The Tower
Ta – Week 7 Poetry
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Author Archives: humjos13
Ta – Week 6 Log
- 14 hours reading – The Way of Tarot, The Metabarons (A. Jodorowsky); Interpreting the Signs of the Times: Beyond Jung, The Magician in the World: Becoming, Creativity, and Transversal Communication (I. Semetsky); Our Dreaming Mind (R. van de Castle); The Sacred and the Profane, The Forge and the Crucible (M. Eliade); Transcendental Magic (E. Levi); The Castle of Crossed Destinies (I. Calvino); The Poetics of Reverie (G. Bachelard)
- 3 hours film and notes (The Holy Mountain)
- 6 hours Tarot familiarization – mandala construction, memorization practices, dream recall and analysis, meditation (focused/deity/tarot), poetry
- 2 hours practice reads with friends
- 6 hours poetry, reverie, and writing inspired by Tarot
- 4 hours note taking and review
- 2 hours paper outline and abstract
- 2 hours planning for poetry observed (scout location, familiarize equipment, etc.)
Total – 39 hours
Ta – Week 6 Poetry
Le M[onde]at
Ta – Week 6 Bachelardian Reverie
“Androgeneity is not buried away in some indistinct bestiality at the obscure origins of life. It is a dialectic at the summit. Coming from one and the same being, it shows the exaltation of the animus and the animus and the anima. It prepares the associated reveries of the super-masculine and the super-feminine.” (Bachelard, pp. 79)
Gradients of light – breathing,
Open up a vast pool before me.
A warm kiss embraces my very being.
The Sun, whose gift is so bold and penetrating,
Commands reverence from every creature that dwells within my soul,
Yet, it is the Moon whose presence holds invisible sway over the tides of my ocean.
The Sun’s double – the Moon – has its own Sun.
This Divine Constellation is a Mirror of a Mirror,
As if sun were reflected in sky and pool and Moon in pool and sky;
And sky in pool and pool in sky…
How can we know the name of this Goddess, were it naught for the Sun’s kiss?
Reverie.
Reverie comes, in dripping beauty,
When I and image merge.
Separation is the birth of Thought, the birth of Sun…
Ta – Week 5 Bachelardian Reverie
“The poet’s room is full of words, words which move about in the shadows. Sometimes the words are unfaithful to the things. They try to establish oneiric synoymies between things. The phanotmalization of objects is always expressed in the language of visual hallucinations. But for a word dreamer there are phantomalizations through language. In order to go to those oneiric depths words must be given the time to dream. ” (pp. 49)
Light casts meaning in its absence. Shadow. Does one meaning exist only in opposition to another? The light from a fire, cast against a man’s flesh and onto cave walls, is not the man. What does this mean? The object lies dreaming, its own dream; floating in the space between thoughts. This space is pregnant with possibilities, like the fertile soil of the Indus River or Mesopotamia – The Cradle of Civilization. Words, like people, must be given time to dream. Dreams open parallel dimensions; rifts in space-time (whose fabric becomes permeable, like the membrane of a cell). It is said that we spend as much as a third of our lives sleeping; and whilst asleep, no doubt, dreaming. Do words sleep? Do they lead plural lives between Conception and Imagination?
Ta – Week 5 Poetry
The Syzygy
A braided river runs through the secret garden of my mind.
Whose hand dost paint this river?
It’s banks, by which The Aeons come and go, are muddy and fertile.
This is the Art of Black Soil,
Black Earth.
From a pinpoint drop of her blood
(blood of water, blood of wine)
A wellspring flows unbridled.
Arcane knowledge explodes in all directions.
Arcanum – tomb of secret knowledge,
Whose whispering images speak paintings,
Stroke by stroke,
Upon my mind.
Here you will find Archangel Raphael and Azazel
(The Watcher who, bound hand and foot, was cast into darkness forever);
Mercury , son of Maia and Jupiter, reconciler of all opposites;
The Word Dreamer, Surrogate-Nurse of all things Material;
The Poet Ennoea, lost in reverie.
Ennoea beget Nous;
A Cosmic pair – Lovers, Siblings, Mother, Father.
The Syzygy (Ultimate Androgyne),
At once an infinitesimal dot and omnidirectional, infinitely vast plane
(through which my braided river runs)
Is both Source and Destiny.
Alas, this Divine Zygote has cut itself into pieces;
Nous – flawed, sick and insane,
Bit and clawed at the underbelly of her beloved twin.
Spit out like the poison from a wound,
She fell to Earth, to Black Soil;
The Logos – The Word,
The Immaterial Manifest.
Ta – Poetry Observed
Ta – Week 5 Log
- 16 hours reading – The Way of Tarot (A. Jodorowsky), The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Italo Calvino), The Mirror and the Mask, The Garden of Forking Paths (L. Borges), Creative Processes in Gestalt Therapy (J. Zinker), The Forge and the Crucible (M. Eliade), Transforming Ourselves/Transforming Curriculum: Spiritual Education and Tarot Symbolism, Reading Signs: Semiotics and Depth Psychology (Inna Semetsky), The Art of Memory Reconceived: From Rhetoric to Psychoanalysis (P. Hutton), Man and His Symbols (C.G. Jung, M.L. von Franz & Aniela Jaffe), The Poetics of Reverie (G. Bachelard), various poetry (Rimbaud, Bauldelaire, etc.)
- 2 hours lecture & notes – Inna Semetsky (innasense.org)
- 4 hours note taking & review
- 8 hours familiarization – Finally received Tarot De Marseilles (Camoin & Jodorowsky) in the mail from France. Spent this time imprinting the imagery on my unconscious via various methods of associative experimentation (i.e. sleeping with a card under my pillow, carrying one in my back pocket, arranging a music performance based on assigned arcana and their correlative numerical progression), practice reads on friends.
- 2 hours organization – Indexed all of the books that I am reading in order that I may tie a thread between a vast spectrum of knowledge. Note organization for cohesion of ideas & hypothesis regarding the use of Tarot.
- 6 hours writing poetry and Bachelardian reverie.
Total – 38 hours
Ta is for Tarot
Field Study Proposal
In many traditions, the temple summarizes the creation of the universe (the cosmogeny) seen as a divine unit that has exploded into pieces. The Tarot can be seen as such a temple. Alejandro Jodorowsky calls it a nomadic cathedral, whose mirrors reflect the multifaceted nature of the soul. The Tarot is a mandala, with its own spatial orientation, architecture, and symbolic structure. It has been used as a tool of self discovery for centuries. Through examining the history and symbolism of the Tarot, and by practicing the language of reflection in its mirrors, I hope to gain insight into the complex, multidimensional nature of the unconscious. Perhaps it is only through the study of “beauty” that one may grasp the ineffable and the divine. The study of Tarot can therefore be undertaken as a study of “beauty”. In many ways, the plasticity and complexity of the Tarot reflects the nature of the human brain. If poetry is one way to recycle neurons, it occurs to me that Tarot must certainly be another; as it too is a language that begs for differential interpretations of its words. In The Way of Tarot, Jodoroswky writes, “You start with a pack of cards, you mix up the arcana and lay them flat, which is to say you cut god into pieces. You interpret them and put them back together in sentences. It is a sacred quest that the initiate reader must perform. God is resuscitated not in immaterial form, but in the material world.”.
Read complete field study proposal
ABCs and 123s – weekly log and field notes
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Bachelardian Reverie
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Poetry
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