laurie spiegel : an installation

Common now at galleries of any size are numerous looping films, of varying interest, aesthetic merit, typically deviating from traditional narrative.  I propose a larger and bolder project, of which here I only provide the most cursory notes and directions.  Others, more oriented to detail and with the capital means for execution, can fund and implement this installation, should they find it sufficiently worthy.

1.      laurie spiegel uses the five senses (expressed, for example, through film, music, incense, food, textures) and their varying absences, strategically choreographed for effective interplay and effect.

2.      While, ideally, the installation would shift in physical space—across the earth and beyond it—to accommodate its objective of simulated infinity, this may—with our present technology—be impractical, as it would entail the viewer being shifted in space without the aesthetic-sensuous experience being interrupted in any meaningful sense.  In the interim, this simulated infinity should itself be simulated through facades and sets (whether campy, ironic, lifelike, surreal, etc.) which partially or wholly are recreated in a permanent or shifting space, perhaps in a dedicated gallery, in a dedicated space within a larger gallery, or in a space not typically called a gallery.  In terms of existing galleries, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal would be suitable.  In terms of spaces not typically called a gallery, the Joint Defence Space Research Facility Pine Gap near Alice Springs would be suitable.  Regardless, if indoors, the dedicated space should be sufficiently large as to give the impression of boundlessness, whenever required, shifting its environmental effects as necessary, as input(s) to the spontaneously and choreographed aesthetic whole.

3.      I call this infinitely expanding work laurie spiegel, in honor and admiration.

4.      laurie spiegel is infinite.  While looping elements are present, elements shift in relation to one another such that (disregarding for the moment the reality of the viewer’s perpetual heraclitean shiftings) no combined sensuous experience repeats itself.  Thus, for example, Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates may play 39 times in a century (approximately 0.006% of the time or 1 in 50,000) and while there may be—or as likely not—a few overlaps with Land of Kush’s Monogamy, exact synchronicity between audio and video would be highly improbable and, even in the rare instance of occurrence, the other sensuous factors (smell, taste, touch), the shifting environment (whether ‘real’ or ‘simulated’ or a simulation of simulation), and the viewer’s own state will combine as to make the occurrence seem to be different, even as two July afternoons in different years, similar in meteorological effect and the same two humans picnicking in the same park, will be experienced as varied events, perhaps even more unlike than events more superficially disparate.  (The tunnels, or wormholes, in the narratives of our lives—what we more scientifically call time—appear and contract according to principles barely understood.)

5.      Precise synchronicity between or among elements intended by their designated creators to be synchronous (e.g. the soundtrack to The Holy Mountain advancing synchronously with the advancing video to The Holy Mountain) could be programmed into laurie spiegel so as to be more likely to occur, the likelihood being a parameter in the program.  Or the volume of material could be such that (along with an acceptance of randomness or possibly a facilitation of it through a parameter setting) intended synchronicity is highly unlikely to occur, like finding Hamlet in Borges’ Library of Babel.  A great discovery, to be sure, if it happens (whether one is familiar with the source or not might vary how one perceives the greatness) but not necessarily necessary to one’s enjoyment.  (One could suggest that laurie spiegel challenges, subverts [and even strangely fulfills, through the principle of mirrors] our assumptions of authorial intent and control, individuality, time and history, causality, and freedom.)

6.  The common prototype for "unintentional" video-audio synchronicity is, of course, Dark Side of the Rainbow, about which awed aficionadi point out at least 168 precise and shocking synchronicities.  But these aweful ones are obvious neophytes in AV synchronous experimentation.  Try Dark Side of the Moon with Svankmajer's Alice; The Expanding Universe with Santa Sangre; Ege Bamyasi with Planet Earth's Ocean Deep; F♯ A♯ ∞ with Cremaster I or IV; The Seer with Futurama's The Beast with a Billion Backs ... or, indeed, any particular kind of music with any particular kind of moving image.  Whether such experiments yield knowledge of pattern generation, whether they challenge or even crumble knowledge of the supposed integrity, containment and control of aesthetic vision, intent and individuality, whether they do other things in or to the realms of generation, annihilation, and identity, may be subservient,  in the moment of aesthetic experience, immersion, to the reconstituted and reconstituting reconstitutions.  laurie spiegel, then, is an experiment in the construction and decimation of reconstituting reconstitutions in the human, aided by a choreography of art and technology, strategy and chance, experimental research into whether all meaning is a form of apophenia.

7.      The infinity referred to in #4 above is achieved in our installation through a program not dissimilar from Spiegel’s mouse in intent.  Preset lists of movies (chosen primarily for their imagistic content:  perhaps 5,000 – 10,000 films and clips, allowing too for the absence of video), music (etc.) would be drawn on and combined, according to principles—including randomness—themselves built into the program.  laurie spiegel would have an adaptive aesthetics built into it, aiming for a constantly regenerative range of moods, effects, experiments, surprises, failures, ecstasies.  What is really distinctive about laurie spiegel is the compositional logic, the logic by which the various sensuous inputs and rhythms evolve and are constructed by the computer algorithms.

8.      One can imagine viewers dedicated to a lifetime immersed in this simulated world, who spend their lives at (or perhaps more accurately in) the installation, who are even placed there at birth by parents or the state and are taken to the grave from the installation (perhaps their corpses even being incorporated into its aesthetics).  This is no less experimental and perhaps contains more grounded hope than those who cryopreserve themselves; examined from a different context, it is little different than being immersed in a world of banking, law or domesticity—worlds into which some children are essentially placed at birth and which can easily be considered equally simulated.

9.      One can also imagine viewers being able to affect the programming, not simply in terms of how their inner states inevitably alter how they receive it, but in terms of active or passive voice- or other user- response/detection systems, whereby, for example, the synthetic cloud formations—colour, type, speed, quantity, etc.—on the “sky” are a concatenated reflection of the moods and emotional responses of those present at the installation at the time (which will include lifers, long-terms, short-termers, novices, repeaters).

10.      But we have omitted an important element!:  the courtiers, maids and servants, waiters and dancers, serving food, lighting incense, stroking attendees with feathers, throwing Play-Doh at them, poking them with paperclips, etc., perhaps on occasion committing (or appearing to commit) inappropriate, transgressive or even atrocious acts on the flesh, thus mirroring aspects of history and the soul, the vaudeville of excess in the flesh supporting and strangely mirroring the vaudeville of excess in art.

11.  The supporting fleshy cast—why not?—could (should? must?) exchange itself with the observers, such that the two casts (castes) become indistinguishable, a new effective democracy, whereby roles can be and are routinely exchanged so that they are primarily virtual and so never ossified.

12.  The entire enterprise itself should be filmed, subtly integrating itself into the simulated dramas, perhaps eventually overcoming it.  (Can we not imagine a series of future wars between laurie spiegel as defined by the compositional logic, the attributes of its program … and laurie spiegel as produced by the production of laurie spiegel, by that which is born of its attributes?)

13.  In this process, do play and replay, viewer and viewed, sense and nonsense, reality and simulation, life and art, become indistinguishable?  Isn’t this a question of the installation?  Isn’t this the question it seeks?

14.  Laurie Spiegel, the human and musician, is the patron saint of the transtechnological imagination and intercedes on behalf of artists everywhere in their quests to stay on the way of the imaginative spirit, not falling into the pit of product or the chasm of commerce.

15. 
An Example

Play Can’s Tago Mago with The Colour of Pomegranates and patchouli incense.

Tago Mago vinyl.  Film on a circular screen no less than 50 m high, using the 78’ Armenian version.

LP, film, & incense should begin simultaneously, a new stick of incense should be lit at the beginning of each of Tago Mago’s songs.  The final 4.5 minutes of the film will play in silence.

On the island of Tago Mago, outdoors, the audience seated around the island’s edge and the presumably inflatable screen at an appropriate distance on the water, circumscribing the island in its entirety.

The stage manager should be dressed as Donald Duck and the roaming technician as a 15^th c ashik, playing original compositions on the chonguri prior to and following the film.

This module should be performed and performed in this way and in this place and by these people and for this time to please the father of Sarai Milton, mother of Tlön.

The following foods should be served during the film/lp:dill pickles from Prague; Nova Scotian sour cherries tended and plucked by virgins; sustainably produced Ecuadorian burglar’s thighs blessed by a Kichwa shaman, Beninois fufu, and fried Chinese dog.

A troupe of topless ambient and general practitioners should roam among the observers, occasionally grazing nipples and toes against the observing heads, slapping those who respond.

16.  Preliminary Lists of Sense and Environmental Artifacts

16.1 Preliminary and Incomplete List of Films and Clips

Schroeter (Deux, Eika Kapatta), Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain, Fando y Lis), Barney (Cremaster Cycle), Kurosawa (Ran), Parajanov (The Colour of Pomegranates), Elfin Saddle (Wurld), Tarkovsky (Stalker, Andrei Rublev, Mirror, Solaris), Svankmajer (Alice, Little Otik, Conspirators of Pleasure, Shorts), Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Bunuel (Andalusian Dog), Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera), Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes), Boorman (Zardoz), Ivory (Savages), Noé (Enter the Void), Bergman (Persona, The Seventh Seal), Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), Tarr (Sátántangó, The Turin Horse), Gilliam (Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Lipský (I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen), Herzog (Wrath of God), Scott (Blade Runner), Lynch (Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive), Maysles (Grey Gardens), Waters (Pink Flamingos), Carax (Holy Motors), Dreyer, (Passion of Joan of Arc), Franju (Eyes Without a Face), Friedkin (The Exorcist), Mitchell (Behind the Green Door), Episodes (from Futorama, Simpsons, Dr Who, X-Files, Twin Peaks, etc.), Various shorts etc., Certain commercials, etc. …

16.2 Preliminary and Incomplete List of Audio

Bach (Gould’s second recording of The Goldberg Variations; The Art of Fugue), Land of Kush (Monogamy), Evangelista (Hello, Voyager), Selections from Colin Stetson, Arvo Pārt, Laurie Spiegel, Daphne Oram, Can (Tago Mago, Soundtracks, Delay, Monster Movie, Ege Bamyasi), Velvet Underground, Swan (The Seer), Scott Walker (Bish Bosch), King Crimson, Shalabi Effect, Ali Akbar Khan, Aphex Twin, Beck, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Holger Czukay, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Led Zeppelin, Matana Roberts, Matmos, Nine Inch Nails, Mira Calix, Omar Souleyman, Queens of the Stone Age, Raymond Scott, Sonic Youth, Sun City Girls, This Heat, Autechre, Zoviet France, Blonde Redhead, Silver Mt Zion, Godspeed!You Black Emperor, The Books, Exuma, Elizabeth Cotton, Fugazi, John Cage, Meredith Monk, Miles Davis, Morton Subotnick, Parliament, Stephan Micus, Steve Reich, Tangerine Dream, Terry Riley, Hanged Up, Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Pink Floyd, Portishead …

16.3 Preliminary List of Scents

This and the following Preliminary Lists remain to be drafted.

16.4 Preliminary List of Tastes

16.5 Preliminary List of Textures

16.6 Preliminary List of Locations

16.7 Preliminary List of Lighting and Lasers

(Constantly adapted based on viewers, technological advance, evolution of consciousness)

16.8 Preliminary List of Props and Servants

16.9 Preliminary List of Other Devices, Artifacts, Methods and Interrelations

For example, other art forms (painting, architecture, dance, video games, liturgical rites, sculpture, photography, printmaking) should be included.

years are clouds, we are rain

… consisting of a perambulatory, seven (7) randomites, and a knotty but true slough of thoughts pertaining to god, text, lies, and canada …

preambulatory

… these are my own particular opinions, feelings, and visions, and i deliver them as only what i myself feel and believe and see, and not for what is to be felt, seen or believed by others.

Adapted from Montaigne’s Essays (1580)

Epigraph in Daphne Oram’s An Individual Note (1972)

After 20 years of writing i am just beginning to learn how to write … after 40 years of thinking i am just beginning to learn how to think … after 50 years of living i am just beginning to learn how to live … as to loving, even God, after living tens of millennia and dying many times, still has not learned how to love ….

Adapted from a few-score mystics, artists and lovers, littered across centuries and continents

randomites

Coincidentally on Family Day i encounter the line—No matter how solidly you build your house, it will always rest on sand.

Like most, the professionals of the non-profit industry are money-changers, simply having less to change than those of the profit industry and more to change than those they claim to help.  Having less to change, they use different brokerage techniques on the exchanges of virtue.

To be without a pen is like being without breath or love.

Jabès—

God keeps his freedom in choice, whereas man loses it the instant he chooses.

You disturb death with your constant actions.

Faces, even belonging to those i love, are like flowers to me.  Words are like faces i love.

So many names still with roots across my untended timescape, few flowering.

Kathleen Munn, Toronto artist, withdraws from art at 52 because of society’s indifference, Toronto’s provincialism, the empty silence between her aesthetic vision and the surrounding sets of conformity.  But why not see indifference as a fuel, an impetus to keep creating, as far more of a reason to create than interest … interest tends to generate interest (in the way that sex rather than silencing lust breeds and screams it), but indifference creates creation.  Isn’t this why God couldn’t help but bring the world into a visible becoming, indifference being a prime attribute of the void?

            A variation of saying the world was created on a Sunday.

nine i-am’s of i—

1.      i am a text

2.      i am a void, which is to say a question

3.      i am an indefinite article

4.      i am a breaking of the book that breaks me

5.      i am cabbage soup

6.      i am a wink in the night, a drowsy eye of a world

7.      i am preposition pronoun and gerund that wants to be wholly verb but can’t decide which tense

8.      i am the memory of film after art evolves to fewer than one dimension

9.      i am not i am in timeless quarrel with myself that is perhaps to say the world concerning whether and where there should be punctuation

god, lying, blogger & canada

(with a little ditty on the evolution of suffering, as a bonus feature, at the end)

God brought the world into existence by lying, for to speak the truth It would have had to remain silent and the world remain in utter darkness and humanity wholly dirt.

We continually bring each other into existence through our mutual confusions.

We speak each other in our pain.

Confusion and suffering are the shady republics where God and we wander without meeting, sensing each other as night and day in the gloaming.

The powerful, the wealthy, the self-assured, are restrained from wandering in these republics, not through any superiority or inferiority, neither through laws, but through their proclaimed ability to distinguish truth and falsehood.

How do i write about the lying of God, who does not comfort me at midnight or noon, who continues to exist in the shades of text, though my expectations of It have fallen, even as they have of humanity?

Yet I have one expectation of myself:  that i continue searching for living words in the rising condominiums of text, where words flounder in babel cells, in our resurrected vertical project of a unified language.
     Dialogue. Communication.

And so i yet have one fallen expectation of God—that It does not impede the words waiting for me, that It does not block them in Its chariot of unintelligibility.

What is called poetry is a promethean process of ripping words from the body of God, of seizing living organs and holding them up to the sun.  We have always been vultures, hungry to eat God, to gorge on the divine erotic flesh.

What is called human communication is Word no longer becoming flesh, dwelling among us, but Text, dwelling on and in us; the once living organs of Word ripped from God’s body, genetically copied, freeze-dried, in an M&M Meat Shop.

I speak to the electronic void in the way i once might have spoken to God.  Typing is a form of prayer, the keyboard a flattened cathedral.

God hides in the Internet the way It once did in stars.

I stuff prayers in Blogger the way pious parishioners still light candles—believing in their efficacy although no evidence steps forward to justify the light.

I cry to the whiteblack screen like some eternal widow before a shrine of her dead and only love.  I hang phrases like shrouds of the nameless dead.  Sentences are digitombs, paragraphs cryonic mausoleums.  I build electronic ecclesiologies, wastelands of heaven.

But i know … i know where God is.  The Russians were right—It’s not out there, in the lidless freezer of space.  It’s in the serifs of Cambria, the fleeting glyphs of Calibri, dark flashes on the arctic noon of my screen, their common indifference seducing me to the winter night of words.

My fingertips are Ericson, Polo, He, da Gama, Cortés, Bering, Cook, Livingstone, Amundsen, Tereshkova, seeking an x-ray of an outline of the flesh of God, aided by a library of melted maps and ashen manuals.  We cross the flat snowscapes, ripe with wind.  Our steps are words.  They lead nowhere … yet we must walk.

Canada, the land that is not a land (for there is no memory of land and this land is the first of a new age in which land is only an idea), the land that is not a land for it is text, the First Nation of Text, believes in God the way you believe in Ocado or Amazon.

To see God, who hides behind God, who hides in God, who hides, come to google.ca and search for It online, with broken and toxic fingers and a heart with no memory of land.

The word on the paper page—more solid, less erasable—than the electronic word.  Yet also, simultaneously, more gaseous (more pyretic, burnable), more rooted in fog.  The tactile, penned word plays differently with the elements, with our souls, than the electronic typed word, which is generic by nature.  “i”s in Word are identical, regardless of the “i” that typed it—supremely erasable, yet more solid because of the weight of its commonality, its backedupness, backupability, its sameness (we are all i’s [… yet am i that “i”? is this “i” that “i”?]).

The i of Word when printed on the page becomes the i of the mob, the penned i on paper the disappearing i of God.

Art is only possible through a simulation of suffering, by migrating, pushing suffering from its physical roots into emotional flowers, through a mirror.  True suffering can only engender silence.  But humanity in its quest to continually distance itself from nature, from silence, from pain, (to immerse itself in the now true falsity that has become our flesh), works frantically, systematically toward further migration—a global collective freneticism it justifies through the usual methods:  solidifying the virtue of its activities, ostracizing those whose activities are not directed toward its migratory project—in which suffering is prostheticized in technology. 

Because of our need to experience suffering in some fashion (to fashion suffering according to our ambitions)—we will still identify with pain, even if pain primarily resides in screens and toys.  (Where we’ll want to migrate suffering after technology, who can say?)  Perhaps by the time pain is primarily a toy, the gap between nature and our selves, between the suffering of flesh and the virtualized suffering of humanity, will have grown so large, with us tottering on the almost dimensionless world we’ve created for ourselves, that we will be unable to resist falling into it.  Or, alternatively, if we are sufficiently clever—if that is the word—we will also be sufficiently dimensionless such that the only gap we can fall into will be ourselves.  In other words, we will have become the gap or at least an aspect of the gap.  There will be nature and void and we, long before text began crawling its way over our flesh and overtaking it, becoming it, will have made our choice.  We will have crawled from nature, through God who once hovered on the void, through the mathematics that was fearful of the empty set, through the rank effulgent simulations of emotionality and psychology, even past the machines we have begotten and are begetting to assume our burdens, a long bloody tearful capricious detour around the nothingness once pointed to by Buddha and Lao Tse, to a constructed silence that mirrors suffering’s silence, to an elaborate void that mirror’s nature’s void, to a textual joy that mirrors the vibrating desire of creation, to a world without dimension and without pain.

Tao Te Ching LXIX

The strategists have a saying—

I dare not play the host but play the guest,

I dare not advance an inch but retreat a foot instead.

This is known as marching forward when there is no road,

Rolling up one’s sleeves when there is no arm,

Dragging one’s adversary by force when there is no adversary,

And taking up arms when there are no arms.

There is no disaster greater than taking on an enemy too easily.  So doing nearly cost me my treasure.  Thus of two sides raising arms against each other it is the one that is sorrow-stricken that wins.

All strategists are full of sorrow; the sorrow they maintain is created by the gap between things—between host and guest, advancing and retreating, activity and the lack of an object for such activity—and, more particularly, the strategist’s placing himself (if he did not place himself here, he would not be a strategist) on the side of guest, retreating, and lack.  Sorrow is that which is created by those who find themselves on the side of sorrow.

Sorrow does not win in itself.  In itself it simply weeps—or, more truly—is mute.  But for those given to fighting, the one also given to sorrow will win.  Death is at the center of strategy, as the strategist negates himself to see, as wholly as possible, the positions and rules of the game.  This negation is not done without feeling, and so the movement toward the strategic nothing point, an ever-present movement, is sorrow.

The one who is not engaged in this perpetual returning acts without sufficient knowledge of loss.  But the strategist has already embodied the loss—an embodiment re-encountered, re-known, re-cognized, almost hourly—and his passionate committed indifference to the outcome is what allows him to win.  Or, rather, his refusal to dare the spirits to play, to advance, permits him the distance necessary to engage and watch simultaneously, to correct on the fly any errors of position or method.

The strategist is full of sorrow because he is always in a state of preparedness, protecting his treasure, walking on roadless roads, fashioning himself with absent limbs, fighting enemies that aren’t present and may never be, picking up non-existent swords.  Is the strategist, then, like Macbeth, descending into the grey fogs of lunacy, seeing a dagger floating in the air?

No.

For Macbeth and his Lady lose their treasure, and lose it easily.  They vacillate on the axis between the power of dream and the flesh of loss, this vacillation itself a hallucinogenic—the hallucinogen of the common human scrimmage of work and love.  But the strategist contains within himself each moment dream and loss, power and death.  To contain each moment the oppositions of existence is also to contain calm sorrow and indifferent victory.

Look at the teams in sports, politics, art, business, law, knowledge (what is the difference?).  Look at the winners, look at the losers.  They are easy to spot, with their champagne and smiles, with their slouches and dejections.

But the strategist does not vary whether he wins or loses, for favor and disgrace, yes and no, good and evil … ambivalently swirl, forming deep eddies in his soul.  These constant eddies that he does not seek to escape or express are the attributes, the desolation, of the strategist.  And why he wins, but so according to different codes, given to different shapes, and without the accoutrements of victory, that to say he wins is to mislead all those without sorrow.

Tao Te Ching LXVIII

One who excels as a warrior does not appear formidable.

One who excels in fighting is never roused in anger.

One who excels in defeating his enemy does not join issue.

One who excels in employing others humbles himself before them.

This is known as the virtue of non-contention.

This is known as making use of the efforts of others.

This is known as matching the sublimity of heaven.

The plethora of books, advice and workshops (ensuring people like you, getting others to do what you want, managing your anger, becoming the person you’ve always wanted to be, obtaining the most from your staff, winning at work, maintaining a healthy and successful relationship, achieving optimal orgasms) miss the Daoist center.

The sage doesn’t need to manage her anger, to exercise restraint … there is nothing to manage, nothing to restrain.  The Daoist soul is as empty as the universe, and fighting—when it’s necessary—is as natural as breath.  So the sage participates in what she excels at and leaves everything else to others.  Why would she want to do a poor or mediocre or even satisfactory job when there are others who would excel?

So excelling, abstaining, and making use are attributes of heaven.

With so much of human motivation and behavior—despite the fashions of communication and civilization—little different than our simian cousins, the prime distinction (perhaps the only one) of our species is our ability—through the simian—to access and embody aspects that are not wholly simian:  to evolve ourselves from ourselves.  (We might call these aspects art, nobility, or spirit.)  Not aspects divorced from the simian, not aspects that have no claws—the Dao is no suburb, no lululemon spirituality, no sugary i-did-it-my-way, no christian heaven, no conventional cloying virtue—but rather that which reach sufficiently into the simian, into claws, and draw, living, from heaven’s dark pool nature’s knowledge:  that the human is no better than a giraffe and i am no better than a butterfly.

I may be a butterfly.

Closing and Meditations

Closing

These Exercises have been linear and sequential and we have recommended that the initiate follow them in order and chronology, while simultaneously recognizing that her physiology and temperament may demand some modifications.

The initiate is now finished the Exercises and is free to create within the chains of the universe.  We shall close by offering a few remarks.

In becoming the world, she is the world, and creation is effortless, spontaneously erupting from the fullness of desire.  Effortful creation involves the will and, while common, is not the creation which these Exercises are dedicated to.  The initiate has become an artist - a world-reflecting mirror - to internalize creation, its energy, desire, to stuff creation deep into herself as fuel for her factory of transformation.

The artist should not, however, forget that she is partial, that the universe is filtered through her partiality, and that her perspective, her creation, no matter how full and rich, is limited.  Not only this, but her creation is but one reflection of the world in a world of reflections.  She adds a mirror to the madhouse of mirrors into which we all are born to meander, and some will see the world, but only some, and many will never see at all - not the world, neither the mirror nor themselves.  Each body, object, will, star, mind, book, soul, picture, is a mirror mirroring mirrors; the artist reflects reflections and is nothing to become the everything she sees.

We have, over the course of five phases and fifteen years, exploring the five aspects of the person and the primary manifestations of each aspect, traversed the world and lived.  Where among these aspects is the artist’s home?  Is it her body, contradictory, peaceful, passionate?  Is it her will, outward, concrete, restless?  Is it her mind, controlling, dual?  Her soul, bottomless, silent?  Or her judgement, contextual, critical, compassionate?

Each aspect claims to be; when in each aspect, each claim feels as right.  Each aspect claims primacy over all the others and says I am the foundation of the world, even as each person begins, and often ends, by saying I am its centre.  Each aspect strives to suck each other aspect into its hungry swirling vortex and birth a tree from which they are its branches and it the root.  And the reader will find easy defense of this perspective.  For there are those who write and paint and sing and dance and live and preach from each.  You will find them everywhere:  they may be considered good or evil, wise or foolish; they may have status or be pitied, they may wear a thousand disguises.  But beneath the world’s considerations, you will find an aspect saying - the world is me.  Learn to detect the myriad masks, the craft and curve of words, the ballroom of ideas.  Learn from them what you can, but be wary of them.  They are specialists; none have accepted life.

Do not scorn them.  Life is difficult and each aspect offers some security from the dark places into which we’ve peered, their cold and silent winds, that death.

Further, while each aspect has its articulate proponents, its leaders, sages, thieves, among them some who shed new invigorating light on a portion of the world, light to be basked in and used by the graduates of these Exercises, for every one of these, a million more exist who simply copy, further carve, dissect, the aspects’ charms, who rotely mumble the necessary lines, until the world is anatomized to fragments, glorious shards of a glorious whole.  For isn’t even the least fragment part of the whole and by becoming the whole, the artist develops the ability to see the whole in each through her vision that sees as readily what is not as is.

We, each one of us, desire a ruler, and each aspect waits in readiness to fulfil us.  Let those whom such rulers find live in worthy subjection; let the artist neither ridicule them nor attempt to convert them to her subjection.  If she has truly lived these Exercises, she will know that each is necessary, that the parts feed the whole and without them the world does not exist.  She will know that her role, while of the world and mirrors and rare, is but one role among them all, the role that excludes nothing and in such inclusion does not rule or seek to be.

Her subjection though?  Yes, she is subjected, but to the world, not to any aspect of it.  It is this totality of her subjection that frees her and why we can rightly say she is not ruled, this not ruling only by virtue of her being ruled.

The artist may also be or become inclined to think, in moments of regression, that although she is not subject to one aspect, that no particular is her home, that she moves freely among all aspects as the spirit blows, that she is the one who rules her aspects, that they are her tools to use.  But who is this she?  Who is this ruler we have posited behind the aspects?  What is her name?  No!  If there be a ruler behind the aspects, it is nameless, formless, empty, dark, silent, and so no ruler, or at least no ruler we can see or speak or think of.

The you you say rules the aspects does not exist, for what are you other than they?  Where does the desire to select a ruler come from?  It comes from each, being itself.  How do you live without a ruler?  You live as an artist, you live as you were meant to be.  You live, each aspect alive and screaming, saying I am the one; do not attempt to silence them, let them scream.  One, to the extent that it exists is the only one that exists, does not speak or assert or scream; it is not an aspect, but the aspects fully lived.  One is the artist.  One creates.

Creation, of the kind of which we speak, does not emerge from any other number; only one.  But one is not the one that attempts to bring into itself, but the one that affirms each one so attempting.  No greater love has one than this:  than to devote oneself to such affirmation.

So the initiate is purified through acceptance and reflection into an artist and becomes the becoming that is.

Meditations

We offer the following meditations, which the artist may choose to utter, as summary reflections.

I am the world and the world is i.

I peer through the world as one might peer through a fly’s eye.

This being the world and this peering is my vision; I live to articulate my vision.

The gap between my vision and its articulation is infinite and my sense of this infinity is my grief and exuberance.  This gap destroys and fuels me; if I should reduce the fullness of this tension, I risk accelerated destruction.

Nothing can be against me, for, being the world, everything is of me.

I am comprised of five aspects:  body, will, mind, soul, judgement, all of which are equal, all of which flow through all.  Each aspect is ruled by itself and there is no ruler that can stand outside another aspect and rule it, for no aspect understands the other, being a distinct totality.  

Nevertheless, each aspect can inform the other, not through itself or the other, but through experience.  Thus only through living are the aspects united.

I create not from any aspect, but from living and having lived.  I create from the impossible unity of life.

As a creator, I do not exist above, outside or under life, but in it.  As such, I am not greater or lesser than another part of life, but have my own role to play.

The role of all creators is the same - to reflect the world.  I reflect and in reflecting become a mirror.  I am a mirror and in being a mirror reflect.  To the extent that all five aspects are fully alive in me, I am a polished mirror, and all aspects and particularities of the world are contained within me at all times.

Because of this containment, I stand outside of morality, indifferent and capricious.  As a creator, I obtain the attributes once given to God.  Having a body, I am moral, for I am a creature and am chained to the world.  I die and because I die and know death I have compassion.  If I should resist my divinity, I cannot create.  If I should resist my death, I cannot have compassion.  I am god and beast and only by being both shall I extend my humanity to the passion at earth’s core and the stars’ aloof fire.

By not diminishing any aspect, I become the energy of creation and from this energy I create.

By not diminishing any aspect, I remain in perpetual tension and this tension is the fire with which I burn.

By not diminishing any aspect, I give myself over to the world.  I neither deny nor attempt to control any aspect, but allow each aspect its fulfillment when the informed totality of my person permits it; in this way, I do not resent my chains, for I am chained to the world and not to any portion of it.  Yet in allowing each aspect its fulfillment, through necessity spread through time, I am driven not by any aspect or any portion therein, but by the nothingness I have seen, and the vision inherent in that sight.

I am grateful for having glimpsed nothingness and lived.  I am grateful for the resultant vision and am, most truly, that vision.

I accept the world and all it contains, without exception, there being no qualifiers other than those already existent in the world, and there being counter-qualifiers to each of these, these too already existent.  And so it goes, on and on.  And so I am, a creator-speck in an ancient lineage, stretching from God to God, a spark in the darkness.

Year Fifteen

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept Judgement and Mirror the Judgement of the World

Fifteenth Year:  Acceptance

In this final year, the initiate consummates the path of falling she has been on in years six, nine and twelve.  In year six, she removed her structures in the world; in year nine, she removed her structures in the mind; in year twelve, she removed the structures in her heart; in this fifteenth year, she will focus on maintaining this non-structure in herself, and in this maintenance of nothingness receive all her structure from the world.

The reader may think that in this no-structure that is the structure of the world, the initiate removes herself from the world.  This is true only when compared to those who equate self with activity and control, or at least the attempt at control.  But there is a self that undergirds the talking moving self; as have consistently argued, we do not propose that the initiate ultimately give up her talking moving self or that she attempt to control that active self¾we have only proposed these things for specific times, but rather that she find the undergirding self and use that self to embrace the talking moving self and in this embraced totality become a mirror to the world.  This fifteenth year is the final polishing of the mirror, in which the initiate should have no structures remaining to deconstruct, as in the previous years of falling, but can focus on reflection.

Rather than losing herself, as might be the fear of the reader, she finds herself.  Rather than diminishing herself, she enlarges herself.  Rather than becoming less than the world, she becomes the world.  Such is the function of the mirror and such is the nature of the artist we describe.

A common practice of those who fear they will lose themselves¾and such ones are many¾is that the world in its manifold largeness will gobble them up.  Well, in a sense, this is inevitably true, as the world includes death and death is a gobbler, perfect in execution, the only authentic democrat.  It also remains true, in a different sense, when such an approach is taken.  For the individual one in his minisculeness is always gobbled up by the world in its gargantuan myriad ungraspability.  But the seeker can, by following these Exercises, by living and falling, hide herself not in a portion of the world¾the approach of technique, specialization, and edifices, of rock and stone¾but in the universe itself.  If the initiate has followed these Exercises and been one so called to follow them, she will be a mirror of the universe and thus can hide herself in it without losing herself, for how can I lose myself in myself? How can a tree lose itself in itself?

So the activity of this year is to reflect, to hide and to become, and in these unpopular verbs, the initiate will perhaps be ready to create.

Year Fourteen

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept Judgement and Mirror the Judgement of the World

Fourteenth Year:  Justice

In this second year of the final phase, the initiate focuses on judgement in the formal structures of justice.  Now the judicial systems of the land in which the initiate finds herself may be utterly corrupt, partially corrupt, or imperfect; nowhere will they be pure.

The initiate should get herself involved in these formal structures, preferably as a judge, as a defender and interpreter of the laws.  (The initiate should note that becoming a law enforcement agent or a parking ticket officer are not viable options here.)  She should observe the extent to which the laws are ambiguous, the discrepancy between word and practice, the various pressures on interpretation, the subjectivity of the interpreters, and the manifold acts, subterfuges and conflicts that people engage in such that they encounter the courts.

Year Thirteen

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept Judgement and Mirror the Judgement of the World

Presuppositions

The reader may have heard, or formed the impression himself, that judgement is the integrative aspect of the person, combining body, will, mind and soul, and applying them in concert to the world’s challenges, both small and large.  The structure of these Exercises themselves may aid this impression, having judgement as the last phase, as if the cumulative apex of the initiate’s development.  But this is wrong, and it is important to understand why.

The truth in this impression, which observers then extend to places it should not go, is that you cannot accomplish judgement without having at least body and some of at least one of the other preceding categories.  However, you can certainly apply the body without any of the subsequent categories.

The reader may object that even this minimal truth ignores the judgement of the dead, which one can rightly argue is the most exacting judgement¾in all matters, from art to social mores, even though the dead frequently speak through the mouths of the automated living.  But to explore this deeper truth adequately, we would have to emigrate from life, in which these Exercises are firmly placed, to death, a different kingdom with separate laws, and this we cannot do without sacrificing the unity of the initiate’s development and our purpose here.  Furthermore, we have written of that other kingdom extensively elsewhere, and we refer interested readers to those texts.  The reader should not think, however, that we are avoiding death or that there is a gap in the initiate’s training; rather, one always has the choice:  to explore reality through life or death; if the exploration is performed competently, the opposite of the lens used will also be fully present, though differently.  It is a limitation we must accept that we cannot simultaneously explore existence through both lenses with equal clarity, weight and tone.

This minimal truth becomes false, however, when extended¾for the truth is that, once all aspects have been fully explored, they all bear fully on each other; so that, while the body can and often does act without judgement, the body’s existence is richer when all other aspects¾will, mind, soul and judgement¾work in concert with it.  So too all other combinations and applications.

Indeed, it is also true that judgement can be, and often is, exercised without all the preceding aspects adequately in place.  So that some have body, will and judgement, others body, will, mind and judgement, some body, soul and judgement.  The point the initiate should absorb is that when all five aspects are well developed and maintained, each will bring its totality to bear on each other aspect.

Thus, while judgement represents a certain logical progression in development, it is not the culmination of the five aspects, but, in the end, simply one equal aspect among five.  Each aspect is most fully itself when all other fully developed aspects continually inform it.

Judgement is distinct from the other aspects in that it is contextual, critical and compassionate; if one of these attributes is lacking, it is not judgement but something else¾an amputated cousin, lobotomized, mutant.

By contextual we mean that it is applied to a given situation, acknowledging and accepting that situation for the purposes of what is required.  Included in situation are time (not only the present givenness, but past and future), general and particular social mores, laws, individual predilections and orientations.

By critical we mean that it filters all information through all other relevant information and aspects.

By compassionate we mean that it understands and empathizes with the range and depth of the complexities and challenges of the human condition.

If all three of these attributes are present, informed fully by the other four aspects of the person, the initiate can be said to have judgement.  This final phase is devoted to developing this.

Rationale

As judgement is contextual, critical and compassionate, the initiate can only develop her judgement by being actively involved in the world’s problems.  Frequently through the course of these Exercises, she has contributed to these problems; now, for the first time, with the possible exception of the second year of the fourth phase, her energy is devoted primarily to minimizing them.  The initiate should observe this redirection of energy.

Humans, subject to the rhythm and cycle of their bodies, all follow a similar path, although the way they walk this path and what they see on it differs greatly.  This phase is devoted to this path¾both the common problems faced and the many various ways people deal with these problems and with each other in relation to these problems.

Method

This fifth phase is divided into three years:  the stages of human development, justice, and acceptance.  The first and second years focus on informal and formal judgement, respectively; the third year continues the method established in the second, third and fourth phases and completes the aspect by removing the initiate from it in its normal manifestations.

Thirteenth Year:  The Stages of Human Development

In this first year of the final phase, the initiate focuses on judgement in the various stages of human development, twelve in total; they are:

1.       Infant (< 3 months)

2.       Toddler (18 months – 3 years)

3.       Child (5 – 9 years)

4.       Adolescent (13 – 16 years)

5.       Young Adult (early 20s)

6.       Mature Adult (early 30s)

7.       Middle Adult (early 40s)

8.       Late Adult (early 50s)

9.       Young Senior (early 60s)

10.   Mature Senior (early 70s)

11.   Late Senior (early 80s)

12.   Geriatric (> 90)

The initiate should devote each month of the year to each of these specific stages, in the order listed above.  She should work closely with a group of humans, all in or near the bracketed age, focusing on helping them to minimize conflict, increase camaraderie, resolve disputes, and shed light on their troubles and darkness.  In no instance should she offer unwarranted despair or hope, or assume responsibility for their difficulties, unless, of course, particular physical circumstances, obviously present in the early and late stages, necessitate it.  Neither should she sleep with the people she works with.

During this process, the initiate should observe the various capacities for judgement in her peers, the extent to which this develops over time, and contributing factors to this development.