Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Twin Peaks

I watched all of the Twin Peaks gold box DVD in less than two weeks. That is thirty hours of programming and a lot of bonus material, by far the biggest marathon of media absorption I've ever undertaken. I have been Twittering about my theories about the show and its deeper meanings, and I want to write a long post here gathering all that together - it was fascinating to me, and I can feel an essay coalescing. As they say in TV land, stay tuned.

Moving Right Along

I am almost moved out of my old artists' community and into the new one. I have one more big push this weekend. I've been a basketcase dealing with all of this, but I keep getting signals that I am doing the right thing, so I am trusting the process, as they say.

I finished my artist's grant application and mailed it in yesterday. That is the first grant I have ever applied for, and it was an interesting experience. It's for a very large sum of money, with this organization:

http://www.aroomofherown.org/

The grant is for $50,000 over two years to help a woman writer carve out the time to pursue her writing projects. I pursue mine no matter what, but a stash of money to help me publish them would change my life. That is what I said I would do with the award if I won it. I would buy a better laptop and start a tiny publishing venture for my work. This economy could not be worse for trying to launch anything, but the award won't be announced until next March anyway, and it would take me a little longer to set everything up and roll it out. I am working on that anyway. My priorities for next year are saving money, paring down and simplifying my life, upgrading my laptop, working on music, visiting my family in Texas, and self-publishing a small run of my books.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Very David Lynch

Regarding my move, my housemate at my old community brought home the complete set of Twin Peaks on DVD and we have been watching it. I borrowed the DVD's and am working my way through them as I pack up my bedroom. All I have to say is, that is a way to make this move even more surreal.

The Next Step

I am suddenly moving from one artists' community to another, staying in Los Angeles but relocating to a different neighborhood. I have been at the first community, The Sugar Shack, for two years almost to the day, and I had no plans to move as recently as two weeks ago, but I stumbled upon another one that is more music-oriented and that I think will be a good place for me to live for a while in terms of developing that part of my career. It's closer to downtown and the music scene in Silver Lake/Echo Park, and the other residents are almost all professional musicians. It's in an old convent which reminds me of something in New Orleans, where I lived briefly until Katrina put a stop to that. It also reminds me of another artists' community in Dallas in an old church where I lived for a while after I was forced to leave New Orleans. I've met five of the people there, and I like all of them. I am still friends with the housemates at the first house, but I got a strong feeling when I found this place that I need to go there next. It's certainly shaken my energy up - I got a move on this week and brought home a truckload of free boxes for packing and I've been sorting through clothes and stuff to give some away and sell some more. I've had an issue that has dogged me since I left home to go to college that I have more personal stuff than I ever really can rent enough room for. Cities are so expensive and space is at such a premium that I've always had to cram stuff into a little apartment or pay to store too much, and I am sick of it. This space is smaller than where I have been living, so I need to pare down, and for once I don't feel bad about it. I had a big rent-controlled apartment on Staten Island in NYC for three years and I accumulated too much. I also picked up a lot from family storage in Texas and enough is enough. I won't get rid of family things, but I have enough vintage clothes and purses and shoes that I could go the rest of my life without buying a thing and still be okay, so it's time to purge. I have always thrifted and yard saled for entertainment, and I have a lot of lovely things that I paid pennies for, so I feel okay about recycling some of it. I am supposed to be moved by the first weekend of November. It's interesting, I have a very intuitive feeling about this place and there is a lot of synchronicity around the move. My aunt told me that her very first apartment in Los Angeles was only a few blocks from my new one, which I take to be a good sign.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Grant Money

I am working on a grant application to try to get some funding to publish my books. It's a very long application and I have to prove some level of financial need, providing tax forms, etc. I've been pulling all of that together and completing the nuts and bolts part of the application, with contact information, etc. There are several required essays and I have finished two of them in the past two days, one asking for a description of how the cash award would help me meet my artistic goals, and the second requesting a description of what my writing means to me. It means the sun, the moon and the stars, and I basically said that. It's a large amount of money, and if I won it, it would change my life. Here's hoping the passion I expressed in my essay is convincing to the grant panel. I've put aside my book edits to work on this for now, which is totally worth it - it won't take me too much longer, and it's due by the end of the month. I needed a break from editing, anyway, which is why I've been reading the color and theology book. I think I needed that break to clear my mind for the grant application, and focusing on it will clear my mind enough to get back to editing after it's done. See how neatly it all works?

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

The Temptation of Faust

The color and theology book I've been reading (see the post below) included a lot of Goethe, whom I love. I had not read Faust in years, though it was a big influence on me at one time, and it was very pleasant to read its poetry again. I looked it up online today to divert myself from the current financial and political maelstrom, and discovered that instead of being a distraction, it instead fits the times perfectly, and puts them into some perspective. One related article I found concerns alchemical themes in the work:

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/faust.html

I just Twittered about the plot point where Mephisto artificially manipulates the economy of a kingdom by convincing its court to indebt themselves to him based on his issuance of paper currency against their territory's gold futures. The empire has been ruined by out-of-control spending, and he offers the courtiers a short-term solution that will cost them their souls in the long run - soul's gold traded for worthless paper. Does this sound familiar? Amazing how the classics can reflect on social situations centuries later - if you write on universal themes, your work will stand the test of time. Mephisto finds men to be so self-destructive that they eagerly embrace his treacheries. Sometimes, he does not even have to get involved - he just watches them ruin themselves: I find, as always, it couldn’t be worse./I’m so impressed with Man’s wretched ways,/I’ve even stopped plaguing them, myself, these days.

The alchemical article also elegantly analyzes the roots of Faust's problems with Mephisto and finds them in patriarchal culture, always one of my favorite targets and very much a part of what's to blame for today's social issues. The dualistic god of patriarchy splits the psyche and sends Faust's vital nature and his anima into his unconscious. He lurches through life listening to his own lowest nature, unable to truly value women because he projects his own inner feminine onto them in a broken fashion. Only in death can he become whole, as he is trapped in the prison of dualistic thought all his life long and requires a transcendent experience to overcome it. The very woman whom he corrupted and whose untimely death he caused comes to his rescue in the afterlife, interceding with the feminine divinity on his behalf: All that shall pass away is but reflection./All insufficiency here finds perfection./All that's mysterious here finds the day./Woman in all of us show us our way.

The author of the article, Adam McLean, neatly comes to the conclusion that all of the characters in Faust together represent the integrated aspects of the Self. Faust requires death to unite them; hopefully, the rest of us can do so in life, while we can still make an impact on this sphere. Early in the work, when Mephisto is talking to God, the devil comments on the way Man uses his reason in a manner divorced from his inner being. This is a classic failing of patriarchy, a worship of rational intellect that fails to take other aspects of consciousness (such as emotion or intuition) into consideration. I will leave you with this last quote to ponder on - ask yourself, how do you apply your faculties of consciousness and reason? Do you use them humbly and compassionately, like Gretchen, the Sophia figure who is willing to aid her former oppressor? - or arrogantly and egotistically, like the financiers who thought they could outsmart and exploit their fellow humans by selling common dirt as diamonds?: Man might appreciate life a little more: he might,/If you hadn’t lent him a gleam of Heavenly light:/He calls it Reason, but only uses it/To be more a beast than any beast as yet.

Here is a free online translation of the Faust text if anyone is inspired to read it: http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/German/Fausthome.htm

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Archetypal Psychology

“Most people find it quite beyond them to live on close terms with the unconscious.” – Carl Jung

Where Imagination Meets Sustainability

We get some highly interesting visitors at the artist's community where I live. My housemate Dave Hippchen is an actor, and he lived in Florida before he came out to Los Angeles last year. He has friends from there who have formed their own production company, Cinemap. Their names are Josh Horn and Dan Maninna and they are Emmy-nominated producers who worked for PBS prior to forming their own company, where they work on projects combining art, culture and environmental sustainability. Here is their website:

http://explorecinemap.com/

They are currently traveling around the country and were in California to pitch a new show they are developing called Canvas Earth. The tagline for it is "Where Imagination Meets Sustainability," a good description of their whole ethos. The pilot episode features a community in East Africa that is totally self-sufficient and produces amazing artworks from reclaimed glass refuse.

Here is the site for that show - it gives a really good idea of their general focus:

http://www.canvasearth.tv/

The Sugar Shack, where I live, is a community whose primary purpose is to foster creativity, but which also has a big focus on becoming more self-sustaining and environmentally sound. We have housemates past and present whose professional work involves environmental concerns (scientist Ryan Wartena, architect Elizabeth Marley and green entrepreneur Jedi Wright among them) and they want to get us off the local electrical grid and into solar energy, and move our water usage into a system that recycles our runoff for further distribution (conserving a precious resource in an area prone to prolonged dry spells and shortages). We are also planting a drought-resistant garden to replace a more conventional one, and several housemates are pushing for a compost bin to reduce our waste impact. We were all happy to learn about this show. It covers an area of overlap that could use more exploration, namely the connection between the creative impulse and that of preservation of the planet. I am schooled in the arts and not so much in environmental studies, but I am learning a lot living here, and it makes sense to me that artists would be among the first to commit to going radically green. The vanguard of thought includes both elements, and combining them seems like a very attractive way to make progress with global environmental concerns. The Cinemap guys have committed considerable energy and resources to their project, and it's very cool. Check the show out - hopefully it will be coming to television soon.

The Theology of Color

I am up to page 431 in edits for Parsifal. I took a side-trip the last few days into some esoteric reading and it has slowed me down, but is well worth the slight delay. The book I have been reading is called Color Symbolism and is a collection of essays on the meaning of color in spirituality and religion. It was published in 1977 by Spring Publications, a Jungian publisher, and it is a record of some of the presentations from a conference at Eranos which was held in 1972. The interesting thing is that I have had this book for years. My friend in Austin, TX bought it for me, at my request, for my birthday sometime back in the nineties. For some reason, I never read it, until in 2004 or 2005 when I was doing a lot of spiritual work, I picked it up and looked briefly at one essay, "Color in Christian Visionary Experience," which tied in to what was going on in my life. I picked it up again about two weeks ago, and, again, it is synchronistically connected to both the section of Parsifal I have reached in my edits and some other things that have happened lately. I read an essay about color symbolism in Africa that dovetailed with alchemical stuff I have been studying and, strangely, with the Persian Sufism expressed in the other book I've also blogged about lately, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, by Henry Corbin. I somehow knew way back when I asked for it that this book would be significant someday, but am amazed at how prophetic that has turned out to be. As Dionysius the Areopagite says in the paper about Christian visionary experience, God is primordial light. Colors manifest from that light as veils of its descent and radiation into lower worlds, including our own; therefore, their presence represents the presence of divinity throughout all of creation. Color is extremely important in both of my King Arthur books, for exactly that reason - it indicates the principle of divine action. I've read extensively in the past about the meaning of color and light, but this book has taken me to a new level of understanding. I have just reached a section in my book edits where Parsifal undertakes the initation of a solar hero, and with each level he reaches, another color appears until the entire spectrum is represented. In work derived from that of Jakob Boehme, also referenced in the same paper, each color is associated with an archangel and a major note of the Western musical scale. Without having been familiar with his work at all prior to writing my book, that is a major component of the iniation process that I created for Parsifal. It's an archetypal construct, an element of the psyche, and occurs in many religious traditions.

There are additional essays which cover color sense and the meaning of color in biology, concepts of color in the ancient world, color and the expression of interior time in Western art, and the elimination of color in Far Eastern art and philosophy. This is the more comprehensive Eranos yearbook from which these essays were taken in case anyone is interested:

The Realms of Colour – Die Welt der Farben – Le monde des couleursLectures given at the Eranos Conference in Ascona from August 23rd to 31st, 1972 – Vorträge gehalten auf der Eranos Tagung in Ascona vom 23. bis 31. August 1972 – Conférences données à la session d'Eranos à Ascona du 23 au 31 Août 1972
Eranos-Yearbook/Jahrbuch/Annales 41/1972E.J. Brill, Leiden 1974

The condensed book I am reading is not available on Amazon right now, I'm sure it is long out of print, but here is its info in the event anyone wants to track it down:
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Symbolism-Eranos-Excerpts/dp/B000K1UJQE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222982156&sr=8-1

More on Spring Publications:
http://www.springpublications.com/aboutspring.html

More on Eranos:
http://www.eranosfoundation.org/index.php?node=76&rif=bd80812e4c

More on Dionysius the Areopagite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_the_Areopagite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Dionysius_the_Areopagite

More on Jakob Boehme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Boehme