Monthly Archives: January 2013

jung on the human psyche and healing the soul

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Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the stock exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.
~ C.G. Jung

genna gardini – the archivist

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The past clicks us into focus.
There’s a slid-hinge to the edit.

In this photo, your father frames you
like a fish he wants to remember—
slipped and tin, temporarily pliable,
propped on his knee.

Let’s take your brother, here,
blue-faced and stuffed, full of berries out the
bottom of the backyard, off the bramble
of his foot, rolling from the cabinet’s
carpet like a gum to its tongue,
small and sand-favoured;

his cheek still a linen chest of flesh
before he turned himself down

for girls who developed with their legs poised
stern as oars. They were his wife. Their skirts
unassailable septums, bone-walled. And their
factory-lit health, a tythe

I find myself paying,

and saying, “What’s honest is what lines it,
is the advertorial milk blanket of your insides,”

while my friends ask, “Is this how shit always is?”
and listen, and wonder, what fresh therapist
will chug the construction belt of their counsel,
tap court shoes square and cocked, to knock
the Morse code of medication, and send us
nearing ourselves, for three months, or about.

So, I smoke the scalpel of memory, instead,
and scour love in its clot, as time consults
like a ruler. And each inch knows this
is the telling. This is the business of my life:

to talk that bread out of its dripping
with the small, sauced animal of my knife.

Posted here with kind permission from the author.

a special message from jimmy rage

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jimmy rage01each and every one one of us has a book of narratives, that we read write and become part of. each chapter verse and paragraph tells our stories and as time passes, we become familiar with our own characters and our own cast of characters become familiar with us.

there is the longing, the dreaming, the ambition, the beauty and the ugliness and above all, there is the love.. the love of others, the love of others like self and the love of self..

the hardest part though, is to be and become part of the narrative..beauty.. to not negate from its positivity its validity as a document to the light rays streaming through our windows of hope and courage to go forward.
the sun rises and sets in a distant sky, as trees bend, bow, blow leaves, jingling. we are hushed into our own simplicities, the grace of intelligence..

man woman or child is the subtotal of a life lived and hoped for.. the narrative of distant and close dreams are but moments, in our own being, where we are awake and know and overstand that it is in the power of our being that we learn that our own empowerment is the storehouse.. that we are capable of more than the small parts that make up the whole.

love, romance, career, children are all part of the course of our own destined future, but the inner self, the inner voice is the calling to follow your own path, all love, and in doing so .. this becomes a mantra, a calling even..

jimmy rage02

a dream about an imaginary new year’s day

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It’s New Year’s Day, away for the weekend with a smallish group of friends… people on different continents, in one place in my mind.  We leftovers – avatars of Stella, Michelle, Marco and me, I think it might be – wander back through in the early morning to the communal lapa sort of place where all the dancing had been, the remains of last night’s party trodden into the ground, our affect similarly flattened. The day is wrapped in a quiet mist blanket, grey and clammy.  All the couples are still in bed.

“OK, we need music.”

I pick my way over to the old boombox, there on a table surrounded by empty cups, the dregs of stale liquor… Scratching around blearily, I find a Nina Simone tape. (CASSETTE TAPES? WTF, dreambrain?) Anyway, I want to put on “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” for we souls with nowhere to be curled into.

I slide the wonky cassette into the player, reach out to press play, and my finger can’t. The buttons are melted, changed into some unearthly goo. Not sticky, not hot, not cold, just melted, uncooperative and soft in an alien, irreparable way. This weird flux will crust over, re-harden as the day wears on into a single mass of equally unbiddable plastic.

Someone must have been using a lighter to illuminate what they were doing during last night’s revelry, I suppose. What a bright idea it must have seemed in that moment, but now we can’t hear the one song that I was hoping might make us feel sort of OK about living through another year alone on Earth.

la double vie de veronique

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The marionette scene from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991). Watch the full film HERE.

“The director’s international breakthrough remains one of his most beloved films, a ravishing, mysterious rumination on identity, love, and human intuition. Irène Jacob is incandescent as both Weronika, a Polish choir soprano, and her double, Véronique, a French music teacher. Though unknown to each other, the two women share a mysterious and emotional bond that transcends language and geography, which Kieslowski details in gorgeous reflections, colours, and movements. Aided by Slawomir Idziak’s shimmering cinematography and Zbigniew Preisner’s haunting, operatic score, Kieslowski creates one of cinema’s most purely metaphysical works. The Double Life of Veronique is an unforgettable symphony of feeling.

veronique butterfly

“Krzysztof Kieslowski focuses on identity using actress Irene Jacobs in the dual role of French music teacher Veronique and Polish soprano Weronika – both born on the same day. Metaphysically they are aware of each other’s counterpart – this harkens back to the director’s penchant for fate, chance and circumstance,and we envision a possible meeting of the intertwined souls… Our unspoken desire for a mirrored being – who can non-verbally share our most intimate loves and joys – is the ultimate expression of personal support… Overall, an ambiguous and enigmatic offering, this is a film that clings to you for years after viewing. A true masterpiece of cinema.”
~ Gary W. Tooze

noise and capitalism

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“This book, Noise and Capitalism, is a tool for understanding the situation we are living through, the way our practices and our subjectivities are determined by capitalism. It explores contemporary alienation in order to discover whether the practices of improvisation and noise contain or can produce emancipatory moments and how these practices point towards social relations which can extend these moments.

If the conditions in which we produce our music affects our playing then let’s try to feel through them, understand them as much as possible and, then, change these conditions.

If our senses are appropriated by capitalism and put to work in an ‘attention economy’, let’s, then, reappropriate our senses, our capacity to feel, our receptive powers; let’s start the war at the membrane! Alienated language is noise, but noise contains possibilities that may, who knows, be more affective than discursive, more enigmatic than dogmatic.

Noise and improvisation are practices of risk, a ‘going fragile’. Yet these risks imply a social responsibility that could take us beyond ‘phoney freedom’ and into unities of differing.

We find ourselves poised between vicariously florid academic criticism, overspecialised niche markets and basements full of anti-intellectual escapists. There is, after all, ‘a Franco, Churchill, Roosevelt, inside all of us…’ yet this book is written neither by chiefs nor generals.

Here non-appointed practitioners, who are not yet disinterested, autotheorise ways of thinking through the contemporary conditions for making difficult music and opening up to the wilfully perverse satisfactions of the auricular drives.”

Sound interesting? HERE, DOWNLOAD NOISE AND CAPITALISM FREE.
Edited by Mattin Iles and Anthony Iles
Contributions from Ray Brassier, Emma Hedditch, Matthew Hyland, Anthony Iles, Sara Kaaman, Mattin, Nina Power, Edwin Prévost, Bruce Russell, Matthieu Saladin, Howard Slater, Csaba Toth, Ben Watson.
More details from the publishers, Arteleku Audiolab (Kritika series), Donostia-San Sebastián (Gipuzkoa)
Publication date: September 2009

paul sharits – n:o:t:h:i:n:g

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A portion of the opening movement of Paul Sharits’ 1968 film.

N:O:T:H:I:N:G is a film deplenished of all, of any signified stance and involved only in the manner of film itself. Just the drawing of a bulb, the projector light and a chair remain in the space of the screen. But these are just random disruptions of monochrome frames.

The whole film is built as a vibration of rhythms, ‘energy-colour’, based on the structure of the Tibetan mandala of five Dyani Bouddhas. Formally the composition is centred on the psychic flickering caused by four symbolic colours: white, yellow, red and green. The more the film is next to the centre  that is the centre of the mandala, the empty point, the more the monochrome frames flicker faster, up to invert the speed in the second part of the film (bearing off the centre), the retrograde of the first one. Sharits constructed the structure of the film about the ‘Om’ Nembutsu droning: nevertheless the film can be considered as the visual translation of this sound.

“The screen, illuminated by Paul Sharits’ N:O:T:H:I:N:G, seems to assume a spherical shape, at times – due, I think, to a pearl-like quality of light his flash-frames create… a baroque pearl, one might say – wondrous!… One of the most beautiful films I’ve seen.” – Stan Brakhage

“You are pulled into the world of color, your color senses are expanded, enriched. You become aware of changes, of tones around your own daily reality. Your vision is changed. You begin to see light on objects around you… Your experience range is expanded. You have gained a new insight. You have become a richer human being.” – Jonas Mekas

this mortal coil – waves become wings/ barramundi

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“Wave Become Wings” and “Barramundi” from It’ll End in Tears, an album released in 1984 by the label 4AD, using the name “This Mortal Coil” as an umbrella title for a loose grouping of guest musicians and vocalists brought together by label boss Ivo Watts-Russell.

Images taken from Baraka (directed by Ron Fricke).

t,o,u,c,h,i,n,g

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TOUCHING is a 1969 short film by Paul Sharits.

“There are moments in cinematic art when the narrative of the film is subjectively implied and subsequently written by the viewer. While this is common to most structural and lyrical films in the experimental genre, none hits louder than T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, an angry and demonic piece that simultaneously lulls you into awareness and hypnotizes you into an emotive overload.”

waiting to exhale

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lsd

*.* Love’s Secret Domain, 2004. Self-portrait manipulated with MS Photo Editor.

“I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

~ Ursula K. Le Guin – from The Dispossessed