung from the perspective of one of the spiders, it describes his death, ‘Like a leper messiah / When the kids had killed the man / I had to break up the band’. It offers a parable of fame and success, the overcoming of an ego that leads to destruction. Yet, it is not the last song on the album. Instead, it precedes ‘Suffragette City’ and the album finishes with ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’. The live show too, while it differed in track listing from the album, always finished with this track. In Pennebackers documentary of this final performance, at the end of the show, stripped of costumes, wearing just a sheer black top, Bowie delivers a speech before he begins, announcing the end of Ziggy Stardust that this is to be ‘the last show we’ll ever do’. He turns, as the opening piano chords begin and circles the stage, stopping in the middle to sing, delicately, ‘Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth’. The song matches the tone of the opener, ‘Five Years’, both feeling more like ‘avante-garde show song than straight rock songs’, biographer David Buckley suggests. The repeated refrain of the song, sung with unbridled passion and emotion by Bowie at the final show, ‘You’re not alone’ feels like a message to his fans, written in the knowledge he would kill Ziggy. Bowie created Ziggy with the intention of him to die, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ is the final prophecy, fulfilled 18 months after it’s release. It is this track that is perhaps the ultimate stroke of genius in creating Ziggy. Bowie created a prophet, and created for him a prophecy he knew would come true. While Dylan ensured that his work could not be falsifiable, Bowie ensured that his was able to be proven true.

Ziggy Stardust had truth embedded in him at the moment of his creation, to be ultimately revealed at the moment of his death. Bowie knew too, that in order for Ziggy to be authentic he had to die. Not just in the grand tradition of dead rock stars but more potently in the tradition of theater, where no piece of art can last forever, and they are imbued with truth because of it. Bowie employed mime in every aspect of Ziggy’s creation, and it is because of this that he was able to create authenticity. He undermined himself, acknowledged that he could never be authentic and so instead created someone who was. ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’ speaks as directly about Bowie as it does to Ziggy. Bowie had to commit suicide of the self, suicide of his rock n roll dreams in order to create Ziggy and reach authenticity and communicate truth. It would not be the first time such a suicide was performed. ‘You’re not alone’ is as much words of comfort for the freaks in Ziggy’s world as it is to Bowie himself, his repeatedly fracturing personalities ensuring that it would be nearly a decade before he performed as himself, alone. Bowie confronted authenticity as directly as The Monkees did, but where Head was a critique of their own inauthenticity, Ziggy Stardust was a celebration of it. Embedded within Ziggy is knowledge that Bowie had in his first record, we are never ourselves, never for ourselves and we are all the more powerful because of it.

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

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Lectures on the I Ching

Richard Feynman

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.

Five of Disks (Tarot Triptych)

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Name: Worry, the Five of Disks
Number: 5
Astrology: Mars in Taurus
Qabalah: Gevurah of He

Chris Gabriel November 30, 2024

In the Five of Disks, the Earth quakes and cracks, structures crumble and confusion comes. This is material instability, a crash.

In Rider, we find two beggars enduring a snow storm. The man is lame and using crutches, his head is bandaged as he looks up in agony. The woman is barefoot, covered in a shawl and thin skirt, she looks down in defeat. They are passing a stained glass window made up of five pentacles pointing up. The material comforts enjoyed by the previous 4 figures in the suits have withdrawn, there are now distinct haves and havenots.

In Thoth, we have five cracked disks forming a downward pentagram. They bear the symbols of the five Tattvas, the magical elements that form reality. Astrologically the card is Mercury in Taurus, an unhappy position, quick and agile Mercury here is weighed down by the laborious Bull.

In Marseille, we are shown our most pleasant image, five simple coins and two flowers. Here the disruption to the stable four is seen as a growth: they are not moving up or down as in Rider and Thoth, but remain balanced. This Growth can be good, like a flower, or bad, like cancer. Qabalistically, this is the Anger of the Princess.

This card reminds me of chapter 77 of the Tao Te Ching, in which the Tao of Heaven is likened to a bow, the high is made low and the low is made high, but the Tao of Man brings the high higher and forces the low lower. The Five of Disks is an excellent expression of this.

As Mars in Taurus it raises to mind Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali, who make excellent use of their fallen Mercury through science and art. The Parapraxis or Freudian Slip is an idea that could only arise from Mercury Taurus, the worry that our words reveal ulterior motives is exactly the kind of paranoia that flourishes in the sign. 

Dali develops the “Paranoiac Critical Method” through which he follows paranoid fantasies as far as they can go. Psychoanalysis, and its town crier Surrealism, shook the very foundations of civilization by revealing their true basis in the terrifying and inhuman Unconscious.

Materially, this is a stock market crash and economic collapse, the stable power of the Four of Disks is broken. The money goes up, leaving the poor to suffer, as in Rider, or the system itself crumbles, as in Thoth.

When we pull this card, expect your comfort to be shaken, for it harkens a breaking down and collapse. Trust your suspicions. This can be a failed investment, a car crash, a break up, or a job loss but it can also be the positive risk of a new opportunity. 

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

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

Film

Walking in the City, Part 2

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

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Michel De Certeau November 28, 2024

The Concept-city is decaying. Does that mean that the illness afflicting both the rationality that founded it and its professionals afflicts the urban populations as well? Perhaps cities are deteriorating along with the procedures that organized them. But we must be careful here. The ministers of knowledge have always assumed that the whole universe was threatened by the very changes that affected their ideologies and their positions. They transmute the misfortune of their theories into theories of misfortune. When they transform their bewilderment into 'catastrophes', when they seek to enclose the people in the 'panic' of their discourses, are they once more necessarily right?

Rather than remaining within the field of a discourse that upholds its privilege by inverting its content (speaking of catastrophe and no longer of progress), one can try another path: one can analyse the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated by panoptic administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy, developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of constituting everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization.

This pathway could be inscribed as a consequence, but also as the reciprocal, of Foucault's analysis of the structures of power. He moved it in the direction of mechanisms and technical procedures, 'minor instrumentalities' capable, merely by their organization of 'details', of transforming a human multiplicity into a 'disciplinary' society and of managing, differentiating, classifying, and hierarchizing all deviances concerning apprenticeship, health, justice, the army or work. 'These often miniscule ruses of discipline', these 'minor but flawless' mechanisms, draw their efficacy from a relationship between procedures and the space that they redistribute in order to make an 'operator' out of it. But what spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space? In the present conjuncture, which is marked by a contradiction between the collective mode of administration and an individual mode of reappropriation, this question is no less important, if one admits that spatial practices in fact secretly structure the determining conditions of social life. I would like to follow out a few of these multiform, resistant, tricky and stubborn procedures that elude discipline without being outside the field in which it is exercised, and which should lead us to a theory of everyday practices, of lived space, of the disquieting familiarity of the city.

The Chorus of Idle Footsteps

The goddess can be recognized by her step.
Virgil, Aeneid, I, 405

Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these 'real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city'. They are not localized; it is rather they that spatialize. They are no more inserted within a container than those Chinese characters speakers sketch out on their hands with their fingertips.

It is true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or 'window shopping', that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.

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“Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything’.”

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Walking Rhetorics

The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns (tours) and detours that can be compared to 'turns of phrase' or 'stylistic figures'. There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of 'turning' phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path (toumer un parcours). Like ordinary language, this art implies and combines styles and uses. Style specifies 'a linguistic structure that manifests on the symbolic level ... an individual's fundamental way of being in the world'; it connotes a singular. Use defines the social phenomenon through which a system of communication manifests itself in actual fact; it refers to a norm. Style and use both have to do with a 'way of operating' (of speaking, walking, etc.), but style involves a peculiar processing of the symbolic, while use refers to elements of a code. They intersect to form a style of use, a way of being and a way of operating.

A friend who lives in the city of Sevres drifts, when he is in Paris, toward the rue des Saints-Peres and the rue de Sevres, even though he is going to see his mother in another part of town: these names articulate a sentence that his steps compose without his knowing it. Numbered streets and street numbers ( 112th St., or 9 rue Saint-Charles) orient the magnetic field of trajectories just as they can haunt dreams. Another friend unconsciously represses the streets whjch have names and, by this fact, transmit her - orders or identities in the same way as summonses and classifications; she goes instead along paths that have no name or signature. But her walking is thus still controlled negatively by proper names. 

What is it then that they spell out? Disposed in constellations that hierarchize and semantically order the surface of the city, operating chronological arrangements and historical justifications, these words (Borrégo, Botzaris, Bougainville ... ) slowly lose, like worn coins, the value engraved on them, but their ability to signify outlives its first definition. Saint-Peres, Corentin Celton, Red Square ... these names make themselves available to the diverse meanings given them by passers-by; they detach themselves from the places they were supposed to define and serve as imaginary meeting-points on itineraries which, as metaphors, they determine for reasons that are foreign to their original value but may be recognized or not by passers-by. A strange toponymy that is detached from actual places and flies high over the city like a foggy geography of 'meanings' held in suspension, directing the physical deambulations below: Place de l'Etoile, Concorde, Poissonniere ... These constellations of names provide traffic patterns: they are stars directing itineraries. 'The Place de la Concorde does not exist,' Malaparte said, 'it is an idea.' It is much more than an 'idea'. A whole series of comparisons would be necessary to account for the magical powers proper names enjoy. They seem to be carried as emblems by the travellers they direct and simultaneously decorate.

Linking acts and footsteps, opening meanings and directions, these words operate in the name of an emptying-out and wearing-away of their primary role. They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.' People are put in motion by the remaining relics of meaning, and sometimes by their waste products, the inverted remainders of great ambitions. Things that amount to nothing, or almost nothing, symbolize and orient walkers' steps: names that have ceased precisely to be ‘proper'.

Ultimately, since proper names are already 'local authorities' or ‘superstitions', they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) makes the city a 'suspended symbolic order'. The habitable city is thereby annulled. Thus, as a woman from Rouen put it, no, here 'there isn't any place special, except for my own home, that's all ... There isn't anything.' Nothing 'special': nothing that is marked, opened up by a memory or a story, signed by something or someone else. Only the cave of the home remains believable, still open for a certain time to legends, still full of shadows. Except for that, according to another city-dweller, there are only 'places in which one can no longer believe in anything’.

It is through the opportunity they offer to store up rich silences and wordless stories, or rather through their capacity to create cellars and garrets everywhere, that local legends (legenda: what is to be read, but also what can be read) permit exits, ways of going out and coming back in, and thus habitable spaces. Certainly walking about and travelling substitute for exits, for going away and coming back, which were formerly made available by a body of legends that places nowadays lack. Physical moving about has the itinerant function of yesterday's or today’s 'superstitions'. Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up space to something different. What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory’, the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleeting visions of the French countryside’, 'fragments of music and poetry', in short, something like an 'uprooting in one’s origins' (Heidegger)? What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one's own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.

From this point of view, their contents remain revelatory, and still more so is the principle that organizes them. Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world's debris. Even if the literary form and the actantial schema of 'superstitions' correspond to stable models whose structures and combinations have often been analysed over the past thirty years, the materials (all the rhetorical details of their 'manifestation') are furnished by the leftovers from nominations, taxonomies, heroic or comic predicates, etc., that is, by fragments of scattered semantic places. These heterogeneous and even contrary elements fill the homogeneous form of the story. Things extra and other ( details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.

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

Brianna Wiest

Film

Walking in the City, Part 1

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

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Michel De Certeau November 26, 2024

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

Voyeurs or Walkers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From the Concept of the City to Urban Practices

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

An Operational Concept?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iggy Pop Playlist

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

Rays of Truth

Questlove Playlist

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

Ten of Cups (Tarot Triptych)

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

Chris Gabriel November 23, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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