Books I read on my phone in 2024

Alex Niven - Wikipedia

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The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in N…

"Incorporating sharp questions and big ideas, Niven shi…

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It was in this context that the director Ridley Scott, who had grown up in Stockton in County Durham, and whose family had helped to establish most of the state-of-the-art cinemas in interwar Newcastle, would launch Blade Runner into the world. Released in 1982, as the final, most aggressive phase of northern deindustrialization was kicking into gear, this visionary film was something like the swansong of a particular tradition in twentieth-century art of using an industrial northern backdrop as both creative inspiration and a means of hallucinating an evocative impending future.

Though it would later become an archetype of northern backwater decline (in the context of early 2020s debates about so-called Red Wall and 'left-behind' areas), it was in Hartlepool on the County Durham coast that Scott would pick-up
the inspiration and the professional training for Blade Runner's spectral premonition of the year 2019. An early beneficiary of the British state education system of the post-war years, Scott studied at West Hartlepool College of Art between 1954 and 1958, an experience he would later describe as a 'revelation', because of its 'weirdly dressed students' and 'passionate teachers'. In this nurturing creative environment, and later as he enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London, Scott would absorb certain key high modernist influences while giving them a distinctively northern twist. His first film, Boy and Bicycle (made in 1962), featured stream-of-consciousness voiceovers indebted to James Joyce's Ulysses, underlain with footage of his brother Tony cycling over a landscape of cooling towers and blast furnaces in West Hartlepool and Seaton Carew, on the north-east edge of industrial Teesside.

There is little doubt that such vistas would remain lodged in Scott's mind, so that when he later came to create the cosmic chiaroscuro of twenty-first-century Los Angeles which supplies the backdrop to Blade Runner, he would ensure that it looked a lot like the brooding panorama he had once seen at the mouth of the River Tees. In this weirdly generative space, which had also given Aldous Huxley the imaginative jolt to create Brave New World, Scott would be one of the last in a long line of twentieth-century writers and artists to uncover a sublime other England - one rooted in the urban North rather than the rural Home Counties, and which looked forwards to a technological future, not backwards to a
rustic past. As Scott commented in a 2007 interview:

There's a walk from Redcar into Hartlepool I'd cross a bridge at night, and walk above the steel works. So that's probably where the opening of Blade Runner comes from. It always seemed to be rather gloomy and raining, and I'd just think 'God, this is beautiful.' You can find beauty in everything. And so I think I found the beauty in that darkness.

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The Hill of Dreams is his best work, essentially because he came closest in it to his own ideal that language should itself be a rare instrument for the transformation of the soul, akin to music. He belongs to a very particular English tradition, that of the radical conservative. They combine a hatred of commercialism and big business, mercantile and bourgeois values, with a strong affection for tradition and continuity, individuality and the 'good life' in the widest, most all-embracing sense.'

Indeed Machen was equally at home writing about the joys of taverns and good food as he was invoking the great god Pan or tramping the hidden by-ways and pathways mapped out in his The London Adventure Or The Art Of Wandering, published in 1924 well before psychogeographers codified the practice. Machen was also a member of The Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn, a magical society founded by William Woodman, William Wynn Westcott and SL MacGregor Mathers via direct transmission from supposed 'secret chiefs', with a membership including poet WB Yeats, Aleister Crowley, Algernon Blackwood and AE Waite.

But most of all Machen eulogised the hills and valleys of his boyhood home of 'noble, fallen Caerleon-on-Usk, in the heart of Gwent'. Machen sang of the liminal borderland between England and Wales in countless pieces like The Hill Of Dreams and The Secret Glory, which, he believed, caught a glimpse of the eternal.

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What if one became animal or plant through literature, which certainly does not mean literarily

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The book imitates the world, as art imitates nature; by procedures specific to it that cannot accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do.

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In nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature.

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Take William Burrough's cut-up method: the folding of one text onto another, which constitutes multiple and even adventitious roots (like a cutting), implies a supplementary dimension to that of the texts under consideration.

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Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.
The linguistic tree on the Chomsky model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichotomy. On the contrary, not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature: semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status.

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We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They've made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology to linguistics. Nothing is beautiful or loving or political aside from underground stems and aerial roots, adventitious growths and rhizomes.

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Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter.

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Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but a brain itself is much more a grass than a tree.

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Murphy said:

Nadia Choucha's book is alright too

Surrealism and the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, a…

An art historian shows how many surrealists and their p…

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DannyL said:

I like that Nadia Choucha book a lot.

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As a fact, a great sinner is more really alive than a tepid, effeminate man, and the fullness of his return to virtue will be in proportion to the extent of his errors.

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Dali has provided a witty account of Breton's disapproval of his painting The Lugubrious Game (1932). In this painting, Dali has
portrayed a man whose underpants are smeared with excrement, to Breton's extreme disapproval. Dali, quite naturally, defended his right to paint whatever he chose to. He compared Breton and his colleagues
to the 'Church Fathers' and wrote on the affair:

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"I understood from that day forward that these were merely toilet-paper revolutionaries, loaded with petite bourgeois prejudices, in whom the archetypes of classical morals had left indelible imprints. Shit scared them. Shit and arseholes.
Yet, what was more human, and more needful oft ranscending! "

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In the final issue of Documents (No.8, 1930) Leiris contributed a remarkable essay, 'The "Caput Mortuum" or the Alchemical Woman' which is accompanied by full page photographs of a woman in a black leather mask, creating a disquieting and sombre effect.

It deserves to be discussed at length, since it is a particularly good example of a surrealist synthesis of such diverse topics as eastern dervishes, costume, totemism, fetishism, eroticism, mysticism and alchemy.

Leiris writes how he was inspired to write the article after a conversation with William Seabrook, who had sent the photographs. In their conversation, they talked about their mutual interest in occultism and their scepticism of Western civilization, and how it could be overcome, mentioning their monism- i.e. body and soul, matter and thought are unified. Seabrook told Leiris a story from his travels in the Middle East about a monastery of dervishes.

One young initiate was showing rapid progress, so his tutor told him to spend a night meditating alone in the ruins of an ancient mosque, whereupon he would gaze on the face of God. When the tutor went to the mosque the next day, he asked the initiate if he had seen the face of God.

The trembling initiate replied yes, he had seen the face of God at the end of the night. When the tutor asked him what it had looked like, the boy replied that it was his own face.

Leiris uses this story as a starting point for the discussion of the photographs, which he perceives to be both erotic and mystic, because the woman's head is disguised. He discusses 'disguises' in a general way: uniforms, tattoos, theatrical costumes, carnival masks, women's make-up and tribal totems.

In the latter, the individual identifies with an animal spirit, wearing a mask to cause a transformation of identity. The psychological process is similar to that which occurs in sexual fetishism, when a man focuses his desire on an article of woman's clothing, which functions as a symbol for the whole woman.

Fetishes attract desire because of their estrangement from the real object, and their ability to epitomize and intensify the concept of the real object. The manufactured object is charged with a social value, as opposed to pure nudity.

Leiris seems to suggest that the fetish, symbolic of the greater distance from the real object, can paradoxically bring us closer to our own source of desire in this distance - which can be compared to the initiate gazing upon the face of God, his own face.

In this sense, the mechanism of erotic fetishism comes close to religious fetishism, particularly the cult of relics, for they both employ the same type of magical thinking. The part is taken for the whole, the accessory for the person; and this part is not only equal to the whole, but becomes stronger than the
object that it represents, like a diagram.

This part, or diagram, is like a quintessence, more moving and expressive than the whole because it is more concentrated, less real and therefore more exterior to us. When the real object becomes assimilated with its disguise, we undergo a metamorphosis. Thus, the masked woman becomes a generalized and more abstract woman, and the image of her body acquires a surplus of intensity.

She is made more mysterious in her anonymity, and Leiris describes her as Nature and the human symbol of the exterior world, which men try to dominate.

Her head, the symbol of her individuality and intelligence is negated by the mask. She is no longer able to look up and appear elevated, so she represents the pleasure of sacrilege, a simple and universal erotic mechanism'. The joy experienced by the young dervish applies to the man faced with the masked woman. Love becomes reduced to a natural, instinctual process because the brain is symbolically negated by the mask. Hiding the face, the quintessence of human expression', reduces the woman to an 'infernal and subterranean significance.

There is a reversal of human custom by covering the head and leaving the body naked. The whole body is symbolically reversed, with the head covered in leather, usually reserved for making shoes, boots and whips, thus creating an element of fear to be overcome. Leiris describes eroticism as an ecstatic means of transcending the self, breaking the lines of morality intelligence and habit and 'conjuring up the evil forces to brave God and his substitutes'.

He calls the process of metamorphosis which results as 'caput mortuum', a term borrowed from the ancient alchemists, who applied it to the phase of the Great Work where all seems rotten when all is regenerated.

Leiris shows in this article how mystical and erotic feelings both stem from the same impulse to enter into a more direct contact with reality by transgressing the artificial boundaries of the self. He uses an alchemical term to show how this conjunction of the high and low, the base and elevated, where sexual instinct provides metaphysical insight.

This is a principle to be found in Tantra, and there are also similarities between the concepts raised in this article and the system of Austin Spare...

The body as the alchemical vehicle was a concept that Dali had written about:

'I have an alchemist's view of the human being. I do not believe in an abstract notion of man - his genitals, his odours, his excreta, the genes of his blood, his Eros, his dreams, and his death are an integral part of existence. I believe on the contrary that the 'substance being sought is the same as that from which it must be derived', which is the basic principle of alchemy. Every element of matter has a treasure within it. And man to me is alchemical matter par excellence: the well from which wealth must flow, the gold mine of the absolute, provided you know how to transcend it.'

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DannyL said:

Bad one to read on the phone maybe? Just in terms of seeing the prints.

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Eileen Agar's object The Angel of Anarchy (1936) is a plaster head entirely covered in embroidereds carves, beads and shells, creating a mysterious, disturbing yet sensual effect. The denial of the head is a denial of self-control, logic, reason, evoking infinite potential for expansion in a different dimension.

External sight is covered suggesting a direction inwards. The veiling is a revelation in its very etymology. Revelation is a re-veiling, every
discovery acting as a catalyst for a new mystery to be revealed. The ideao f the veil implies a potential removal, with both mystical and violentc onnotations. The Angel of Anarchy speaks in a clandestine language, exhorting the spectator to plunge, head first, into the infinite.

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There's legendary fear of forests, the panic fear which Pan himself inspired in those who entered his domain. The Roman soldiery, fearless in the face of every enemy, were overcome with stark terror by their first sight of the untrodden forests of Germany. It is a reasonable fear in the face of massive evidence of a tumultuous form of life which is not human, the world of giant vegetables.

'West of Arkham, the woods rise wild and there are valleys with deep woods where no axe has ever cut.' Here flow brooks that have never caught the sun; the tumbled stones of abandoned farmhouses suggest how unwelcome a visitor man was when, in his hubris, he thought he might come to live here and how precipitate, how ignominious was his departure.

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Mircea Eliade says: 'The forest is a symbol which contains death.'

Man is excluded from the forest, where beings and objects, plants and animals, mingle and blend their forms. In the woods above Arkham, in the deep forests of Massachusetts and Vermont, may be found those caverns which lead to the home of the unnameable and the black stones graven with curious hieroglyphs that will invoke the Elder Beings Lovecraft subsumes to the witch-folklore of New England.

Here, also, live on, horned phantoms in the green dark, the mythologies of the Indians who originally lived here in perfect harmony with the forests we only fear because we do not know.

Man is excluded from the forest but the Indians are not because they are not human; perhaps they lived here as angels before the Europeans came but now some Luciferan fall has converted them to beings of darkness.

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The Narangasset Indians are often evoked by Lovecraft as servants to the eighteenth-century savants and necromancers whose descendants are forced to carry such vile hereditaries of damnation with them into the age of the internal combustion engine. The Indians themselves exist in the twentieth century as ghosts or as place names, the names of rivers... the Miskatonic, the Pawtuxet.

Yet their absence itself suggests the presence of death. The Pawtuxet is a long river 'which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards' (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). The very absence of the Indians from their own forests embodies the estrangement of the alien country.

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For the forest is a kind of maze. But it is a sentient one; it has a 'hideous soul' (The Tomb). The forest is a ravenous and multiform being capable of passions, which expresses itself in the movement of the branches, unexpected, causeless, and in the stirrings of a wind that moves the leaves but which we ourselves cannot feel upon our faces.

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Machen wrote to his French translator, Toulet:

'When I was writing Pan and The White Powder I did not believe that such strange things happened in real life, or could ever have happened. Since then, and quite recently, I have had certain experiences in my own life which have entirely changed my point of view in these matters.... Henceforward I am quite convinced that nothing is impossible on this Earth.'

...It is worth re-reading The Great God Pan in the light of Machen's admission. It is about a doctor of pantheist inclinations, who feels that nature is a veil that holds a marvellous world of spiritual reality; he believes he has discovered the way to induce this mystical vision by means of a brain operation. The ancients... called it seeing the god Pan.'

He performs the operation on a girl; she becomes an idiot. The 'vision of Pan' turns out to be too awful for human beings to bear. The idiot girl wanders on the mountains, and has sexual intercourse with some strange creature; as a result, she conceives a child who is beautiful and evil...

What is remarkable here is Machen's transformation of Wordsworthian nature mysticism into something far more sinister. It reminds us that the word panic derives from Pan. Again, Machen seems to be suggesting to Toulet that the underlying vision of The Great God Pan is truer than he
suspected when he wrote it.

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Natural entanglements: An interview with David Kidner

Gyrus: The ideas in Nature & Psyche are quite subtle, requiring specific terminology as well as a kind of iterative repetition to draw them out and stall simplistic misinterpretations. Given that this interview simply doesn’t allow that kind of depth, how would you sum up your thesis in the...

dreamflesh.com

A major problem here, I think, is that support structures have often been assimilated to industrialist ideology, so rather than connecting us to nature, they reflect our distancing from it, and so further alienate us. As Hillman points out, for example, therapy is in some cases a substitute for engagement with the world. In the industrialised world, we all too often seek meaning in isolation from the world and then apply it to the world, rather than finding meaning in the world and our engagement with it. As a child, I struggled to accept the notion that beauty was in paintings and stained glass windows, when all one had to do was to look outside the window at the sky and the clouds to see what, to me at least, was far more beautiful. Similarly, Roger Brooke makes the point that we become spiritual beings not through some internal insight or maturation, but “through the world’s revelation as a temple”. That’s exactly right, I think; and in the same way, we become loving by recognising the loveliness of someone or something outside ourselves. Meaning, I suggest, is in the world (which includes our own embodiment) and in our own resonance with the world, not in some rarified realm of thought or aesthetics.

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The belief that the banyan tree is occupied by good-natured spirits or djinns comes from ancient beliefs codified in Hinduism. In ancient India, along with local deities people worshipped trees, lakes, animals, etc.

One of the most well known spirits associated with the worship of trees was Yaksha, believed to reside on the branches and in the roots of banyan trees.

As Hinduism developed into its modern version, such folk religious practices also found their way into Brahmanism. In the Bhagavad Gita, the book of ethics of Hinduism, Lord Krishna states that the banyan tree is his embodiment out of all the trees.

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Nanak was a naturalist. He regarded the beauty of the world to be a manifestation of the Divine.

For example, he says:

"The sky the salver,
the sun and moon the lamps,
The stars studding the heavens are the pearls
The fragrance of sandal is the incense
Fanned by the winds all for Thee

The great forests are the flowers.
What a beautiful aarti is being performed
For you, O Destroyer of fear."

Do you understand what Nanak is trying to say here? Nanak is criticising the act of performing of aartis [fire ceremonies] within Hindu temples. He is trying to say that God doesn't reside just in temples, mosques or shrines, but in nature.

Nanak is saying that when God resides everywhere why should we, as devotees, limit our aarti to temples?

The entire world is our temple and everything in nature is performing the act of aarti.

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According to legend, a few yogis were hanging from the trees while there were others who were sitting within an empty trunk.

I stared hard at the trees, picturing Nanak observing their practices. I was drawn towards it. I touched one of the trees in the hope that through physical contact I would be able to transcend the boundaries of time and space and enter the world of Nanak and those naked ascetics.

I was there.

Nanak sat here, his legs folded under his knees, while in front of him Santrain sat in a yoga position. Nanak was young but looked much wiser than his age. There was curiosity in his eyes as he listened with rapt attention.

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From plants we learn that if you want to enter nature, you have to do it where you are, because that is the only place nature can be found. It follows that if you are going to ask a plant to bring you into the blessing of nature, it is best to ask a plant that lives where you live. The great English acupuncturist J. R. Worsley said,

"Local herbs are not ten times stronger, not a hundred times stronger. Local herbs are one thousand times stronger than exotic ones!"

Professor Worsley was not exaggerating.

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"The names of these plants mean nothing," Wulf chuckled.

"They each have to be specially prepared, with plants known only to sorcerers. Even to begin to learn about the plants of power, you must collect and prepare them with me, not memorize their names."

I laughed with relief. I could remember only about five or six of the plants he had listed and these were plants already known to the Mission. Indeed, for the monastic library I had transcribed sections from volumes of the classical Greek herbals. But I was interested in Wulf's reference to plants of power.

"Plants of power are important allies for a sorcerer," he said, as if reading my thoughts.

"With their aid I can influence the life-force of a person."

"Life-force?" The term meant nothing to me.

"Life-force permeates everything. It is the source of all vitality. In a person it is generated in the head, flows like a stream of light into the marrow of the spine and from there into the limbs and crevices of the body. Power-plants help to control the channels through which the energy flows."

I was intrigued by the idea, but could not conceive of its material essence. I tried to picture it as a liquid substance.

"Is life-force like blood?" I asked.

Wulf shook his head. "Life-force is
visible only to a sorcerer...

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Trees are often the dominant life form, or at least the largest & most noticeable. They may form a large proportion of your early work with the Glade.

There are many ways of selecting a tree to work closely with & many possibilities for practice. Try pacing slowly around it in either or both directions for a period then lean your back against the tree where it is appropriate or comfortable to do so, either sitting with your legs flat on the ground or standing.

Face or hug your tree.

Stroke it slowly with the palms of your hands. A tree, too, can be an axis (see above). Trees contain vertical flows of energy & materials.

Visualise upward streaming on your in
breath & downward streaming on your outbreath. Alternate these movements as you breath until the movements come
alive for you. Then try to visualise both as continuous. This 'visualisation" maybe visual, auditory or both.

Try doing it visually until you can "hear" the flows. One direction may predominate. This will vary with the season & time of day. It may also vary with your own state.

You may choose to concentrate on only one direction for a particular purpose such as earthing an energy, which can be very important.

Don't, please don't become a tree parasite!

Always ask permission or test the situation in some other way. Some trees are emphatic with their "NO"

This is a most positive sign- well at least you heard it! A tree talked to you! & you understood what it said!

With permission & at your own discretion try a bit of tree climbing. Don't forget that getting down can be harder than getting up! Nowadays there are quite a lot of expert tree climbers associated with anti-road protests. Go down to your local camp, give them some support & they may teach you some stuff!

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