Posted, February, 2022, in memory of Douglas Trumbull, special effects.
Having attempted to nail down the dream structure of Alien (1979), at long last it seems time to drop back another decade into the past, and consider 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969), a movie I have seen at least 20 times, likely because the first time I saw it, maybe in 1971, when I was 18, I was utterly flummoxed. As per my usual, I will simply do a walk about, and see where things shake out.
Starting with an astrological concept, that by a sudden certain alignment of the stars, some events of historic importance may happen, the movie begins with a bookend which is only picked up later on, the theme song along with it
as the sun comes into alignment with other planets, it is supposed that something of importance must be happening. And, to start things off, the important thing is the emergence of man.
as a dream structure, I relate the sun’s everpresence to the High Light. This is an inner light that hangs up above in one’s purview during vigilogogic attempts to get to sleep, and remains so bright that even if you do eventually fall asleep, if it does not dissipate, it makes dreaming brittle and uncertain, prey to easily being splat into nightmare. This light does seem to flow through all the movie, in keeping with Kubrick’s ongoing critique of the officialdom of the current culture. In the Dawn of Man sequence, the sun is seen to shine at dawn or dusk from far off at the far horizon of a desert landscape. It is almost as if at sea, but there is a mountain way out there too.
and then it from far but kind of immersed in the haze, evoking the idea of a day woken up to with dread, not wanting to. It is also a Presence, switching to ON the fear vector
another theme that emerges is that, like filmmakers dealing with the American west, in the modern period, that is, up to 1975, a monumental view was taken. The idea is to draw up from the barreness some landmarks forms that give one bearing and signal that the events taking place are monumental too. Monument Valley was made use of in American Westerns to signify that the settling of the West, and the work of cowboys, was an act of nation-building, upon whose shoulders, so to speak, “we” stand. By contrast, in a few spaghetti westerns the same monuments are made use of almost as if to say keep away, this is a land of the dead. This same second take seems apparent here as I note that most of the forms Kubrick focused on have a pareidolic dimension
and again
this one seems like a reclining woman
while this one seems like a male
it is also true that when Kubrick chooses to pull in and picture only the goings on of life at a particular watering hole, that is, a haunt, that being the original meaning, the ring of rock is also of a nature to encourage one to think, we are always under attack, being watched, and therefore wary of outsiders.
and, indeed, that is exactly what happens, another clan of man-apes tries to take over the watering hole
and for that reason the peaks, the lookout points, are associated with male power.
indeed, when predators get their prey they take it up top to eat it with eyes open on any interlopers looking for a handout.
in their waterhole, then, the early man goes through three phases, one, they more or less co-exist with tapirs, irritated by their presence, but do not think there is much they can do about it.
then, two, they fight with another clan for the watering hole, but only by means of making threatening gestures, scaring them off.
then again, three, the head man sits with his troop on a cliff in the night, wary, he strikes a Don’t Make a Move, or what’s going on pose, somehow, afraid.
then they wake up to something terrible, a great change has occurred. He sees something, foreign
it is the monolith, they are terrified
then mystified
then, after one of them breaks the ice with a touch, kind of adorational of it, in an instant cult. It becomes the new watering hole
it seems like, as there is an alignment at the beginning of the movie, 1969, so there was an alignment at the dawn of man; so there is to be another alignment at the end of Hal. And, so, Kubrick adopts a view of history as bestowed upon passive man by extraterrestrial forces which pervades the UFO community and cults like Uranius etc being highlighted in a show at Jeffry Deitch right now. This belief also found a resting place in theosophical thought, with Blavatsky’s theories about ancient origin peoples; but, it is also true, is a core belief in the explanation of man’s origin in just about every traditional world religion from the Nile to the Colorado. I suppose if at the age of 18, though just getting into Joseph Campbell, the Bible was the only origin of the world or creation story you had heard, this theory of the origin of life would be controversial, or at least far out. This notion is also supported by a catastrophe view of change, that is, things plod along for eons and eons, then, suddenly, there comes a spike, a transformative moment which leaps forward, and Kubrick’s explanation for that is alien interference in human evolution. The idea here is then that the hum of the monolith, the touch of it, the adoration of it, by a vibe, jolted through the mind of the man-apes at present, to cause them to suddenly think of things in a way that brought on new ideas. I have mentioned in a call out to Philip Guston that in his 70s works he seemed to reach a new stage of existentialism. I attributed it to the working at night, which has a way of establishing a “feast day of the brain” every time you wake up, because the mind has been softened by sleep to allow of associational links that the rational mind either would reject or simply did not see. Seeing things in a new solving way like this is the climax of a type of dream recognized since the middle ages, the fantasmata.
I also found out that Julie Mehretu works at night, through insomnia
As such, the work of the universe of on the monolith, storing in it its power of working things out, evolution, that is, is contained inside it. It represents the creative core of life in the universe, or the whole universe pressed into a hard object. In my terms, given my graphs, as I see that the ape man take a proskynetic posture to it, and reach up, and rub it, and such, it is a blocking mechanism which fills entirely the core of consciousness from the top of vigilogogy to the bottom of hypnagogy, a monster, whose ignition, that is, relating to other or all levels, can, indeed, create a whirlwind of associative synchroetherrhoe (my word: everything flowing together at once), in which some new leap forward is suddenly made. Something like this
the ape-men pressed down to the splat, bottom of nightmare state, by its presence, by that pressure, there is an ephialtic need to bounce or jump out, and that, Kubrick seems to be saying, the need to wake up from nightmare, might be the core psychodynamic function which underwrites the need for violence (this could also combine with twinfire, if indeed they “saw themselves in a new way,” by way of that). The looking up, then, it patterned on the reported experience of people taking drugs, paralyzed below, looking up at wonders, this one, however, ominous, the wind begins to howl
we see a particularly pareidolic rock, as if almost coming alive
(this feature of the movie, which I have never commented on before, suggests that Kubrick knew something of the relationship that the Nilotes created with the earth in the form of imagining the hills as the bodies of the gods, Gebel barkal is the most famous example, in whose front form they saw the wedjet snake crown and in the whole of which they saw the head of Amun Ra
This was one of those ideas that I had preceding the literature on Egyptian art, because of the nature of paradigm block out, formalism would not allow of it, except in a formalist way, but soon enough it has been proven, there is now a whole subgenre of Egyptian scholarship devoted to exploring what it meant that Egyptians saw their gods lying on the ground in front of them. So, here, the idea means perhaps that this is a place where the power can rub off on man and an advance made, that is, the pareidolas reinforce the notion of the power of the monolith.
And, sure enough, idle apeman one day knocking about in the bones of a dead tapir, picks up a bone, notices that if you hit other bones they bounce, then that if you hit a few times hard they break, suddenly has his species changing eureka moment, you can use a tool as a weapon to kill
we get the monumental birth of man, in 60s jargon a hopelessly violent creature (these were the days when people believed that every man could be a murderer or a rapist, rape culture revisionists have revived these primitive ideas).
then we see that the next time the other tribe comes for water, you can do more than just scream at them, you can hit him and kill him, and chase the others away, a weapon gap has opened up
victory, and he tosses the weapons into the sky
for it to then leap into space, the year 2001. The date, of course, was a bad miss, we are nowhere near creating anything like what they have in this 2001 in the 2001 that was twenty years ago. Indeed, thinking of the 20th anniversary, it brought down a building that was built soon after 1969 and became a symbol of a more aggressive nationalist capitalism, US as world power. This reminds me that because the Taliban have taken back the country, some press was given to the blowing up of the twin buddas of the Bamiyam valley
which I saw in a conceit at the time as the source idea for a copycat version of a double gigantic form take down directed at the US and the symbol of US capitalism, the WTC, another example of twin towers.
then, too, I imagined a Taliban having the idea at a campfire not unlike the above nighttime wariness in which he envisions the WTC as King Kong did, his homeland towers, reflected back on the idea of defending Afghanistan, and so the plan was hatched.
But, in reality, not even on the map yet, in terms of creating as real the dream of this movie. Does this make any difference? Not entirely. In the recent commercial launches, I commented on the Bezos shot
as as humbling of oneself for one’s arrogance in thinking that the similar effects in 50s sci fi movies were primitive, when, now, they are the way to go.
Here too, but it does mean that this is more of a dream of places inside the human imagination, than an exploration of real space. That is, everything in the movie visualized is simply a construction built in a place in the human mind, whether explored as yet or not. This opens the movie to a hypnagogic reading, as follows.
I have said that in many ways I like the first part of the movie, the arrival for the secret meeting, more than the core of the movie, which is the Hal story. In this sequence horror movie star William Sylvester, likely unknown to general audiences, is flying up to a space station. Here is a gravity joke, ha ha, his hand just floats as he sleeps.
but is it a joke? One of the persistent problems in getting to sleep is where do I put my arms and hands, do I tuck them up in my other arm close to my body, or do I let them drop off the edge of the bed, and just hang there (it seems that in a bad night of sleep due to sinuses last night I dropped my hand off to the side and touched off an avalanche of notebooks that I keep piled on my nighttable! I did not hear it, though woke up in a fright that I had also broken my glasses, they were fine). What this means is, note, Sylvester is always being shown as asleep. This is not hypersleep, but sleep is nonetheless used as a metaphor for space travel here too. This implies that everything happens inside the head rather than outside in outer space.
Then too there is all arrivings and departings, very much the structure of a picaresque action movie, or even a superhero movie. One suspects the space annihilating presence of the rings of Saturn (though I made a mistake in memory, it is Jupiter that lords over 2001). Kubrick uses Strauss to make of all a waltz, many 60s Freudian 101ists saw sexual intercourse in every encounter between, well, here, rubber over very very tiny dick and whole shebang of female apparatus including the fallopians
but, then, what kind of shots do we get, we get out of the window shots, comparable to the more common type, out of car windows, and, as per my recent analysis of that sort of shot in the past year, this is the Raven’s Gate shot, meaning that at all times in space we are gazing on the possibility of instant death, that is, all space in its utter blackness and stillness as rendered in this movie is the devil’s road.
then, there is another kind of shot, and that is reception. This is an extreme version of the same. But as if creates a frame for death, defied by entry.
but, then, much more interesting to me (and notice we are not obsessed with the bottom of things here, that is, this is not space as more of the underthebottom, we go into the center of things here, meaning that the emphasis is always upon the being in-between of life there). This then lends itself to the third and to me most interesting aspect of Kubrick’s treatment of space craft, the half-life form. As noted in several essays recently, the half-life outlet is a form of the Raven’s gate seen from inside out, it posits that what is beyond that is half-life compared to what is within. Just as materiality depletes in ambience to the periacqueductal and to the phantom peripteral, so life force depletes to half-life force in immediate contact with ambient space. Kubrick seems to have told his designers, consider the idea, but then build it into the very structures of the ships travelled to and from. That is, come in a bit from the half life itself, and show that it has eat into the structure of things from the outside, to create whole network of half-life forms all operating apparently independently in a way that all but makes you look upon these forms as one would the windows in a large apartment building opposite, a trope in many movies, an idea then in general which forces us to acknowledge the depletion of personal force in a mass world. So, in this shot, the approach, the hatch, all very interesting, but the fascinating thing is the opening below, with staff busy doing whatever.
that is, this control room, below
and in this shot, greater interest in the opening on the other side, a half-life space
here
then when he gets by another ship to the moon base, it is veritable warren of these little marginal cubbyholes
this is reinforced by the fact that Sylvester is a bureaucrat come for a meeting and he speaks in the false polite language of the office world, all bland courtesies and the like. This is one of the very sweetest spots in Kubrick’s critique of the world, men who become just mouthpieces for the government, the idle chatter, the disingenuous politeness, it saturates his movies, even up to The Shining, where I argue that Jack is playing at being the man that he thinks this odd job forces him to be, so here, these men are fairly screaming, forced to be polite in address
the half-life shot is, in its singular form, an outlet of the hypnagogic power of a scenario, so that the power can get out into the wider world. It is a place of reverse agency, running against agency, to explode the energy out. But, but, the multiplicity of these spaces in this scenario, the drizzling of such depleted personages throughout this long drawn out maze involved in getting up to take a simple meeting, this attests to Kubrick’s 1969 version of a critique of what I would call today the overpower of the interstitium, that is, a system of technological development so vast and complicated and tricked up with so much hyperfunctionality that no one person can ever hope to understand it, and thus the failures it suffers. What this means for me is that Kubrick’s actual mindset is grounded in the symbolic level of hypnagogy, but as if fed from negative energy pouring down into it from the rings of Saturn emitted from the mainstream console of rational consciousness, and by this action, in this movie, in his mind, this power as if eats away at in the manner of termites the central core, creating theses little marginal half-life places (also a very popular trend in painting and art now, see my treatment of Stephanie Heinze). Something like this
I fear this means I think that Kubrick is working with a vision of space that is culturally grounded in the comic book imagination, which, as per my treatment, hollows out dream space, to then create negated flip forms of a hollowed out and empty world, as if that was a critique of it. His movies are always about how try as we might to be polite the hauntings of the interstitium and the whirr of the rings of Saturn (though this is a Jupiter movie) are ever eating away us, it is a kind of cannibalism by termites (two things, is this then a formicariam? and isn’t the wormhole sequence simply an eating away of THIS, the interstitium? NOT SPACE………).
That said, being a formalist, Kubrick felt that following Sylvester through his zigs and zags in the swiss-cheesing of the system is entertainment enough, and it is, but there will be no stewardesses, and flying today is not nearly the calm and ethereal process it is here, not since the sharing era where every person must air their every private grievance for all to hear in public space even to the point of fighting the revolution flight by flight in the air.
but, the, of course, the special skill of Kubrick is then setting up this utterly sterile world, and notice that just like the doctor in The Shining, the listeners listen in with caution and dread, absolutely still, while he is politely interrogated as to the rumors of a plague up on Clavius (it is a planted story to hide the real truth, of the monolith). Lovely Kubrickian scene, filled with menace and dread
especially when he presses the issue, against politeness and protocol, as tense a conversation as in the restroom with the caretaker in The Shining
then we move further on, things are getting red. An interesting trait of the movie is that with cling shoes humans have conquered gravity and as a result of outlets that spin them up and down, while they are always upright to themselves, things are pictured in space as having no up and down, but for humans under control (by contrast with recent findings that space is going to truly mess up human balance systems, not to say anatomy, turning us into big-headed snakes with no bones).
and now we approach the moon, we see that this odd spaceship is rather spermatozoan shaped
but really looks like the krell, in Forbidden Planet (1956), ominous red eyes up top, a big, masked face, with the implication of a large opening maw (I also call krell any static imaging that comes across into dream from consciousness of the interstititum above, the half-life form may well be a kind of krell form as well, then)
A dream tableaux demands certain elements. Previous visions by Nerval in Aurelia are tableaux, having a strange meteorological event, then comparing that to a setting below, and then a talus or dream structure in the form of a building. A talus is an architectural machine created by the imagination to in dream capture the essence of the dream. Thus, the inn or country house on the edge of a high cliff, like in Moonraker (1958), or the rooftop walks in Dracula has Risen from the Grave (1967). If Nerval had advanced to an “epigogic” state of consciousness, he experienced a tingle and a sense of freezing, still; then, the world would have flipped on him, for all of this life to look very far away from him. By that rearrangement of vectoring, however, he might experience ophthchthony, seeing through the darkness to the truth. He might have got there in the book. But, then, alas, under the Blue Sun of death, a deadfall formed against him, he felt shut out from life, maybe all that was needed was that mummy, to push him. Perhaps there was a few city service devices in the narrow street that lead down to the river. Maybe this path atop the world of REM was paved with faced-down demon plates, to ward off the evil that comes up on it out of the river. At the river’s edge was not just river, but a municipal sewer structure with three levels of outlet, no doubt a 19th century devisement to handle excess run off in times of heavy rain flooding.
the main offflow was likely the opening on the left, but then, at a slightly higher level, another outlet, fed through the wall of a structure. Perhaps Nerval had done the measurements, and knew that this sturdy iron bar sewer mouth was just high enough over the lower level that it offered with steps to reach it and then a drop to take him the perfect way to both tie himself up and drop down, hanged man, in suicide. This is so devised, it seems preplanned. Indeed, Dore, by all but propping up Nerval’s body as if it is almost still standing, might be commenting on the precision of his plan, but also that he also arranged it so that it did not seem like a great step to the beyond. Maybe Nerval wanted to hang himself but feared the gibbetted way of hanging. It is suggested that there is a prognostic plan here, for him to leave this life on his own two feet, to walk on to his afterlife.
But, then, as happens with spiritualists who gain the clear-seeing level, his good spirit leaves his body, this pictures the moment he slumps away, it has a down-pass up-pass element of mesmerism, and depictions of the departure of the spirit from the body as if by ricochet or bounce is typical of mesmeric theory spirit photos. This again places him at the clear-seeing level.
but, then, up top, at the end of the public passage, the rattling nature of the locale is personified by the death skeleton, blowing a horn.
Perhaps there was an urban legend that death hung about at the end of these creepy passages to the Seine. Dore is saying Nerval was drawn by death there. But, then, finally, as if to direct the eye of the viewer away from even trying to visualize all the dead of the Seine, Dore has his spirit backtrack over the dead and enter the world of spirit as imagined by mesmerists and spiritualists that throngs about high over the avenues of Paris.
way up
On the right, hell, evil spirits, on the left, heaven, and a cascade on a stairway to heaven over the avenue beyond. It is, that is, very much like the visions Nerval had in Aurelia, and thus Dore might have thought that in this sort of rendering of the suicide he was committing Nerval back to his imagined world. But as a record of level of consciousness, he places Nerval at the level of the clear-seer, with cosmic consciousness.
This view shows the site in more detail, not unlike the stairs made use of in Joker (2020), it seems that it was all but viewed as a machine for suicide.
To summarize. overall, Nerval was tasked to build an “I” against his mental illness or schizophrenia, using his imagination. It would appear that he was succeeding. Except, as I analyze it, the dream forms made use of in Aurelia are repeatedly spun involutely over themselves for the whole spin to then get carried away, leading to a nightmare crash. In his crashes, he then had frightening visions of the destruction of Paris. These trigger full nightmare crashes, with suicide ideation, which frequently rears its ugly head in the book. He seemed to think that his manic euphoric escapisms offered him a way out of mental illness. He was perhaps enchanted by mysticism (I do not believe he was, in fact, a mystic), and then magnetism made great claims for a spurious capacity in humans. But the record of his visions shows a quickly accelerating recursive spin of increasingly excessive claims that seem to reach a euphoria but also have in fact cannibalized the glory and lead to a crash and yet more suicide ideation. It is that spin, the Night Mirror, the Morning Storm, and then some, that is reflected in his drawings. In this one of Catharine de Medici the signature which Prinzhorn identified as characteristic of schizophrenia appears to be there, a second one a working out of his family tree
As to Nerval’s death, pictorial evidence seems to suggest the end of his life influenced how people saw the whole of his life. While academic writers writing about artists or poets who committed suicide might be chagrined at this tendency of popular thought, it is a trope, and hard to stop. It certainly seems like it worked its way into the Nerval cult.
This started, as I was saying, with Dore’s picture. Then it spread.
The site preyed upon the minds of people, then, because of its psychogeography. The above print shows the whole terrain. Out at the end is a column, indicating avenue life. But, then, it is but one or two short blocks, at that point, to the Seine, but you have to walk down one flight of steps to a service entrance or door that serves the buildings there. Atop that door is a platform that leads into an apartment, or factory. Then, there is a rail, and another shorter step down. There is a large sewer opening below, and it seems that what looks like a barred window on the right is also a sewer outlet, for floods in times of overflow. All of this then flowed over a lower platform presumably at the level of the river. This riverside locale, of course, can be found in a hundred places in the writings of the time, and in movies about that time since. For me, it has all the markings of a typical “place of sacrifice”, as recorded in dreams. It almost graphs out as a fear vector, from the POV of its descent to the river.
That is, high up, in “everyday life” is the monument, and, beyond that, in Dore’s imagination, heaven, angels. Above, though, there is the approach from avenue to cul de sac, to a dead end, to the first level, not the most attractive of streets, but serviceable. But, then, between that upper dark opening, and the lower dark opening, the mind as if tip toes down from vigilogogy into hypnagogy, and it is right at this point, this strange nexus, that there is the hook or detail that somehow Nerval noticed, knew about, or mused over, that here were two levels of sewer outlets, but for that, you could stand on the upper level, tie a tope to the bars of that opening, then jump, and end up a few feet still off the lower level. It was all but made, like the guillotine, to be a suicide machine. That where-is-this is a deadfall formation, that makes of the place below it the neighborhood Tarpeiian rock, the place of sacrifice, the river itself the zone of monsters. Thus, then, the whole zig zag, the two levels, the stairs, playing off the motif of haunted stairs, then the odd twist, it is a place of sacrifice. And seen off to the side of, or down from the normal of, it is a talus, dream formation, evoking creepiness.
And, indeed, it seems that some artists grasped this, it was almost as if the suicide machine bespoke some aspect of his soul, as in this montage picture of his mind
with the sewer grate being almost his empty heart, and the scene the vagus nerve in his neck, connecting heart and head, or something like that
and this is where Marcousis, of the various illustrators of the book, comes into it. I recently posted: “Somehow I stumbled on Gerard de Nerval’s Aurelia (1853) and joined the debate, mystic or schizophrenic? After deconstructing Dore’s enshrinement of his strange-choice-of-place suicide, January 26, 1853, a victory of good soul over demons, taking place in a dead end of Old Lantern street into sewer outlets into the Seine, I found that Louis Marcoussis in the 1930s abstracted the setting’s stairs into a motif that he then backbuilt like in a reverie over all the scenes of the story. At one point Nerval ran to Place de Concorde to jump into the Seine in front of a crowd but when he saw the sun become a black sun and it all go pitch black he ran off, to warn people of the end of the world. Soon after Nerval ran up the Rue St Honore toward the Louvre but had a dizzy tilt that made him see several moons racing over the palace and then it all tilt on its side as in the moment he felt the earth lurch out of its orbit to catapult unhinged into deep space, as he tried to hang on. Marcoussis also captures his search for Aurelia’s tomb, the idea that the whole book was all a dream and finally where Nerval made a pact with the Elohim about an occult truth armed with the knowledge of which he felt he had defeated his demons. Legend says the mss of Aurelia was found in his coat pocket, when they were taking the body down. Very, very interesting readings by Marcoussis, musing”.
The fascinating thing about Marcoussis’s etchings is that he obviously started with Dore’s image of Nerval suicide
then abstracted it.
right in front of the body, as if blocking it out in another zone, death, is the lowest flight of stairs. Then the platform which afforded him this novel suicide locale is hidden behind him. He then as if leaves a gap in one’s perception, making it unclear how the upper, light-tinted steps, relate to the lower steps, that represents the in-between, the Luor, the step over the gap, which means this is entirely happening either side of the in-between in the Land of Nod. And then further back, like in Dore, he trails off back up to normal life, the busy world of the everyday. My guess is that Nerval is abstracted into a ghost to represent rather his suicide ideation than his actual body after suicide (kind of grossly, but weirdly half standing, represented by Dore). That is, a conjecture that Nerval knew the spot, and knew, therefore, where to go to get an easy painless suicide (this then functioning for Nerval like the empty room with a noose and chair in it in the Seventh Victim (1945), indeed, there is some support culturally for lore of the idea that one way to value life more is to lock in place a suicide pact that will make you appreciate every day more).
But, there is more. I said above that it looks like Marcoussis’s conception for the whole suite of ten prints was to make of it a reverie, that is, fixating on a motif, or trope, and then multiplying that form through the whole rest of it. In this case, if it was known that Nerval died at the foot of stairs leading down to the river, then, the effect of the suite is to, in fact, take his suicide moment, and backbuild it over the whole of Aurelia, to make all of it an expression of the fact that the book was written by a suicide, and his whole life is to be viewed in light of that suicide, even leading to that suicide.
In the Insane Asylum, where a good deal of the book takes place, the stairs dominate, in a composition that echoes the former
indeed, it looks like proto-suicidal; Nerval is having trouble with some of the inmates, which he describes, and that the chamber or cell he is in, echoing on his place of death, is claustrophobic. But here too there is a stairway up and out, and, after a platform, which might be an avatar of himself reading, there is a zag from a zig out to the world at large. Thus, compositionally, it says his asylum periods primed him for suicide.
In the Tomb of Aurelia, the stairs become the passage from life to death and vice versa. She is pictured entombed in a crypt. But he is pictured as a shadow in the negative space of the architecture, not unlike in the movie The Night House (2021), an “illustration” of related scenes in the story because in fact Nerval was lead randomly to the cemetery after he followed a cortege, but then forgot where Aurelia’s tomb was, so had to run back to his place to get the note which told him where, that involving, then, a frantic up and down of the stairs, and out, but then he still did not visit it. So, the illustration bespeaks the negative space of that manic episode.
And stairs are in The Garden
there are also stairs in what looks to me like the central print of the suite, Place de Concorde and even in Several Moons
all in all, without arguing it further, it can be said that what Marcoussis did to create an atmosphere of death and doom was build off of the suicide images, and then build back.
this as if rebuilds Paris in the mind of the reader of this illustrated version of Aurelia as the necropolis of Gerard Nerval, and the place where his tomb was, and it was all a tomb to him. This repeated backbuild is retrogressive, to emphasis the cult aspect of his death, and to further make of him a cult figure. Given that living Paris cannot, really, imagine what it was like to live in dead Paris, it also precludes any imaginative identification with the dead, he is dead, he died a suicide. But, of course, this retro wheel spinning runs counter to the what I contend is the Night Mirror mind-spinning of Nerval’s mind, the spinning which built up houses of cards, for them to then, upon first touch of pressure, all come tumbling down.
There is one more point, on how this can work, poetically. That stairs is the space between, and the space between must itself be granted full agency, as an entity unto itself.
I argue then that when Marcoussis read Aurelia and about Nerval he felt that the stairs of the suicide legend picture proved that Nerval was moving in outer inner space. It is in this transitional space, this trap space, this transitional element, that dream is cultured and conjured. Marcoussis seemed to grasp this. I know this is a real mindspace because as noted previously one reason why Nerval’s Aurelia, and its aftermath events, intrigue me, is that I suffered phthses very much like any one of his described episodes, in my 20s. The most famous was in a small hotel room in Florence, 1979. I realized I had reached the apogee of my wandering (I had run out of money), after a year wandering, it was time to go home. My mind crashed. I do not think I slept, but I must have because in a “dream” the door to the tiny closet in my room opened up. It was an abstract in-between space, in person in my dream, it connected, by a passage in the back corner of it, to the de Medici passage, and by crawlspacing through into the passage I found a way to compensate for my loss of hope and a sense of seeing it all by roaming alone through the Uffizi taking in all the art into me at night. The glory of that “experience” only made my present situation worse. It strikes me that the dream created a hyperloop spin which, just like in the case of Nerval’s episode of making art in Aurelia, caused the house of cards to periacqueductally spin and dissolve and lose all power and as a fixed-on thing in the lattice crash in a whoosh down to splat. It is the abstraction that opened the door, but also shut me down.
I am going to give Marcoussis points then for understanding an element of dreaming that it is apparent Nerval did not quite understand. He did not see that, if he had visited this site earlier, scouting it out as a suicide site by his river of death, the Seine, he felt the in-itself prototype antiquity of it, and knew, this was a good place to die at. That then bespoke to him, in a kind of insight which might be linked to clairvoyance, as a good way to depict dream Paris, which, again, for Nerval was Paris come BACK to from the dreamland of the pagan Rhine. His dream Paris, that is, he did not see, was lethal.
It does seem, from this print, that Marcoussis believed in the mystic aspect of the story, and that Nerval was, by his reading, a mystic. I am less convinced. Nonetheless, if he did, this is a statement that Nerval like the Seeress had arrived at stage five clear-seeing, cosmic consciousness (which is also the level at which Walt Whitman sought to write, see American hieroglyphs).
there is perhaps in the print a too close relationship to this famous Rembrandt, but note that Marcoussis has Nerval sitting beside and below, in the shadow, as if shrugging, like durer’s Melancholic angel. Again, my reading is that these manic spins dematerialized his house of cards, causing a crash
So, what makes this dream-based art, versus something else, is that Marcoussis made the interesting decision that the whole physical set up of the dead end where Nerval’s suicide took place was a perfect example of a deep structure or nature morte almost bespeaking the strife of the suicide itself, without the figures, and as such he converted it into a talus formation which forms in dream in the symbolic level as it drifts out into ambience, and, framed by a peripteral wall, to become phantom, the whole complex is fixed on
and then, from that fixing, can be backbuilt back through every scene in the story.
it is, ultimately, a thanatoptic view of Paris, and of Nerval’s life but it then wends its way back over the prescribed pathway of the life as marked out in the book, and by that retrogressive overcast creates as if a dream of his life, if not angelspace, then Nervalspace. Indeed, Marcoussis pinging on the abstract chords of memory in the Palace de Concorde, with the black sun, is not that different from my appreciation of the abstraction world space of the Palais Royal, the Daniel Buren piece (see my article, 1991) there plucking on invisible ley lines of memory, to make it all tremble.
the one scenic element, the building on the right, is converted back into an extended form of the dead end spot, by causing the monument in the middle of the square to re-form as a stairway which places the scene inside the trace of Nerval’s experience on the devil’s road. And then the pattern reproduces itself in the pattern of the cobblestone, and Nerval’s state of phthsis, or near death, is conveyed by him also being cast to the bottom of those stairs, and laid out splat on the pavement, or almost of the pavement, and even looking almost like a statue of a reclining nymph you might see at the Louvre, or see Paris through. It is quite effective, if a poetic overcast on the more frenetic description of the event in the book. All in all, then, a solid evocation of the book. All of which means, I think Marcoussis also devised a system of abstract vectors by which to “retell” the scene in each incident, to create his nonetheless suicide-spot overcast images of Nerval’s Aurelia.
The stairs are clearly the primary vector, and they signify the passage from life to death for him. But there are counter-stairs too, light, and then light vectors that I do not understand, and it is possible there is a vocabulary of a few different sorts of steps here, the stairs of a sewage outlet, the stairs of a street, the stairs of a house, or fire escape, the stairs of a balcony or palace. Indeed, this vocabulary of stairs was notable when the only element in recent art that I can relate to the way in which the Street of the Old Lantern dead end was instrumentalized of late, the staircase in Joker, which was an issue at the time.
These drawings bespeak my sense that Aurelia was written as but also in a dream and its tableaux of Paris were set-pieces of the kind created by dreams and which I call talus formations, in hypnagogy, at the edge of ambience. Marcoussis then pushed the whole story into the second level symbolic level of hypnagogy, as it zig zags to the talus form, maybe even opening up to the half-life form, and he made use of Dore’s print to ground and rethink the entire story as happening inside the maze of a stepped universe whose umwelt form IS the Street of the Old Lantern (and, of course, the search for the umwelt is always done with a lantern, as per Blake’s Jerusalem), making it pure dream, hypnagogic, and all of it of a premonition of those stairs and all figures as a cubistic premonition of the strange half-standing posture that Nerval ended up his life in (an odd death pose not unlike a figure impaled on a gate spike, or caught screaming in a coffin, it is tropaic). Marcousis, an artist I do not know, understood the dynamic, the dream and the nightmare, and as a result rendered drawings of an all but scirpographic intensity in capturing the trapped nature, once upon the onset of trouble, of the last years of Gerard Nerval.
Taking all poetic states to be vigilogogic I will argue that the whole vigil-hypnagogic zone is, for Nerval, a representation of “real” Paris, and that, then, it is mirrored, in the unseen ambient and sentient space beyond, by Dream Paris, the Mystic city, and they interact in a loop
in this new state, however, and this would be the purpose of the dream, to accustom him to it, he has a new power, a kind of clairvoyance, he hears a woman scream, but he says, “to my mind terrestial events were bound up with those of the invisible world”, admitting that he does not quite understand these strange relations, how it works is, he hears the scream, then he hears it echo in the spirit world, as such
this creates a tremor, or frisson, or nomos, sent through the whole of Paris, and it so scares him that he thinks that this perturbationi will destroy the link, “had I disturbed the harmony of that magical universe, from which my soul drew the certainty of immortal life. Perhaps I was accursed for having attempted to penetrate into a terrible mystery in violation of the divine.“ So, secondarily, in addition to being the spirit world, that is heaven, or the world of the immortals which he, as a Catholic, hopes by faith to ascend to upon death. Now, he is not so sure, and it is shaking him up. Then, he even thinks, so it recoiling negatively upon him, to attack him, he fears that because he made that tight rope walk he is accursed, he saw and learned things that he should not have.
At another point he posits that God rules over this world, for him Jesus, but then also seems to acknowledge further out, the god of Lucretius, who is so immense that he is effectively powerless, “This is a god that ‘did not admit of a singular royalty.” So, it is not simply that the spirit world is catholic world, but that he has split it off from the church and has been populating it in recoil with his own beliefs. He then speaks to a poet who gives him a good dose of all these “god is everything” speisl, and this casts him into another phthsis.
It is at this point that Kubin provides a provocative picture, a man as if almost but not quite, crawling, maybe, out of bed. If he is getting up in the morning it is with reluctance and it is not going to be a nice day. I suppose the intent was to show the effect of depression over a specific problem, that it feels like to wake up again to an unresolved crisis, making you immediately want to go back to sleep. This is a proskynetic pose, indicating lack of energy, a heaviness and unwillingness. It is a Not Wanting to Live, Not Wanting to Get Up demon, It could also be the four o clock demon, who depletes things to nothing.
I am going to argue that his hearing an echo of the woman’s cry in the spirit world means that by his dream he has fallen into a first level state of mesmeric in-turning, nothing dramatic yet, except that he understands the occult principle of correspondences as a belief. In his next attack of depression he wanders and comes across a funeral. He follows it, but says, though he did know who was being buried, “I now know that the dead can see and hear us” and as a result they might think kindly of him, following a cortege.This momentarily resurrects in him hope for eternal life, if only by meeting up with one’s dead relation after. Such a liebestod death is noted. By the specificity of it that would be an occult belief, but this seems to be but a magnetic sleep fantasy given an extra poetic spin, but not yet to the point, which would be a higher level, where he says he sees the dead. He cannot find Aurelia’s grave, so runs back to his house, where there is a reliquary. Again, keeping a reliquary, while giving it such intense meaning is poetic, it is not cult, it is not occult. He calls them superstitions, but even that is just vigilogogic poetic reading of life. But then he does have in there a mummy cloth, laurel leaves from Beruit, and a mosaic from Saint Sophia, meaning relics of a more religious quality. Then there is a piece of paper with the info on it about where the grave is. Then he had “terrible dreams,” deciding not to return.
The dream then casts him back into the an unfamiliar room, and it is contrast to the “external world,” which means he is back in the Paris of His Dream world. So, he is over there, the room, the mirror, then a figure he thinks steps out of the mirror, gives him a message, and it all vanishes.
the desert that he sees, which shows up in angelspace, etc, is what I call the phthchth, vast, empty, meaningless, he climbs down a cliff into it, so, there is the cenote to the sight of monsters, but it is interfered with by the ghost of a dead relative who chastises him for not mourning her as much as her mourned for the end of his love with Aurelia. At this point, the energy is as if intercepted by the form of a near death experience as he describes a time-tested trope of seeing all sorts of people, all passing before his eyes, but with the poetical touch that in this form of it they dropped back into the darkness like the beads of a rosary whose string has snapped, so chaotically, all at once, splat
and then he saw the physicality of presence harden into statues of a classical sort, and at the end of the path a large confessional, which in turn made him feel guilty about his faith, and turning his back on Catholicism. He has been, since the Revolution, agnostic, but now feels some guilt (his dream world, then, and this might be a sign of schizophrenia, is a minefield of traps which catch him and make him feel guilty, he basically pinballs from one trap of guilt to the next, not my problem). So, the confessional, the door of truth
Nerval’s Confessional 12 5 21
but, then, thinking of his mother, he drops down lower. And he elaborates, but in a fascinating passage, it is about Germany, and I read dubruck’s book on Nerval’s romance with Germany, so this also brings us close to the seeress of Prevorst.
He says that his mother, like mothers and wives used to, followed behind the army, presumably Napoleon’s into Germany, but there died. It was custom, and a genre, which provides visuals to imagine a miasmic half-life zone below the phthchth, a hell on earth, green-befogged Chloros
a queer, nonplace, but which seems to take into it his longing. But, the mother dies. For that he was placed with his grandparents in a region full of “strange legends and bizarre superstitions. His grandfather dug about for Roman antiquities, and dug up Venus, Mars, Neptune, Amphitrite, and in the town square was a Pan, so it is a pagan city, it is also a celt city, as Esus and Cernunnos are over the door of the cathedral. His grandfather said “God is the sun”. I am going to have to argue that Nerval had developed in his mind a redoubt below the desert of the phthchth, which is below the internal world of dream, a mirror world of Paris, and that in the space past the Confessional at the end of it, passed into and down to a level of imagined hell on earth, a mystic pagan land of Roman antiquities and pagan gods ruled by the sun god. This almost sounds like my own ruritarian fantasy world of the Rhine, the foo fighter triangle, currently being explored (not to get carried away, but the whole time I have been writing this essay there has flickered at my back window a kind of bouncing reflection, a foo vision, true, annoying, 1144am Dec 3 21). (and it is, of course, one the birthplaces of horror, that is, the German ghost story influence on Frankenstein, the influence of Burger on Wordsworth as mentioned in Woodlands Dark, the whole aura of gothic art out of Germany, moving west and north. Nerval, in fact, lives in this back and forth.
I might place it roundabout Quedlingen, which takes some current interest, as it was there that the SS sought to institutionalize its vril cult of the Black Sun, but Ouijan and Hartog are the main towns of that fictional ruritarian redoubt, and this sounds like a familiar transrhineian fantasy of a world below earth to give substance to the feeling of being in hell in earth. It was in some fiction on this zone that Nerval made his mental way back to Paris. He now goes back entirely to Paris, I mentioned something similar in a post this morning, since the Times was congratulating itself on recognizing Warhol’s catholicism.
The interesting or fascinating thing about this famous zigzag is that some of the cities I wandered about, entirely in that state, in 1979, such as Lyon, have seemed, ever since, to be dream towns, unreal, but, somehow, magical, I am grateful they slept for me and did not kill me (Bourdain’s Rhineland suicide brought all this back to me too, a few Junes ago). Same sort of thing here. Then, same thing, one hundred and twenty five years before my incident, he starts just going to the churches of Paris. He comes as if in an anabasis back UP into Paris, but it is not real Paris, it is his dream Paris, fata morgana Paris, now materializing in the narrative like a peripteral-walled periacqueductal-dematerialized and talus-formed dream Paris, that is, a mental construct created by the dreaming brain, in ambience, later to fata morgana to light sleep. This is the Paris that Kubin draws so nicely, strange encounters on isolated, lonely streets
It is also where he only goes into churches, and while in conscious life he might’ve shrugged at faith, not the Virgin in her power is entirely restored of her agency, so he carries out the cult, this is, in fact, the Paris I toured in my depression in ‘79, I was not in “Paris” of the tourists, or museums or restaurants or girls, I was lost, stuck, couldn’t do any of that, so it was this out of the way, alone touring, magical, in fact. He then of course partakes of an even more extreme ritual event, with a ring that has inscribed the name Allah on it, he wants to give to his restored dream faith the intensity that perhaps a good orientalist regretted not having in his faith, seeing it in Muslims, and also to make a syncretic statement that all god is one god, ultimately.
Unfortunately, this, and I may have skipped some, this taken from my reading notes, he sits through more of some service, then heads to the Place de Concorde, and “my intention was to do away with myself.” If the author of the Red Comet wants to do a correction course to reappraise the poet Sylvia Plath by her art not her suicide fine, it was certain that Nerval lived at a time when the romantic suicide was a trope in art, and thought to be the noble end for all great poets. But this awful remark indicates that he is not just dreaming in this Paris, he is pinballing and frantic, and bouncing from place to place, in a mood of suicidal ideation which has escalated to intention and to means, literature as suicide note, Paris as suicide weapon. This sort of danger, in my view, pushes him closer to self-tearing-apart and true schizophrenia, and likely why he was repeatedly institutionalized, the crazy acts that might be taken for excesses of stage magnetic sleep got much more dangerous when taking on the quality of madness. He says, “I made for the Seine, but something kept me from going through with it,” I just said as much, between the commas, about my experience in Notre Dame
“Church or educational center? Litmus test for me? My only crisis (concerning depression) was what I call the Great Depression, happened once, in 1979, it came down on me, weirdly, in Florence, I broke off from my travelling companions, whose couch I had camped on for a winter, sponging, I zigzagged, broke, north, eventually got to Paris, I got a really really cheap room, no $, I walked, I came to Notre Dame, crowded, tourists, a circus, but in it depths, I felt it, “They really believed, they really believed,” is what I thought*. It was going to be ok.
Keep that, everything else extraneous”.
That is, I may well have been so depressed that I was in danger, I do not recall, and yet I do recall a frantic armtwist in real time, a desperation to stop the pain, and that mantra, which I repeated a number of times, did, in fact, stop it, and I knew I was going to be ok. This part is true.
Then, however, he went to the Seine, it was night, or stars were shining above, then they all went dark at once, “like the candles seen in the church,” This scared him, “I thought that the final hour had come” and that the end of the world was announced by the Apocalypse of Saint John was here.
Nerval’s Paris, 12 5 21
Thus, this is a classic Black out, but further out onto the edge, on a place of sacrifice, which he seems to have placed at the Seine, his river of death, and from it the world went black
I place this all in a fata morgana dream Paris that he nonetheless in a state of half-waking syngogy, in the second nightmare, when he did not know if it was one or the other, awake or asleep, and inside the intention of suicide he saw the sky go black, and fill with images of the Apocalypse, that is, like Durer and Glaser and germans in the 16th century, his mood caused his view of the world to expand in lateral darkness but then pull in in vertical height for a low sky to come down on him, just like in a print and it is HERE, HERE, that he says, “I believe I saw a black sun in the vacant sky and a bloodred orb above the Tuileries, I said to myself, eternal night is upon us, and the darkness will be frightful. What will happen then they all realize there is no more sun?”
This is the most important vision, from my POV, and my study of the Black Sun, of Aurelia, he SEES the Black Sun. And, as I worked it out, him travelling out past ambience into a dream Paris, it appears in the sky of the far mind exactly where it appears in the same mindsky in every other instance I have read of it (including now the Nazi occult belief in the Black Sun).
The Black Sun of Nerval, 12 5 21
And there is more, in fact, he sees the Black Sun, but more, “I saw a black sun in the vacant sky and a bloodred orb above the Tuileries. I said to myself, eternal night is upon us, and the darkness will be frightful.” What will happen when they all realize there is no more sun?” A few things. He sees this vision as a premonition of the fate of the world, thus once again he seems to rise up, even in his black mood, to the clear-seeing state of clairvoyance, fifth stage of mesmerism. Second, the black sun is paired with a bloodred orb above the Tuileries.
Nerval’s Tuilleries, the black sun and the bloodred orb 12 6 21
Here is another one. Another vision in the sky, in middle Europe, in the early modern period. This image, for including in it the bloodred run, relates to the Regenkreuz visions in the sky in Germany, Nerval’s dreamland, in the 16th century, this also relates to Glaser’s sighting of the same over Nuremberg in 1561. And, surprisingly, it also relates to Jung, in the Red Book.
Jung had a “waking vision” from a train window heading into Schaffhausen on the Rhine, in 1914, whatever he saw, it made him 1) think it was the devastation of Europe, and 2) that he had picked up the vibe of a collective consciousness having its own as if meteorological visions, and thus his psychology took a collective turn. But what did he see? I was startled by this image in the Red Book, first impression, it could be a visual record of this vision
But, once again, I think Jung puts a lot of pressure on mandalas, hoping that as a cross, with a radiating but organic blood red emanation, even, not unlike pictures of the aurora borealis, shimmering precipiterally to earth, he sees the mandala as a block to the vision of destruction. And in between, in a style that looks an awful lot like some of David Altmejd’s sculpture, currently addressed on my rmarts site, there is a floating guru
then, later, he has another drawing which is of a type we have seen in Blake’s Robert and here above in Kubin’s drawing of Nerval running naked in the streets, under the power of a star, being thus zapped
Certainly this buildup form, what to call it, pregigerian in its organic intensity, is not entirely pleasing
and with it he attains to epigogy, that is, he sees monsters
but it all does seem, on first impression, related to the bloodredness of a vision of flood (that is, I suspect the catastrophic nature of the flood he saw, maybe he saw Schaffhausen overflow, was that because it was blood). So, this part of Nerval’s visions indicate now a schizo falling apart.
Then, he takes it further, to pure panic. He runs down the rue Saint Honore (and it is fun to hear these fashionable places transformed by panic and depression into the devil’s road), and when he gets to the Louvre, I am going to say this is back in toward the dream, in the ambient spin space, he sees the sky again, but this time, the wind was whipping the clouds across the sky, and” I saw several moons darting by overhead, I though the earth had shot out of its orbit and was careening through the heavens like a ship that had lost its mast, drawing closer to the stars”.
Nerval’s Six Moons of the Louvre, 12 5 21.
He contemplated this confusion, “for two or three hours.”
Hmm. Here is Nerval, in 1852, describing a scene not unlike the one described by Glaser, seen over Nuremberg in April, 1561. The geography between the two sights is the foo triangle of Europe, the most fought over land of it, home of his pagan ur dream or nightmareland. And I have to say that when I was a-wandering similarly I DID in fact have to just sit and not press myself and let myself just sit and watch and stay put, for as many hours. Strange.
Coming home at Les Halles he also wonders about how the peasants are going to react when they realize that morning is not going to becoming, that “the night is not going to end,” This, is, of course, a horror movie trope, Mr Jones, etc, others, it is also true in 2010 Arthur Clarke for unclear reasons is playing with visions of many moonedness and life on other planets. It is clear that Nerval in his dream Paris has had a foo vision, and as such measured against the line from mesmerism to my dream theory, he had a dramatic escalation to a dark or negative form of full sleepwaking, seeing death in everything, over all, everywhere.
So, he imagines the darkness coming down in, and staying forever, the world stuck in the far dark sentience of the Black Sun.
now, a mania. A mania is when you get overtaken by a crazy even poetic idea and then as it fails to materialize you are nonetheless still so much inside of the excitement of the drama of it that as each little lurch of it out of itself to another event happens that is just more part of the plot. That is, your doubts redoubted as proofs becomes more of the mania. I have of late in these writings become a bit more manic in my method, a little cul de sac of concentrated energy will entirely take me over, the current one being, in fact, the seeress of Prevorst and her relation to the occult, Jung, and my dream theory, and then folding into that zero point theory, and occult Black Sun theory, and the Black Sun, and Nerval, and all of it, that I have trouble not rehearsing at all times what I am going to write and it is like I am delivering a run-on thirty hour lecture on all the instant wonders I have found in a state of euphoric synchroetherrhoe, everything all at once flowing together. And so, it is amusing that Nerval, faced with the fact that there is light the next morning, in his mania, still sees it his way, he goes to Notre Dame des Victoires (I went to all the little churches), and smugly and yet harbingeringly, is shocked that the choir is rehearsing, like they have not heard about it, he watched them, as if protecting them, for an hour.
Then he goes to the galleries of the Palais Royal, center of my “world space” Paris of 1989, that euphoric adventure in dream Paris, and by then he devised an even wilder theory, half-life of rationalization, he decided that the sun as it burned was burning itself out and only had enough light to shine for three days (all of this play with the sun and eclipse echoes off the 1961 movie Barrabas, which has always been a favorite). As a result, his impression was “it looked cold and colorless,” he then goes to his German poet friend, they see he is sick, and take him to a clinic.
Nerval’s Cold and Colorless Sun over the Palais Royal 12 5 21
What part of this then is schizophrenia? Again, my guess, without applying Prinzhorn to this as yet, is that it is the suicide ideation but also intention and procuring of instrument (the Seine); a vision which perhaps mentally served to block this attempt, but also set him up for it again; a pinball franticness in his movement through Paris, the running, the spinning, that feeling of feeling the world under the streets as a whole as if spinning as on orb out of control in space. And then the mania, refusing to calm down, but using ever disproving as just more proof, with a half-life of rationalizing spin. Indeed, I think many people in the antivaxx world right now are in a state of strange mania.
The reading gets sad, he is in for a month, then out, and then it begins again. He makes a daytrip to Reims (the bombing of the cathedral in ww1 is featured in my novel, Arma Christi, I think), then has terrible writers bloc and insomnia and wanders nights around Montmarte to greet the sun with anguish. It gets bad, when he hears the bells of Saint Eustache, that makes him thinks of a battle between Burgundians, and Armagnacs, and “saw the ghosts of these ancient warriors rising up around me” This is a full on but negative mental clairvoyant vision, stage four negative. He then wanderers to Saint Eustache when he knelt at the altar, “while thinking of my mother” Thus, this episode is a pull again from his pagan redoubt, in hell on earth, sign of which, that is, appearance of which in his mind may be the indicator of trouble. He said, “the tears I shed eased my soul.”
Nerval and the Bells of St. Eustache 12 5 21
Then he has a particular paranoid end of the world vision, a third one, a Black Sun vision, It starts with seeing a hippopotamus in the zoo, then he goes sees some osteological exhibits at the Museum of Natural History, more animals, He says “the sight of the monsters on display got me thinking about the Flood’ Two things, he is seeing monsters, now, that is, he has lept up into a state of mind I call epigogy, but of the haunted sort. He sees monsters
he is back in his dream Paris, dark city of sentience, under the Black Sun. He has already had a horrifying vision of the Black Sun, and blood red sky; then that the planet was spinning out of control; then that the sun was burning itself; then shocked that people did not realize it was turning dark forever, this was the end of the world, and now, he sees a hippo, illustrated as IMPORTANT by Kubin.
Then he sees a large skeleton figure in the museum, and in both cases given where he is seeing this, this is the unhinged regions of the far mind, deep, hippocampal, amphitrian, each is a monster, he is seeing, in panic, monsters rise up, like in Amityville Horror, two more demons, he might just as well have quoted Rosa’s demon, in the museum of natural history, they rise up, they become the storm clouds
then when he gets out, it is pouring rain, but it is not just that, it is the FLOOD, things are far more serious! This is the beginning of the real, the biblical Flood! In Paris, in 1853, The water was rising in the nearby streets, The Flood in French painting of the time would reaffirm the frantic manic nature of his vision
Then it gets worse, “I ran down the rue Saint Victor and believing I might be able to stem the global tide, I threw the ring I had bought at Saint Eustache (so a magic ring) to stem the tide” (did not Caligula do this on the north coast of France against the incoming sea, killer of so many immigrants,too?) The rain tapers off, he thinks that he has saved the world. This is not good, mentalitywise
Nerval’s flood 12 5 21
this crude graph, which will be converted into a formal scirpograph, is still a psychographic graph, that is, the black clouds situate the mania as taking place in the sentient mind, the rain is psychodynamic downward falling, the monsters as visions of epigogy, a state of consciousness in which one sees monsters of the world, the vision of the flood is a paranoid fantasy of Avornos, hell on earth level one, coming up and engulfing the world. I place them here to indicate my interest in seeing if anyone has ever shot a movie in which scenes like this occur, we shall see.
Having saved the world, some calmness ensues. But then he goes to a shop and buys two ‘velvet screens covered with hieroglyphics, wonder what they were, I suspect psychometric reading thereof, which would be half-waking mesmeric scrying. For him they were a consecration of divine forgiveness. He takes a nap, has a vision of all his positive female guiding goddesses. The revelation tells him, this recorded, he states explicitly, in a dream, I will reveal myself to you, so another saintly vision with teleological meaning.
Now I skip ahead, after another visit, he breaks out of a straightjacket and at this point, “I had become a god, and possessed healing powers”, he is now saying that he is in full clear-seeing, cosmic consciousness mesmeric clairvoyance, a state that Kerner says only the Seeress and AJ Davis had reached in the 19th century. He has a full on divine mania breakdown in the institution, of less interest to me, clearly then off into schizophrenia. His descriptions of his manias inside the institutions are not fun reading, it strikes me that in his mania he went entirely into negative prototype space and converted perception of all inmates with him into figures in cult or worship who had a job in the cult but as if in a temple. I suppose the drawing by Kubin is meant to signify the fact that he had turned them all into things.
One image is of interest, to the topic, When he looked at the leaves of a tree he saw the leaves impishly bobbing so as to create images of knights and ladies borne along on caparaisoned steeds. This is of interest given that knights battling were also seen in the sky over Germany in the 16th century, part of the mindset of the times. But, then, he wont stop with it, and so the involution, outwardly the figures represented the triumphant ancestors, but then he says this proved to him that “there was a massive conspiracy among all living creatures, to reestablish the world in its original harmony”, and “THAT THE MAGNETISM OF STARS PROVIDED THEIR MEANS OF COMMUNICATION AND THAT THE MINDS COMMITTED TO THIS GENERAL COMMUNION WERE LINKED BY AN UNINTERRUPTED CHAIN STRETCHING ACEOSS THE EARTH AND THAT ALL THEIR SONGS AND DANCES AND GLANCES, DRAWN EVEN CLOSER BY MAGNETIC ATTRACTION, TRANSLATED THIS SHARED ASPIRIATION”.
Then the picture of him on his bed, by Kubin, and he says that the clutter is as bad as Dr Faustus’s study, he describes the room, but the key hallucination here is again artistic, a bluish light comes in, that is, this is the Blue Room, in pain, it causes bizarre images to appear, the most bizarre was a charnel house as history, where the history of the world was scrawled with blood. Then, the giant body of a woman stood painted before my eyes, except that she had been hacked apart by a saber, and other women were just a tangle or limbs and heads. Once again, this dream vision horrifies him, tears him apart. This appears to be, in fact, a meeting with the god of carnage (my name for him is Psallictus, since she is the female side, Pscallicta, the god of tearing you to pieces), the ultimate sign of mental illness victorious, having schizo’d the schizo into pieces, gone. Beyond this Blue Room vision, he also encounters a little girl, she has a lantern, she has a cat, this is a Pinkie image, but possibly also a pinax, a lost ideal image in the context of it being torn apart, which he holds still in his brain.
That is, he is in a euphoria of mesmerism, fifth stage, clear-seeing, full cosmic consciousness clairvoyance, but in a conspiracy form, turned upside down. I have not involved the traps of rationality enough in my tour, but this sort of paranoid fantasy can only be doubled in on, or involuted, for the leaves, to then form figures, to then form an idea of conspiracy, by the fixation on it, the clamping down over it, of paranoid fantasy derived from rationality in exploitational mode run amok. Since it is hard to see how his rational mind found a way to colonize the confused far dream space of his mind, and he does shortly after this, with breathtaking change in mood, say all his fellow inmates seen to be asleep or like specters out of Tartarus, it is clear that it is by the perception of a Sleeper, an internalization thereof in him, that he cast into hell on earth, in a hell on earth, the asylum.
He goes on about his state of mind inside, again, he is god, he understands everything, he heard things, secret voices called out to me in warning and encouragement from plants, tree, animals, and the tiniest of insects. He saw the patterns of the world, “harmonies that had heretofore escaped me now issued forth from the configurations of stones, angles, cracks, apertures, leaf patterns, colors, smells, and sounds”. Everything is alive, everything corresponds, the “MAGNETIC RAYS THAT EMANATE FROM ME OR FROM OTHERS FLOW DIRECTLY THROUGH THE INFINITE CHAIN OF CREATION WHOSE TRANSPARENT NETWORK IS IN CONTINUOUS COMMNICATIONS WITH THE PLANETS AND THE STARS”.
This is a dark parody of mesmeric clear-seeing, the soul of the Seeress a mirror held up to the full universe, to see all its laws, and understand all. Here it is, in Nerval, as a form of mad euphoria. In fact, this description of the state fills in a bit more about the nature of it, left a bit too open in Kirner.
The intrusion of the rational mind, which creates a friction, beyond polarity, which tears things apart, then once again immediately sets in, no sooner does he have a euphoric fantasy of living in white album, alert to the impellations of magic as described by Baker, linked to the stars, and the virtus that they emit into the world, than he sees in electricity, the new thing, a bastardization of same which can be taken over by malicious others, to control people. There is all the more reason to believe that malevolent or despotic spirits could enslave other minds by dividing them in order to conquer. He thinks that in the past necromancers managed to subjugate entire races and to keep generation after generation subservient to their eternal scepter.
Throughout, then, in Nerval’s descriptions, I find dream states which correspond to hypnagogic reality, and thus have “visual wisdom”. That is, the structure of sane dreaming is there. What is different, and hard to visualize, is the franticness of it, the intense recursive quality, the intolerable polarities, up and down, repeatedly. The overall desperate and crazy exaggerated nature of his visions, they do seem unhinged and thus headed toward schizophrenia. But the fact that Nerval could find in his mind a way to draw these scenes indicates that he was not at all times in such a phase, and maybe could not have written an account of it if in such a phase
Finally, the book, though by some to be unfinished, just tapers off, no real ending. And then in real life, came his suicide.
The overall purpose of Nerval’s Aurelia, commissioned as therapy by his carer, was to push against insanity with the force of an I, to ameliorate all splitting in a controlled voice. But, then, when he finished it, and the mss is said to have been found in the pocket of his jacket, on his body, dead, he committed suicide in any case. Descriptions of the suicide seem to parse it behind earlier incidents in the book, the seeing of the Aurelia lookalike, the running naked under the star in the street, the vision of the black sun and the bloodred orb, the vision of the six moons over the Louvre, the cold and colorless moon over the Palais Royal, the Flood itself over Paris, etc. It is staged as yet another psychoparisien dream event. One account says that he was making his way on an avenue, until his attention was captured by an Egyptian mummy in a shop window. This then sidetracked him, which then took him down a narrow street between the main boulevard and the river. It’s possible he saw the mummy as a standing encounter with death, a kind of grim reaper announcing the end to him. He then walks on the far path to the far place. We know that previously he thought to make use of the Seine as his suicide weapon. He also saw the Seine as a black river, under a black sun. It might also have been a river Styx to him, his visions of monsters encouraged by it. Dore later made a vision of the scene.
As things accelerate, I have been thinking again of Gerard Nerval’s Aurelia, if read as a work of mesmeric art. As a result, I am going to go through my notes, and see if I can begin to shape his experience according to the hermeneutic of my dream structure models.
Early on he describes feeling enfeebled and unrecognized, and “forever doomed to despair.” He then sought out in dreams, which mocked him, so that he can only give distorted images, reconnection with this dream world. He seems to have thought that his salvation, or heaven, in fact, was in this dream world. Where was it vis a vis his consciousness? He describes his “mental struggle.”
At the beginning, he is fairly rational, but the key thing is he describes his encounter with an angel. As per an article by Allan Beveridge, The madness of Gerard Nerval, there remains a debate over how much he romanticized his madness, or by reading it that way countered it, and by the fact that in the modern era both Jung and Laing continued to offer the idea that madness can be a kind of insight or deep truth if engaged by the self. You know my view. It is a folk theory, not a medical theory, but I hold it fast. “Madness” is a literary conceit signifying an intensification of rational thought into an irrational mania by the working upon it by exploitation fueled by feelings of rage and revenge, and is at the opposite end of the pole of well-being in the mind from mental illness and schizophrenia, which is not about concentration, but about being pulled apart. The one is a vertical rush to a manic peak, the other is a falling away into the void, torn apart by Psallictus. I have since day one dismissed any movie or book which in my view attempts to glamorize and romanticize mental illness, as, indeed, I held a long grudge against, for example, Ken Kesey’s ridiculous ideas in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I have written about this often, it is an issue of constant concern this past year. There is, in fact, in my view, no argument. If Nerval was, in fact, institutionalized several times, sometimes by concerned friends, that alone indicates his mental illness, that he felt like he was coming apart. Therefore, I am not that interested in his personal apparently self-remediating rationales and fantasies of visionary insight, and only in the incidents that strike me as of a breakdown sort. Moreover, he starts Aurelia by saying, “dream is a second life,” which I agree with, and, indeed, I also believe in the flip or the Big Sleep meaning that in his manias he flipped dream over onto life and in fact may not have known what was dream and what not, and for that reason the only point of interest is trying to place where Nerval was at various times in his mindmazings, to see if there was a way out, and, as he lost, how he lost it.
Right at the beginning, he gives some sources, Swedenborg, the prototype for angel sightings. As for Dante, and perhaps Apuleis, both are of interest as they did in fact visualize hells on earth, and thus opened the human mind to a state of “epigogic” comprehension that the modern mind by and large restricts entry to..Nerval here visualizes hells on earth. Anyways, things proceed, there is the dalliance with a possible new love, a woman who seems positively alarmed at Nerval’s attentions.
But, for the street scenes, walking along one street he saw a shop sign with a number which was the same as Aurelia’s death year, then a woman was in the way, she looked like Aurelia thus he has a twinfire incident, based on false equating of appearances, so, he claims to have felt an omen of her death. Seeing omens, though this sounds like an example of Jung’s synchronicity, is an aspect of the initial in-turning of the first stage of mesmeric hypnosis, in vigilogogy, dreamy awakeness.
He then argues that a dream he had that night confirms it. He wanders through a large house with many rooms and it seems to be a composite microcosm of his old school and of the world, and then after getting lost a few times comes to a gallery. From the gallery window, it appears, he sees up above in the courtyard out the window a creature of disproportionate size, androgynous, fluttering overhead. Then, it exhausts itself trying to take flight, so “plummeted into the center of the dark courtyard, snagging and bruising its wings.” It was rosy colored, and the wings were like rainbows, it wore a long robe, and reminded him of Durer’s Angel of Melancholy.
but It caused him to shriek, and then awake “with a start.”
Who is this angel?
First, clearly, it is a turning point angel, and an angel that introduces him to a dark time. He compares it to Durer’s Melancholy, but that seems to be a formal comparison based on the fact that the angel has long robes on (which likely contributed to its loss of coordination). It seems more likely that this angel is Abgrunde, Apollyon, the angel with the key to the bottomless pit, a different Durer,.
if, in the “frustum”, his mind empties out vigil-hypnagogic space, that leaves him with the power to by the touch of the emptying out rattle at Abgrunde, to then cause him to spin up over the voided center above. Nerval is then in classic lattice position, below, but because of the emptiness of his frustum of it, he is more proskynetic than normal, it might be that he froze into a state of being pressed down, paralyzed, and then it was the as if hydraulic pull of that shock that pulls Abgrunde up into the High Light to become as if the demon figure of that presence; but, then, whatever he might have hoped for it, it begins to struggle, tumble and fall, a great black form crashing through the center of his consciousness, and Ephialtus appears, to cause him to sit bolt upright in bed, survivor of a nightmare. This is, then, for all his wanderings, a classic “nightmare” where a demon appears, and then crashes in on you, to force you to pay attention. But the big difference here, since he mentions that next day he started doing rounds with friends to say goodbye, he took this as a premonition of suicide, and thus set in motion plans to do so. It is then also a suicidal ideation nightmare, given its great empty voidedness by the nature of the empty frustum through which it falls.
the black angel 12 4 21
On the overall sighting, seeing it above, knocking about, being knocked down by the too narrow containment of the courtyard, it might be black. But he says that it is reduced, and then has rainbow wings. This could happen if the core were hollowed out, and then emanations from hells on earth could more easily rise up, to participate in the wingspan.
this graph argues that the angel has a connection to Abgrunde, and, for that, is in fact formed out of the emanations of hell on earth. The reason that it is gangly, and has lost control, is that its wings are unhinged layerings of the mists of the hells on earth. Each color of the rainbow exceeds the last, and if the body is red then he is a creature of Pandemonios. If made of emanation, this also makes of him more a demon than an angel. Its labored movement suggests the spindly spiderwalk ethos of demons. Therefore, it scares him because a demon.
Indeed, Alfred Kubin pictures this gangly, somewhat out of control flying demon, he does not picture a being of flesh, with a robe on, but a being made out of robe, a famulus, then, coming out of a figment, and related to the beach figment called up in Whistle and I’ll come to you (1968).
as if a type of Delacroixs image of Mephisto’s demon,
these are demon-angels of reckoning, which likely haunted poets and artists alike. He then has further social interactions as “the fatal hour,” that is, his intended suicide, comes. He then sees a fata morgana vision of an emptiness seen from a hilltop, and thus rereads his sighting of the angel as in fact his version of the devil tempting Jesus in the desert.
Nerval rationalizes all this as proof that he had made contact with the dream realm, a mirror realm adjacent to his Paris. He talks of living in this double aspect, where on one level, meaning was one thing, but on another, everything had a double meaning. Further elaborating on the nature of the relationship between his world and the spirit world he argues that spirits can “take on the bodily shape of an ordinary person,’ and thus act on us. This is what he thinks has happened here. A psychopomp showed up to lead his spirit in and down, but then it messed up, and now he is fallen under the influence of Abgrunde, with her key, and sponsor of suicides too. Clearly, this is the precipitating event in his descent into mental illness. This is the first time a suicide ideation takes on a nightmare form that shocks him awake. This fallen angel is the suspension of his disbelief in the world, now those illusions crash down, he wants to kill himself. This then precipitates the first breakdown that gains the attention of the officials. Overall, too, Nerval’s description of the event amounts to “visual wisdom” as I think that a breakdown will look like a nightmare whoosh, the format of his tale.
And then it comes on him. After Mardi Gras he strips naked in the street, lead by a star. He roams, he puts his arms out, what he is waiting for his star fusion, based on the fact that his body is “magnetically attracted into the ray of the star.” He then feels the magnetic pull, puling him up. But then the cops come and though he feels quite tall and flooded with electrical forces, they take him away. When a man shrieks at seeing a black angel fall onto him, causing him to start awake; when he then strips naked and runs through the streets following a star which he thinks he must merge with to bring the virtus of its magic down, this is a breakdown event. Kubin’s drawing captures the abject hysteria of it, a frail bony, small penis man, trapped in a dark street
formally, this pictured episode feels connected to the previous vision of the angel, as if a reverberation, my scirpograph
Star dance 12 4 21
Now on his camp bed in the asylum he describes a euphoric fata morgana vision, which I am not that interested in. It is a plateau of dream or waking, dream or daydream, to project one’s frustrations to a place in the brain where they can be overcome. He then apparently suffers a recurrence of this nightmare at the same time for a few nights, what I call a timestamp imp (and, indeed, I have been being attacked by the 2 and 4 o clock demons the whole week after my Friday crisis). Last night he was seeking union with the star, this time, same time, lightning strikes him down.
Kubin’s drawing is, in fact, a rendering of the “Umwelt” search for self-talismans, as a way to recover from nightmare, and rise up. The stripping bare is perhaps typical of this state, the wandering too. The fact that he is under a star, following the star, then imagines himself finding the star, which then replaces the dark angel above him, all of this echoes on the fact that I argue that in this state of suspension, unsure or what is awake or not, that the High Light zaps one with lightning, to make the point. Blake also believed, in his Robert, that messages from his dead brother came from a shooting star striking the instep of his foot.
This famous first breakdown, then, is rather classically contained inside nightmare formations. The transformation of the haunting form from a melancholy angel to a star indicates the degree to which he is in flux between top and bottom of the mind. This sighting, in a courtyard in central Paris, sets up the rest of it, in its psychogeography.
Then, his dream-mind wanders out into ambience. Movies or books when the hero ventures out of France into Germany are rare. Of movies only The Girl with the Motorcycle (1968) registers in memory. Here, however, Nerval has an intense relationship with Germany, due to the fate of his parents. Now he is transported to the Rhine, there are menacing crags, but on top a cheerful cottage. He then felt that this place feels so much like home it must be the home of my maternal uncle. Though vague about how he ventured to the Rhine, I place this first foray into some redoubt of paganism downhill from his primary concerns . It is Flanders, the homeland of his maternal uncles. One of them, a hundred years ago, was a painter. He seems to have had a problem finishing work, unfinished canvases hung about, but one was about the fairy of the Rhine (Lorelei?). Then he is told to go take a nap, does so, but then a bird, the soul of his ancestor, spoke to him from a clock on the bedtable, a clear famulus haunting. As I see it, this is tracery over classic dream formation dynamics, movement across the Luor (the in-between) into the Forest of Lost Thought and the Village of Dreams, the cottage is Kienholz Cottage, she will show the way. The fact that it seems to exist pre 100 years ago ads prototype space essence to it. The bird spoke not 100 years ago but in a further advanced state of time relativity, when there was no difference between then and now. Even more amusing, the bird tells him about a portrait of a woman, a German woman in costume leaning over the river, picking flowers. Who the painter is, maybe Schalken, others, is of interest. The purpose of this journey to a place where he had extra backup of maternal relatives outside of France is to introduce a personage met at a party. On the wings of the philosophical debate about the nature of certain posthumous states the whole sequence escalates and expands to a high fata morgana floating over all. At one point he breaks to visit a village and Kubin’s rendering of it is a classic camoflague form of a fata morgana, all of this then is more reverie by the Sleeper cast into a high minded place.
This whole reverie of a perfect palace also included the girls. The purpose of this fata morgana it seems was for him to commune with his maternal ancestors to then pour through pictures of them to at last meet a personage who confirms for him that if he can meet up with all of them in this dream that means that is a dry run for the afterlife, and so, there IS an afterlife, and IS a god, and there IS more than utterly nothing after death, and Nerval takes great solace from this. But, then, further on, he comes upon a woman, she then grows so large that the garden in whole takes on her shape. Her face and arms were imprinted on the purple clouds of the sky. This seems like a revisiting of the angel. He sees a nude bust in the garden, and it seems to indicate to him that this is another premonition dream, and now he is aware of the fact that Aurelia has died.
The only way to work this out dreamwise is to accept that Nerval is not quite working with a modern sleep science model and so his first foray across the Luor into the ambient redoubt of Germany, he just did an introductory meander, to feel out the situation, ending up in the Great Bed.
but, then, he backtracks and then retraces his steps over the same terrain a second time, and this involved his discovery of god and the afterlife, secrets of life. But then, the bust, this is another talisman form, another link on Orion’s belt, and thus he is soothed. Only, then, in a pattern repeated here, for it to be immediately wrest away by his restlessness.
THEN he goes down in in “syngogy” (green, unsure if awake or asleep) searching out his umwelt talismans, of which the news of eternal life is a big one.
then the second premonition is that Aurelia is dead, this, I think, triggered another ephialtic leap, or bounce out, to “epigogy” (red, seeing the monsters), whereupon he sees all the godlike figures, again in a kind of fata morgana dream form. He is working in a binary way, so it makes sense that he finds two talismans, both in the form of knowledge, and so the shock of the finding causes him to bounce out, as opposed to leap up out of that phase, to then by seeking to comprehend more, experience through a vector a fata morgana pull that inscribes over the former spot of the ancestral village and cabin a new mansion where he decorated all the frescoes. And the really odd thing is that after making this bounce out, to come in over the space of the house with the unfinished paintings, he now experiences the now of art and sees a portrait of Aurelia, surrounded by a court. It seems he painted it, coloring it with tones extracted from the juices of flowers and weeds. The fact that she has a wheel under her, surrounded by gods, makes me wonder if she is not here depicted as nemesis,
I believe that this painting is a Pinkie painting, the Rightful Red Herring.
In the fashion of the time, it is also a “pinax”, that is, in a situation where everything is falling apart, he holds an image of his ideal in his mind, it is a common trope. The fact that he paints it with flowers, accords with conventions at the time
since the picture is not described it might also partake of the legends of unfinished masterpieces (re Balzac), in any case, it is for devotion to a lost love. As such, it is a work of art as a half-life of the loved object, depleted, but compensated for, by a measure of possession.
He resorts, in this place, revisited, to make art, he worships the idol of his love, he tries to sculpt her in clay. These are also not described, he could be thinking of literally any of a thousand sculptures of the time.
Then, he is given paper, and covers them with thousands of drawings, and “tales in verse” and “inscriptions in every known tongue,” resulting in a history of the world intermingled with memories of of my studies. He admits this is all “private preoccupations,” a nice phrase encapsulating culture. He is even goes ancient, saying that he gets his ideas from genius using talismans, including the Stones of the Sacred Table, to then paint a painting of the seven Elohim who divided the world. He then explains this history of the world, and the pantheon includes undines, and AFRITES, partly made of earth. He talks of wars of the spirits that lasted thousands of years. They took place on the Mountain of the Moon, in Ethiopia. This goes all the way to Kubin’s two drawings of the people exhausted by these wars.
Then there is a plague, then Orion cleanses the world by pouring cataracts down, the earth spun backwards, the seas overflowed, the floods filled the sands and the tombs of Egypt. This almost sounds like scripture, with three of the Elohim taking up a place on the highest mountain of Africa, but wow, it just goes on. Then, once again, it turns dark, with which it all comes back to the talking bird.
Nerval’s Flemish Rhineland Retreat 1 16 22
What is going on here? There is a type of dream I term the Night Mirror. What happens is that if one assaults sleep repeatedly, but always fails to get to sleep, one ends up with most of the night having been spent in insomnia. Each time one besieges sleep and fails to get there, it is as if a slash, struck against sleep, instantly forms a mirror, and as the strobe builds up, a zigzag of lightning strikes, but in the forms of mirrors, builds up, and this then spins the mind out into ambience, and one then comes up into wakefulness almost in a mania singing an anthem or literally waking up talking out a great rehearsed speech. That is the Night Mirror, and if the waking is in anthem or self-talk, depending, I call it a Morning Storm (which can, however, be good to bound you out of bed, busy).
This can become even more manic if at several points in the whole recursive spinning, going over and over the same ground as if a storm that has stalled over the locality, if there are moments when you think you are asleep and they turn out to be awake, or vice versa, this CAN (as been happening this past week, I think under the side effect of albuterol) become quite manic. As one becomes frantic to sleep, a dream may have an intense half-wobble element that strikes one as if awake, intensely. It this is also instigated by a timestamp demon, or bed imp, like the Demon of Four O Clock, the spin can be more intense. That is, there is turbulence.
But, in Nerval’s description, what I think is happening is at that spot in the dreaming brain where he first visited his Flemish ancestors, he fixated, and then it circled round to overwrite as a larger house, and then circled back around to become a palace, and a garden, and then he made murals over the whole place, and then he saw portraits, one of Aurelia, and then he tried sculpture, and then the thousands of drawings flowed out all over, all of it in its involution and inosculation then sinking in on itself to a clairvoyant core, which goes entirely occult, tracing out, almost like Blake, the history of the Elohim, this is a Kubin portrait of Elohim
he is basically, in a formation as I have not previously described it, caught in a hyperloop, and he is circling over and over and over and over and over the same ground again, caught then in a Night Mirror mania. In the abstract
This dream form, of course, showed up in the “Full of Stars” formulation of what the Big Brother monolith was in 2001, it does not strike me that Clarke in his sequel made much headway in determining that. But they used this figurative form of the mis en abyme, which in my view is a recursive function, that stalls or gets stuck, and just rains and rains, and in each return the quantity becomes greater and greater until it seems almost infinite, at which point the main thrust exhausts itself as it all gets away from him.
Thinking of all this, and that in this manic state things really are “synchroetherrhoe”, everything all at once flowing together, I came across a sculptor this morning, and let loose on it.
“Sweet, so Matthew Ronay, at Casey Caplan, whereas they are in the mode of longtime fav Giacometti’s Palace at 4am, and whereas at present every night I am being tortured by the timestamp demon of 4am, which stirs up a dream form I call the Night Mirror, a spinning almost manic storm of selftalk, destroying sleep, and whereas I literally just decided that when Gerard Nerval in Aurelie (1853) wanders into a palace where he covers all the walls with murals, then that fades, so he paints hundreds of portraits including a cult portrait of his lost love using bright flowers, then that vanishes so he covers thousands of sheets of paper with a history of the world from the POV of his private preoccupations, and I have decided this manic dream form is a Night Mirror in a condition of “recursion”…I can’t help but love Matthew Ronay’s imo psychodynamic scirpographic Recursionizer (2021), as well as his Reinstantiationizer, and his Pluralizer, and there’s even better ones, Etheric journey and Small Pitchers with Big Ears in CK’s Basel page, all of it, if in the playing-with mode, “ligatures” bespeaking dreaming. https://caseykaplangallery.com/?exhibitions=ligatures Recursionizer (2021); Giacometti, Palace; FEPO* graph of Nerval’s recursive dream brain fever; a “for instance” how I could see Recursionizer as graph; Pluralizer; Reinstantiationizer, etc. *For entertainment purposes only. If, for example, you are a scientist seeking truth in your work, the “art” of your mind can be when you just play with it, a point often missed. Finally, GREAT anti-somnambulism quote from Carolee Schneeman, chop the sofa into bits! Exactly.”
The fact of the recurisiveness of the images might mean this is lucid dreaming, fixed on one form, to travel more aware of itself through. That said, this kind of recursion demands that there is a reverse agency trend in it. That is, as it goes on, each successive layer gets more real than the last. An important point is that one in syngogy has experiences which one is unsure is it dream or reality? A few nights back I felt a fizzle left of my ear, this then visualized as a flashlight in the dark, moving toward the door of my sister’s room, 2212, circa 1965. It is because I think the opening fizzle had happened in reality, for real, that made this vigilogogic. This is standard stage one mesmerism, the in-turning.
But, then, last night, I had by far the weirdest of these experiences. I woke up at about midnight to a spark. The small halogen lamp on the bedtable was burning. This was caused by a lightning strike short circuiting the system. It was so intense, it was shocking. Moreso, it caused me to get up and look around, to make sure the lightning hadn’t struck more vitally. I walked out into the front room, then into the bathroom. I looked out of the chinks of the venetian blind, out back. No fire. The weird thing is the blast seemed like the vengeance of a long-buried threat. That is, it was a threat I had known was coming for a long time, but then now that it had at last happened to me it seemed unbelievable that I had not done anything about it in all this time. It was the “I cant think it has finally happened,” or “this is it”, you knew this was coming that made it uncanny and awful, and made me think of it as real. That is, I thought I was awake, and this was real. I though this is it, this is the end, and that was real.
because I was convinced it was real, it occurred on a higher plane than any other dream I have had recently. That is, I was in a mesmeric half-waking state, equivalent to vigilogogy, with a bounce to syngogy. But it made me wonder, the fact that it was so fateful. Perhaps, in the masquerades of self as ghosts dreamt in and about the bedding, all directionals are “under the bed” to us. There is oblivion, and fear of it, on every side of us, when we sleep. That builds up into a world where one false move and the whole world can explode. I thought it was caused by lightning, I feared that others in the building had had it, that the building was going to burn down. This was a full on haunting. The fire was so intense, it scared me (in the ensuing insomnia I looked at drawings Black Elk made of lightning, which registered). Like Jung, it’s possible I picked up a collective vibe (because there was absolutely no weather last night). When Nerval says that he painted the picture with flowers he is saying he wants an achieropoetoi, a miracle image. These images come on the half-waking, half-life syngogic scrying level of mesmeric sleep, setting up further rrhexis (explosive rupture). I would say in general then that Nerval’s imagination has a reverse agency tendency, always seeking by magic to turn it back into reality.
The fact that he at one point describes this project of his thousands of drawings almost in the same way as I describe my own such work, encyclopedic in nature, and it involves a recursive calendered logic, at bottom, to fold the years into one, is uncanny and a bit chilling. It suggests a mania, but as if by a diaristic form of artistic ideation overcovered in art. Consider. Literalism often intrudes upon the full understanding of these things. It is said that Joseph Yoakum, a former go-fer working for circuses his whole life, travelled the world. Then, one day, when he was 73, a dream told him to draw. It is now said that he then took all that he learned travelling the world and poured it into panoramic if primitive landscapes of the wonders he had seen. No he didn’t. His mind got centered or caught in a certain psychodynamic spin, and then it stalled there, recurring, over and over and over again. Each day it is if in his monitoring art, diaristic taking the temperature of the day, his mind as if recorded a graph of psychodynamic energy or not, much like the Seeress did with her sunsphere every morning at seven am, and then he simply overcovered that particular psychodynamic graph which one of his calming landscape, to plough it under, to calm him down. This is exactly what Ronay is doing, he even says he does his work to calm himself down. This is exactly what Nerval is describing here, what I call a Morning Storm, experienced after the Night Mirror, in a mania of anthems, to capture in full the fullness of his life. The fact that he wants to be encyclopedic, and I now acknowledge that quantity over quality impulse is the prime defense mechanism of my life as a sequitur, and I alone have a secret glee in my RoMMerreviews reviews for having fulfilled a desire to do some encyclopedic type work in my time on earth, I mean, Diderot’s dictionary, Johnson’s dictionary, the typologies of Paris, the encyclopedia has always interested me, suggests as well that he is afflicted by a loss that he is seeking to redress in a half life state, in repetition and quantity over choice quality. And another way to put a recursion; attacked by another four o clock demon last night my chest felt tight, so I decided that I had quit abuterol too cold turkey so took a puff to relieve. And when I looked up how long it takes to get the med out of my system, it said, “it takes about six hours for your body to get rid of half of a dose of albuterol, it usually takes about five half-lives for the drug to leave you system entirely. For Albuterol this means that the drug will stay in your system for about 30 hours after your last dose.” This all but models the recursive returns to a site as things slowly fizzle out.
In the text of the edition of Nerval I read, Ross Woodman’s theory is mentioned. (Woodman, 2005, Sanity, Madness, Transformation, The psyche in Romanticism, Univ of Toronto Press). Nerval was asked by his clinician to write Aurelia, thinking that if a narrator named “I’ recounted his experience that might calm his madness. The Red Book by Jung is written for the same purpose, by narrating an “I” one can signify one’s way out of madness. Woodman describes this as learning to “inhabit oneself as a fiction,” arguing that while Wordsworth failed at this, Blake succeeded, and made, by the way, greater art. This offers a different model of fullness of mind, that is, that fullness of mind can DERIVE from the capturing of one’s umwelt, and it is that success that allows for the whole of it, thereafter everything just flows out of you, everything is art, you can speak in plain English about a completely other world. In fact, Blake helped me get there, but….this is about worldbuilding, but from the inside out, you live as if the exoagentic god of an entirely reflective universe, and in that worlding one of course echoes the goal of highest clairvoyance in clear seeing, the whole universe mirrored of your soul.
But, again, the sign that Nerval is in trouble is that each time he runs up the mania to this high pitch, it all begins to dissolve, and he crashes. A house of cards is built, in a mania, it runs past him, he falters, then crashes (this sort of boom bust high crash mental culture was endemic in my early years). It is this part of him that comes apart that signals possible schizophrenia.
He then, out of this mania, realizes that this is the hour of his death, so he runs to that. That is, as I graphed out, the spin, in recursion, at last depletes, things fade, then spin out, and he crashes, the black sign, going down.
This is when he has his realization of doubleness, which seems horrific to him (more to me, his is a twinfire universe, haunted by the fear that that double is Mr Hyde). It must be assumed that the spin and the heaviness of this recursive spillage, like a rainstorm that stalls over a town, flooding it, this created in his mind a tenderness that at last, as whatever gets heavy on the lattice will, broke through the fabric, and by a violent spin spun him down to the realization that he will die. This is a nightmare formation, third time I think.
After this point, the dreams become much less euphoric, and fata morgana visionary, but sink down into the “real world” of his experience of a dream Paris. To work it out.
At this point, he begins a second journey, where he is possessed, he thinks, by an evil genius. The issue is, Nerval is in the dream moving nicely down through a standard microcosmic world of waking slipping to sleeping, but Abgrunde is not to be encountered until one opens up to hell on earth. Here is where the frustum comes into it. The moderns did not colonize with figures the vigilogogic and hypnagogic states but went straight zero to sixty from consciousness to REM dream state, instantly. That is, they had a different sort of rings of Saturn around these zones, emptying out their finesse.
We pick up at the next sequence…….
At first, he is sliding down on endless tightrope. The earth was burning with volcanoes below. He envisions this as the “spirit world.” This sounds to me like Nerval had occupied the poetic fringes of a solid state conscious world, and yet was vaguely aware of a greater mindspace beyond. I therefore put all the forms of mind between full consciousness and deep REM sleep in dotted line to indicate that they are there, but ghostly, not real, not recognized, and so spirit.
and then, I recognize the tight rope as a circus trope, and as with children’s games, or dunk tanks, I see this as part and parcel of Lucid dream apparati by which one crosses over, but that in this case it slants down from consciousness, and passes over the whole vista of the spirit world below. Something like this.
below him, he saw earth, riven by rivers of molten metal, this could be none other than a premonition of hell on earth (I will have another example in Clarke seeing hell on Jupiter), so down there, but he has no bearing on it
and this then lead to, along his way, obstructions, huge puddles of water suspended like clouds, which he sees as if steam sent up from below, so here
then he comes to a vast beach, a castle on a hill, which he climbs, and then on the other side is a vast city spread out below, something like this.
which means that the beach is his metaphor for the crossover point to far sentience, the dark of the mind; then, the castle is, slightly resituated, a trope I know, the Black House, wherein nexi are negotiated, and one crosses over. The city beyond complicates things some, but, situated where it is, and in the prose as it is, it is clearly a fata morgana form cast off the tightrope used as the plumb line of his sanity. But now I have to compress, because that fata morgana city is where he goes, and it seems to be an echo of Paris, entirely floating out in the high fata morgana duct of a vector of vision set off from vacated consciouess. He goes up a dark stairwell to streets, a casino, then there is a workroom, he sees a work of art, “modeling out of clay an encomrous llama shaped animal, which apparently was to be equipped with giant wings,” and it was slowly being brought to life by a beam of fire shot through it. it also had purple blood in its veins, which spoured wool. As such,
Nerval’s Llama 12 5 21
this “masterpiece whose fabrication seemed to have discovered the secrets of divine creation” is a demon, the question is what kind? If discovered in a trap or kunstkammer in redoubt of psychological space outlying from the fata morgana, it is a wild dream coming down some. Its central downward trajectory is conveyed by its long neck, then, the fire shooting through it is ambient spin, and then the purple veins which sprout wool, and it will have wings, is latticelike dream generation, As a scrirpograph, this could be construed as a llama
at present, though he reads it miraculously, it exists in overall mindspace in sentience near to and perhaps as a familiar of Psallictus (the god of carnage) himself, thus, he is a harbinger of schizophrenia, warning him, if those wings are attached, things will come apart.
Then he goes back into the castle, and into a throne room, the throne strikes him as amazing, this is a backward step,
this IS a picture of it, by Kubin, it is a big empty thing, everyone is trying it out, but then he has a complete fit of rage because he imagined that this was a wedding and everyone was awaiting his own double, who was due to marry Aurelia. He screams at everyone, there is trouble, he wakes up.
He is carried from dream back to life by the syllables of some unknown word, not yet pronounced, and it dies on his lips. What’s going on here? He envisioned in this dream the spirit world as existing outside and adjacent to his world, and inhabited by demons, one of whom might represent a warning of onset of breaking up. In its throne room however he realizes that this is yet his mind, and the figure in the scene therefore is his double. This is a doppelganger zone, superimposed upon an empty perception of ambient and sentient dream space. He falls out of the dream, by the throne, as if overthroning him
Thus, we have two worlds, as mapped out, the real world, Paris of his consciousness, which is there, and then its double in whole, a mirror world, the spirit world, occupying all of ambient and sentient space, mirroring the other.
Taking all poetic states to be vigilogogic I will argue that my whole vigil-hypnagogic zone is, for him, a representation of “real” Paris, and that, then, it is mirrored, in the unseen ambient and sentient space beyond, by Dream Paris, the Mystic city, and they interact in a loop
in this new state, however, and this would be the purpose of the dream, to accustom him to it, he has a new power, a kind of clairvoyance, he hears a woman scream, but he says, to my mind terrestial events were bound up with those of the invisible world, admitting that he does not quite understand these strange relations, how it works is, he hears the scream, then he hears it echo in the spirit world, as such
this creates a tremor, or frisson, or nomos, sent through the whole of Paris, and it so scares him that he thinks that this perturbationi will destroy the link, “had I disturbed the harmony of that magical universe, from which my soul drew the certainty of immortal life. Perhaps I was accursed for having attempted to penetrate into a terrible mystery in violation of the divine,” So, secondarily, in addition to being the spirit world, that is heaven, or the world of the immortals which he, as a catholic, hopes by faith to ascend to upon death. Now, he is not so sure, and it is shaking him up. Then, he even thinks, so it recoiling negatively upon him, it might attack him, he fears that because he made that tight rope walk he is accursed, he saw and learned things that he should not have.
At another point he posits that God rules over this world, Jesus, but then also seems to acknowledge further out, the god of Lucretius, who is so immense that he is effectively powerless. This is a god that “did not admit of a singular royalty.” So, it is not simply that the spirit world is a catholic world, but that he has split it off from the church and has been populating it in recoil with his own beliefs. He then speaks to a poet who gives him a good dose of all these “god is everything” spells, and this casts him into another phthsis.
It is at this point that Kubin provides a provocative picture, a man as if almost, but not quite, crawling, maybe, out of bed. If he is getting up in the morning it is with reluctance and it is not going to be a nice day. I suppose the intent was to show the effect of depression over a specific problem, what it feels like to wake up again to an unresolved crisis, making you immediately want to go back to sleep. This is a proskeynetic pose, indicating lack of energy, a heaviness, and unwillingness. It is a Not Wanting to Live, Not Wanting to get up demon, nice shot. It could also be the four o clock demon, who depletes things to nothing.
It is also of interest that sitting under this painting, where there is no father, only a mother, on the right, he says “get me the NYC office”
and we see a This is New York shot, and it is the newly built World Trade Center, the father figure
when back in the office, they discuss the said maximum zodiacal potential graph, a father figure painting is behind, in the same series
and there is the form, in its pure formal state
though it may be the office fluorescent light reflected over a form that looks like a shallow curve swelling to a center, and he declares that based on reading of the star chart, this particular form of the MZP has only shown up twice in history, which is a twinning thing, no?
it is at this point that they reveal that Kate is the second once, that is, she is a prodigy, with a profile like that
and when this is announced, another picture shows up behind
with a clear presence, on the left, of the Virgin Mary, but then a form in the sky, linked to the cover of Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and then an amalgam form on the right indicating that we are still trying to work that out
this is a freeze frame picture indicating his worries increasing, now that he knows what he knows, it is true, Kate IS the second Virgin Mary, so if we compare this painting to the previous, the sunny presence has now personified more clearly as the Virgin Mary herself, then the spirit of Kate has emit like a bird to then pull in and up on the uncertainty of who the child is, and the child comes into view as a white form at the top of the cenote of crisis, while the Karjerste form has reached out pincers, indicating that it is getting closer, and more dangerous, like this
so, we find out why Alexei has sworn off fucking Kate, if he thinks she is the reincarnation of an MMP that last appeared in the case of an immaculate virgin who gave birth miraculously to a god, then he does not want to interfere with her virgin power. He thinks that she is still pure, and must stay that way, and now by her presence, the danger of what he fears, projected into the picture, is allayed.
then of course, Trembley knows that immaculate woman has already given birth to her magic child, the second coming savior, so he goes checks out if it is possible to find this child, by way of, of course, the catholic church, always depicted in horror movies as a prototype place where the veron icon, or true image of things, hides
What all this means is that even if she gave birth to a child in an immaculate state, that is, without tearing open her hymen, it means that the event that signaled the second coming, that is, the birth of the child, has already taken place, and so even if Kate is the one, she already had that child and it is out there so what state her hymen happens to be at the moment, is irrelevant. Alexei is happy about this and immediately runs home to fuck Kate, and they do
and, now, a surprise. Kate has been bottled up for the whole movie. A great deal of mystery surrounds her, Alexei’s suspicions almost ruins their marriage, as he will not consummate, she kinds of goes quietly crazy. But, for all that, though we saw at the beginning that she had very little trouble being coaxed to take her clothes off, meaning that she is an earthy girl, she has been bottled up. Now, to symbolize the break in the suspense, we get a burst of all-over nudity that is extremely rare in movies as it does not involve the marshalling of the body as a series of objects to participate in the erotic objectifying dance of movie sex, but she is just there, discovered, and entirely free and easy about being nude, happy, almost as if this is her natural state. This too is a 70s thing
and without a blush, but only joy, she has absolutely no problem turning entirely frontal to the camera, then, she surprises again by walking toward the camera with all her parts out and swinging, happily returning to bed, this then moves her toward us; and they talk
what her full frontal nudity also means, of course, is that she is coming clean with him, telling him everything, standing nakt before him. In fact, as the conversation progresses, it is a sort of playacting out of effacement, and her nudity therefore, kind of looked forward to for the whole movie, plays out as a figure of effacement too. Firstly, then, she explains that, yes she had the baby when she was sixteen. According to common parlance, that meant that she lost her virginity, because what else could it mean, then she tells him why she gave her up, she would not have been good at it
at this point, having made that admission, and erased that history from her, she makes a curious move. as she describes the events that wiped her connection with the child away, she was put under during the birth, and did not experience it, by the time she came to it was gone, she sneaks back under the sheet, running for cover, but in doing so, exposes herself to the camera completely
why? In standard trope, in horror, sight of crotch in 70s movies means, that person is going to die, check it out if you do not believe me, see crotch, that woman is dead. One imagines the trope develops as an inverted negation of what the female Bermuda triangle is known for, and what remains even today a miraculously odd thing, giving birth, so if a birthing female is exposed, that represents extreme vulnerability, and, situated there, polaritywise, death, so she exposes her crotch here, quickly, something you likely would not even have seen at a theater, but there she is, fully shown
so the question is, why is she exonerated? why is she spared the ruthless logic of the trope? The answer is coming. She has stripped bare a few times already here, she has told him, yes, there was a child, yes, she had it, in both cases, however, it was almost unreal. Now, there is one more thing. as she situates, she quickly fidgets to get back up. She explains too why she chose to seek the cover of nuns, the climate and the place, Virginia, it was not conducive to taking care of unwed mothers, so she went into the care of the church, talking about it as if an effacement as well. and then she reveals the whole thing, she lost her virginity when she was sixteen, that sex act resulted in a pregnancy, she had a baby, as she tells this, she moves about. Then uncovers herself all over again, recounting of her recovery, and that the baby is lost, all that she suffered from that mistake, then she jumps up to go back to the window, slips on a robe, all of this in front of him, and us, for us to then consider her in all her innocent beauty, mid 70s, half way between Sissy Spacek and Cheyrl Tiegs style
clean and sweet and sexy, not porno sexy (though today porno does work with these features, become a trope, but back then, no)
she gets up to put a robe on. Why? because she needs, now, a bit of cover, this part is going to be hard to reveal. This little gesture reminds me of when Fate Dunaway is in bed with Nicholson in Chinatown and getting up, nude, when he mentions that he knows and met her father, she immediately pulls her hands and crosses them over her breasts, a primal gesture of protection, this is what it means here too. She sort of says that she went to the sisters because they had more tact. This also implies that they were more likely to believe what was happening, but she does not say this. It is interesting, subtle. But then she lays it on him. He told her that there was some crazy theory that they had to abide to in their marriage, no sex, until he figured it out. He did not tell her what it was, she waited, she did her part, she is now calling in the debt, and then she comes back to bed, and, telling the whole thing, and the WHOLE thing
she asks him to now believe something very difficult to believe,
and that is that, the bombshell, she did not actually have sex with the boy, at sixteen, there was no sex involved
everybody of course tortured her but she did not in the end know who the father was, and, in fact, what she is really saying is, she did not know if there WAS a father. I think she is even saying that her hymen remained intact, her virginity was NOT violated or taken from her, the child was born, somehow, without compromising her virginity, and this, this miracle she believes, clearly, part of her charm and mystique then, but also a certain airy superpower, and he is asking him to believe it too, so things will be even between them
and THAT is why she can show her crotch in this confession, and she will not die as a result of the trope. Her crotch is not the birthing place (I am not talking about woman who are or are not mothers, just general cultural maternal symbolism), she is exempt, she gets a pass, she did not bring life, technically, so being stripped bare down to the bare fact of that will not result in death. Kind of amazing, if true, entirely unconscious I would think, he is delighted, of course, nothing like a superpower wife, cue the impressionism. They hug, over the truth, her truth, his truth.
then she has a few more things to say. Mentioning a problem that Rahv brought up earlier, it seemed like a dream
this means that, if you look under the hood of the movie, scientific direct transmission of images into the brain, which still at this point only seem to the brain like a dream, the prototype experience of that zapping would seem to allow of the same problem in conceptualizing all body function. So, the primal example of such zapping would be the ray of light that penetrated Mary’s womb in Annunciation images, and she is saying, or reading back, the fact that it all seemed unreal, that is, as the voice heard inside Mary’s head, to which she answers, the whole exchange rendered in miracle images in the Renaissance by backwards writing, that is, effacement, a representation of invisibility. and then too the trembling unreality of it all, captured in Rosseti’s Ecce Ancilla
then she wraps it up that something about the whole thing, the pregnancy, the adoption, the loss of contact with her, the whole thing had this unreal self-erasing quality that left no mark on her, actually
and she goes to blue
this whole thing, then, this whole summary scene, which I think is, vis a vis giving nudity an almost spiritual relational purpose throughout, step by step, it is almost like the reverse of an annunciation scene, in which she asks him to believe that, in fact, he is right, she is the second virgin mother, her child IS the new messiah, if you follow the logic, and that’s that, though it is curious that at the very end of it the movie itself blinks at her, and wonders, cut.
But, obviously, a sci fi movie that makes use of the virgin birth as the primary tool of the science, I’m in.
It is curious, the short careers of scream queens, maybe they quit so soon because of sexual offense, but in this case it is almost as if Tidwell had to erase the memory of her Playboy layout with a counter image of how female bodies really live and ought to be in the world, free of the corny clichés of photography objectification, which still, by the way, live on.
So, interesting. I can in this scene detect no objectification of the female body. Like Romero in some of his movies, the scene evinces an attitude of easy acceptance of the everyday nudity of living in the company of a beautiful woman. Though there is a bit of admiring wonder at the charisma and healthy sex appeal that just radiates from her body, it is all shown in an entirely liberal-ideal way of thinking this is a way of living. It turns out it is also a symbol of her effacement as a merely bodied being, acknowledging that a miracle happened in her life, but she has chosen to think it unreal. It is a goddess stance. Indeed, it was a common remark made by women in the 70s , who had only come of age then, and did not live through the earth mother hippie 60s as grown up women, that they would have no problem going around nude everyday all the time in everything, it just felt to them, in the eden of the naturalness, to be a natural state of woman (again, Tidwell pinging on memories). (I had another friend, an Irish catholic girl I forget, who detailed why the only type of man she can love is a “fallen ange!”) As a scene it all but renders her, even in her nudity, even having had a child, on completed her prophetic duties almost as if without even experiencing it, it renders her immaculate, pure, perfectly natural, thus culminating the strange drive of the researchers after the perfect MPP, and finding it in the Virgin Mary, finding it again in a young woman, born in 1953, so 22 in 1975, who had a child in 1969, so that in her entirely liberal attitude she only confirms that, indeed, she still has it, that maximum zodiacal potential (I will also mention that when artist Titus Kaphar made use of the word potential to explain his glass sculptures at Jack Shainmen gallery in 2018, the implication was that the work was made in a state of becoming, in prototype space, before the bifurcation of the sexes into binary camps, this, I think, applies here too, as Kate, it is learned, now, does live in a prototype state, as if a saint, where everything she does is erased as lived, leaving her to die one day entirely cleansed of any of her human failings. It might be by coming in contact with this type of woman in the mid1970s that some Actaeon creatures of the day found in sex an instantly erasing magic slate quality that made it impossible to remember particular sex acts or events, it might be in this effusion, in fact, the sexual revolution began to fade away. In any case, wonderful performance.
And, then, there is the coda, she dissolves, another woman comes up
it is a seven year old girl in Central Park in NYC (the year I first came to town as an adult, four years from my moving there),
and, with a bit of sour taste in terms of the movie’s choice of villainous ethnicity and the later fate of WTC NYC, 1971-2001, it seems that Kajerste, the evil one, already has his eye on her, and will, no doubt, want to wipe out the power that her supernatural nature implies, to be continued.
but, at this point, he does not have the symbol, there is some doubt who he is, in fact. That said, the movie ends with a sort of excess of loose ends, because the rational mind does not see associations that overlap to construe final meaning. But, then, one final encounter. Glickenhaus was reported to have said there was too much talking in the movie because he did not know how to make movies. But, inadvertently, the “waiting” in the movie, the restraint and hesitation, before some mystery, it makes of it all a “vigil” in the classic sense, a night-long prayer before battle or fateful encounter (see wiki page), and as a vigil the movie sort of dreams with all sorts of images much in the manner of a real vigil.
The last scene is a sort of vigil too, and then her last appearance, bespeaks an unclear aftermath, she has left the world something, and is now passing the torch to it, a “gentle whirring”
now, to complete the picture, I also believe that vigil keeping frees the half-asleep mind, to then upon assuming the Raven’s Gate position, see things. After seeing the movie, that night, I was up and down, but one time I returned to sleep, I saw in my vigilogogic state, a whole sky of brightness, a blue dot from the light reflecting off the page of a book
and that then, I think, sparked a particular dream formation, which I posted about for the record, this morning
“So, this morning, four AM, sit up and write something down, then return to sleep. I am at anoutdoor art exhibit and I see a work of art, which is the curved back of an old wooden schoolroom chair turned upside down with a blue swipe, possibly pareidolic, brushed on it, I express interest, the artist starts in, then she’s like, have you looked around? and, second sketch, the whole viaduct all around then leading up into an upper court has what appears to be a landscape mural torn from an old restaurant but upside down, the figures repainted over as angels, then…a dream formation I call the Morning Storm happens, eight consecutive episodes in which she finds me a place to live, takes me out to things, have adventures, become a couple, usually this kind of dream run, which I drop in and out of over a few hours, ends with “upside down insomnia” because I wake up thinking about every problem thinking about which causes insomnia but I have an answer to every single problem; and, then, this also happens magically, it’s actually storming outside! the Morning Storm, it’s also a “Sunday Morning dream” because I don’t know what day it is. This dream formation, entirely positive, is rare with me, 3 times a year max, so…I listen*.
and then, it is true, a series of dreams, had because I repeatedly went to sleep, woke up, then was able to go to sleep again, and return to the same place (so a characteristic of the “Dunk Tank” phemonenon). and then I woke up to, having all but experienced lightning in my sleeping brain, lightning, and a storm
and this was uncanny, because in my morning scrolling, I was struck by the stage managing of the Afghanistan finale, we magically terminate, poof, and I knew what the image was immediately. On the front page of the New York Times, a photograph, August 31
which looked uncannily close to Elsheimer’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1608), the first rendering of the Milky Way, it is said, in art.
and this is what a high of “synchroetherrhoe” (everyhing in the ether flowing together all at once) feels like, in the rush of images created by the symbols being fed into a bespeaking of The Astrologer, as a sort of clearing house, which also makes me wonder if the movie as a whole was unconsciously modelled on a Morning Storm dream form, suffering from a kind of insomnia which was actually a form of sleep.
Kate is then shown by the fireplace, as if forged by it, determined to make herself look as hot as possible, to be unrefusable this time, note, please, her unbra’d breasts pointing through
then she goes in for a big kiss, he gives it to her
but they immediately pass by each other
But then it is precisely because Kate’s role is so cryptic that it appeals to me. What IS she doing in the movie? What clues do we get that she is somehow part of all this? We now come home, to see her having got all dressed up, and set up a dip in front of a painting of…a Black Sun,
there are also two interesting sculptures at her gateway, a head, maybe his, and a gate, hers, is she a gate?
she sits, nervously waiting to spring something on the hub
when he comes home, she is excited, eager to please, the fire is on, dinner in front of the fire, the whole bit, he is like “shit”,
then we see what I have called a spacey-hippie painting, with a sort of spiritual message, Hilma af Klimt, 1975, but for her, bespeaking her, it means that between hell and heaven she is the embodiment of the Black Sun, far sentience, this tells me for the first time that whatever it is about her that is causing this curious behavior between them, of which we only see the negative space, and are as confused as she is, it comes from far out in the darkness of the universe, it is a big, primal secret
then when he quickly says, no thanks, I’m exhausted, I’m going to bed, she is crestfallen, meaning that the picture, in picture play, speaks to her sudden depression, and being caught in a black out too, so an incursion of the Black Sun into their life
but then she regroups and tries again, comes in to the bedroom, saying we have to talk, he is untying himself, it seems that they have an impressionist still life at the foot of their bed,
and this time the rebuff comes with but a glimpse at a painting I very much wanted to see more of, but this is all we get, casting their marriage into a haunted place, like a country road in winter, ice cold, for some reason unspecified
on my rendering of this scene, redreaming it, her effaced self is expressed by the unshown picture, she is shown profiled by the empty road, as if to say that her breasts, exposed in cleavage here, are yearning to be touched
she then actually accosts him, begging him to fuck her, but he wont
when I redream these scenes, it is to work them out better so that the agency that is blocked can come out, but then she is upset so comes at him, but has to pass through the mirror
this struck me as odd, the arrangement of things around their bed
what this means is that she comes round from the Foot to the Side of the bed, and through a mis an abyme consisting of a mirror casting the primrose path of the other painting out into an eternal dimension, the end result of her accosting him will be that they lay perpendicular to the bed, across it, this is a demonic position in bedding, and usually the site of pornographic encounters, not love, for that reason, thinking ahead to the conclusion of how this might’ve gone in a more realist contemporary movie today, as why would there be any question if she is a virgin still, just give her the test, with a finger, so that bruteness means that as she comes through the nexus of emptiness and manipulation, she is possessed by a demon from Demon Lover (1975), which I watched in double feature with this yesterday, and it is by that demon,
like the demon-size familiar in Demon Lover
their entanglement or angel wrestling would involve a more brutal act, a finger to check if she was a virgin (cryptically, I will concede that all this reverberates off some non-movie memories, weird, as always that the formation is still in my mind). I will also mention at this point that even though she only made like three movies total, Monica Tidwell was known in 1975 still, no doubt, for her Playboy layout in 1973 (like the third time I have encountered this particular connection in the bowels of 70s horror), so she had showed herself off, and, it will be noticed, at 19, she was a redhead from Louisiana, who had what was called at the time, saddled with some legend of hotness based on color and stereotype of crazy redheads, a firecrotch,
which, though she had ample breasts, seemed to be her primary profile (the theory being that all pinups had one outstanding feature which was then by “gore” of form of the star-shape of the body put front and center and everything else conforms to it
then, too, a few years later, ending her acting career, she again played a strangely unreal prostitute
who strips nude for her client right there up close on the couch, side by side, only for them to attack him as a group, the ambient sleep demon attack shot
at which point in viewing time hurricane Ida wobbled east toward New Orleans
all of which indicates that in the spaz nature of the nexus between viewer and movie itself there is a gap as in the actual movie her plea, when he backs off, recoils only to the point where they have, she has known in advance, he told her, that there was an issue that needed to be worked out, and they are working on it, as indicated by the scene ending with a heart to heart on a bedspread that loozy whoosy oceanic, perhaps a foreshadow of their consummation at the end
so, she does have, in my view, a ”demonic” (peculiar psychodynamic) profile, but the movie kept things under wraps to make the ending a surprise.
There are other paintings in the offices and the offices are in a classic brutalist structure of the time, bespeaking the fear that institutional scientific life was getting carried away, and problematic, mad
when he has to go on another mission, spying on Kajerste, the charismatic one goes further with the theory, by what they learn exploring these templates we will be able to go into the mind and zap specific places to help those with them overcome disabilities, which, in fact, is happening.
the idea seems to be that if they identify the zodiacal profile of a person, they can then, since they know of the difference between it and others, enhance it by sending video and images directly into the mind, to change the profile, and this would be a practice way to exploit the fact that as he said earlier we have found the key to the mind, But, then, she has an interesting objection,
so far the human brain, if you zap the horion in it, to improve it, it reads those zaps not as reality, but as dreams, which means that its impulse would be to keep the results inside the head, as fantasy, and leave it at that, shortcircuting the attempt to use the profiles to improve human social life. So, a problem. This means that in the current state of sleep science in 1975 they were not yet aware of the fact that, in fact, if one has a REM Sleep disorder, and engages in a parasomiac routine, like getting up in the middle of the night to eat, see Hobson, that disorder would seem to be a gateway to enacting a profile change in lived life, if asleep. So, interesting, the point being it is searching for an ultimate solution, 70s style.
Nonetheless, and with this doubt, they go ahead with it. The first plan was to make a face mask of Kajerste then put an imposture in his place
but now it seems like Rahv has decided to go into the camp herself, the plan is to film a fake version of his effect on his followers, on videotape, to what end, I am not sure
then sneak into his camp late at night, and attach a censor or implant something, without waking Kajerste, gluing it to his head, so that it goes directly into his brain, I guess the idea is to reprogram him to not do what he does
so, basically, this is a form of dream manipulation? planting a sent dream directly into the head, to change his nature? she gets quite detailed, he will be tranquilized; the videotape, with the fake knife will be put directly into his brain, for him to act by it, he will then, upon next waking, confuse these events with the real events
that will cause him to be killed, I think. So, basically, this is a variation on mind control Manchurian Candidate style assassination, to end Kajerste’s reign of terror in India.
The problem is, she does not seem to know what Kajerste is really interested in, the child waiting to be born, that is, if Kate had a child, and she was the Virgin Mary reincarnate, in form of her ZP, then that child, it stands to reason, would be a kind of messiah, so there is a touch of The Omen series here too. But because she miscalculates what Kajerste’s mind is fixated on, it seems none of her hypnosis or arts work, he is awake
the figure on his forehead seems to be a Savoy demon figure, that is, his mind is trying to approach the state of Epigogy, when in a tingle he can see who the savior is, so I will call this, in passing, a Savoy Demon depiction of a frontal-effacing demon who lets his epagogic sense expand out past her reason to forsee any monstrous plan coming at him, so she is cooked quick, she gets the dagger and the poison, for real, dead.
it is unclear why all this is here, it might just be narrative fill, as happens in movies, or it could be an inversion of the pact that Alexei and Kate have made, to not have sex until he knows for sure if she is the virgin birther, I mean, clearly, the congressman wanted to fuck her, he is very attracted to her, he is lead down the primrose path, for her, doing it for her;but it ends up with him getting it too. So, cautionary version of the same, in between.
Then Rhav goes into Karjerste’s camp, in a midnight raid, an unexpected dimension of her character, the plan is to zap him with tranquilizer and then implant him with something so that they can control him, not vice versa, I think, unfortunately she is stabbed to death
there is also, we find out, some odd aspect in the bodies attacked by Kajerste, in the previously seen effort to impress himself onto them,
this obviously relates to the Achilles Heel, which resulted from a mother’s attempt to make her son immortal, by dipping him in Lethe, but having to keep hold of him by the heel (so, a form with something in common with extreme body magic)
It might also relate to the baculus viatoris, which Byzantine angels made use of for landing, to signify by the wobble of the landing that they are supernatural beings getting their bearing on natural earth
but then, we see that Alexei has a dream, he is maybe worrying about Rhav, and if it is going to go well, but it manifests in his mind, as worrying about Kate,
first he sees those feet of the corpse they examined today, the fact that Kajerste skewers his followers like ducks by a hunter on a hook accentuates his brutality
then he sees her in the camp, that is, this is Kajerste’s camp, but in dream form, and he envisions Kate being there, worrying him
and now she is the one who is nude with Kajerste, it is unclear. Upon first appearance nude, however, very briefly, Tidwell’s body struck me as unformed, and almost octopuslike in its fleshy excess, her breasts swinging,
he thinks back to the wrestling match they had, which continues to worry him, will she hang on til they find out, or will she, out of frustration, run off to him
he imagines, hearing her again beg him to make love to her, Kajerste doing the same, ceremonially
but, my demon formulation of the original wrestle wasn’t half off, he immediately superimposes over that a horrific image of a corpse bloating by floating in a river for a while, the breasts having hardened by rigor mortis into awful tumorous forms, so he imagines Kajerste’s touch of her as a touch of death,
then when she gets the body fusing experience, she is back in a gown but
except she is laughing, damn, so she is dead to me
but, then, in this dream, which is a pretty regular montage style dream, but with a not bad symbolic level glass onion formulation of thinking going on under it, it seems that unlike Rhav Alexei knows what Kajerste is really interested in, he sees the pose, with the white Savoy demon or angel representing the desired messiah for him to use as an antichrist on his forehead
and, surprisingly, because I did not see it the first time, nor would I have known what it meant, there is a flash, just one second, the child born, which Kajerste has mentioned
Now, I suppose to indicate the complexities involved in Alexei being in India, coming back in the rain, being told the correct date of Kajerste s birth, which by local knowledge confirms his evil ZP
and her being way back in NYC, she then returns to the card reader, but the card reader suspects that the young man who works for her is now working for Kajerste so tells her to never come back to her, it is no longer safe, a sort tenuous linkage to the plot (but notice, the threat of death given validity by a memorial aegis of two who died, the Kennedys
then Kate makes apologies for the young man, but the lamp over her head means she is acting blind, she does not know what’s up, that she would in any way be in jeopardy (I guess she would be, if they thought she knew where the child was),
then there’s a great sort of mind wipe shot, the sort of thing that says, this is NYC, in broad daylight, nothing is going to happen
looks to me like the Village
but then, and this part of the story is played with very slightly, the movie does slice its plot points thin, it seems that in fact upstate New York Karjerste has gathered about him a following, and she is kidnapped and driven up to a gathering, it looks like of evil hippies, shadow hippies, moonies, cultists, all the post-hippie post-60s washouts that characterized the times, she is a bit upset
but, then surprise, it turns out that Kajerste has, somehow, got from Delhi to Catskill, lickety split, he is there, in the USofA
at which point, the soothsayer sneaks in and stabs him
clearing the camp, somewhat confusedly, leaving Kate there alone, this also a bit montagey
at this point, Alexei is back, and we return to headquarters, a rather odd shot,
it is only at this point that we begin to see these strange paintings all over the headquarters. They seem to speak to the crisis of the moment. In this one, as it seems Alexei talks with the plant who brought Kate up to the camp? this one
it seems to represent the psychomachia for Kate’s soul going on at this point, she would be the sunflower figure on the left, the threat to her is on the right, what’s in the middle, as yet unclear (the child, a manifestation of the Savoy demon figure on Kajerste’s forehead. It does feel quite scirpographic, something like this. If the sleeps of Rhav and the congressman, and their mission, can be thought of as the first nightmare of the movie; then Alexei’s nightmare of worry about Kate, and it sort of being acted out, is the second nightmare, and seeing her nude in his control is seeing of the Umwelt of the story, that is, he understands she is his guiding star, but might still be the miracle ZPer virgin birther, then, the rainstorm is a script sign of the luor-orana, that is, the crossing over, Kajerste met in person by Kate is the encounter with TIND-TIRH, and that then sparks the turbulence (see previous post on Alien for more precise working out, the rising up in the turbulence of Savoy, to then introduce the arrival of the Epigogic demon, who oversees the monstrous place of sacrifice etc. Something like this
and I say “something like this” because I think Glickenhaus was at best operating by instinct almost unconsciously and since this inner psychodynamic progression was not nearly ready to be discerned, it was somehow picked out of the plot of the book, and given sight in a script of shorthand sequences, for the demons in progression here too to represent the passage. As a result, then, too, the paintings, whoever might’ve done them, and how out of it they were in 1977. we leap out into the crisis stage, I suppose the headquarters represents his movement to that stance, So that this painting
is a freeze frame version, that is, a rationalistic overcast, onto the psychodynamics that might be rumbling under it, to depict the psychomachia of the cenote, Kate displaced from fata morgana to the place of sacrifice, Kajerste precipitating as the cenote itself
and then the strange white form in the center
a precipitation of the white figure on Kajerste’s forehead
by way of Kate’s unawareness of the problem
and her appearing before him for real, the fear that raises
into the terrain of the place of sacrifice at the top of the cenote, which is why things are vacant here
and that is, his real target, which Rhav missed.
This whole trip up to rescue Kate is a bit confusing, but, again, I now argue that the images are meant to bring her in contact with Kajerste, but in a dreamlike way, to alert her to the danger, so, there is the path to danger, the road
then, next morning, it is all over, she is left sleeping in white on a bench
in abandoned camp, this is a dream image, her presence on the place of sacrifice, foreshadowing that the real interest is in her child
then the deus ex machina rescue
and reunited.
Here for decoration but as stage directing devices to move things along. Each shot we get of them sets up a step in a process, so this first view of a large painting set over a couch proposes that there has formed a vector of threat and that by a red slithering form from below, something demonic is afoot
there was another picture on the other side of the office, and the figure on the right seems to suggest a watching figure, with something going on
then we go back to the couch, and the major statement painting over it, and as the red demon form comes up there is, in fact, a central core or shaft, and it is blue, or in pain, but also, note, vaginal, so it is a symbol of the female, there is also a pink form, Kate’s body, or Kate’s child, spilling out of as if the womb of Kate, and then this purely symbolic as it were prelude to the conception of birth is added to by a figure on the right
which seems to be a Madonna figure, echoing on the Madonna in the card reader’s office
and so predicting, with the houseplant as warning, that the next phase of reincarnation is happening.
with mention of cryptophasia and Caroline Kent; Hoare Albert and the Whale; Thomas Mann Doctor Faustus.
Apparently, James Glickenhaus thought this, his only movie, The Astrologer (1975), was a terrible movie, so happily let it disappear. Nor is this the Craig Denny cult lost film, The Astrologer (197SIX), but, here again, I have a different standard for judging things, and found a great deal of interest in this 70s movie. Once again, too, it sometimes happens that movies made by somewhat amateurish directors have a chance to let in some raw material from a time that more polished directors might block, so that is of interest too.
The first thing to consider here is that, once again, a 70s movie seeks to find an essence or truth that can solve the problems of earth, but in an all-or-nothing matter that in the end serves only to dissipate that force in the real culture outside the movie. That is, in the 70s, such explosive, or all-or-nothing constructs served to provide compensation forms for a culture quickly moving away from the 60s, if not demonizing it, and thus replace real activism with fictional hope in the context of a movie (the irony of this expansive pulse in movies being that it is the opposite trajectory from the recoil that brought forth from the ruins of modernist binaries postmodernism, a word I began to make use of as a undergrad at this time). This is another example. Here, the spy works for InterZod, which is a secret company funded by the US government, which crunches numbers on birth charts, or zodiac charts, to determine people’s zodiacal potential, in effect, the fingerprint of their potential in terms of in the future doing evil or good. Very much like the power to make dreams real in The Lathe of Heaven, then, this movie posits that one’s birth, and the alignment of the stars at that moment, interjects into one a personality potential to do either good or bad in the world. This is an extreme example of essentialism, 70s style, which I argue is in compensation for lost power on the streets and in the culture as a whole. A good part of the movie is based on the fact that they found that in 1949 a man was born in India with an appallingly negative chart, so much so they suspect he will become a terrorist and cause mayhem to mankind, so they try to locate him, Kajerste, and kill him. Fine, but much more interesting is an apparent subplot, which turns out to also be part of the spy’s work, and a project, and the flip side of the search for perfect potential.
Things start out with a sort of wink toward conspiracy theory, and the glamor of the belief that the true power in the world is secret, and happens behind the scenes where the strings are pulled. We enter in by way of some pictures of the men on the moon, 1969
we focus on the shield of the man on the moon
and then it closes in, this because in that conspiracy theory universe people have found things to dispute or wonder about in this inadvertent unintended picture, always a trope in conspiracy theory world
the movie has nothing to do with this, or the moon, but it is here to simply suggest that what is under discussion is likely just as incredible, and un-believable.
Then we are talking about a biblical prophecy
and we see a moon man as if dissolve in a kind of halo, wondering, the second coming, they say, is ten days away, who will it be? and we come in on Washington DC
I am not particularly interested in this part of the movie, but will pick up on it as I stroll through. More interesting, in terms of what I guess I have to call unintentional movie making, is that there is a subplot focused on Kate, the spy’s wife, who is struggling in her new marriage. We see her come by a tarot card reader
she has become so distraught, and therefore passive, that when the reader chastises her for giving her false information about her birth date and hour, she tells her to go behind the screen, take your clothes off, and then we try to get at the truth, and…she does.
This is an interesting shot, from behind the dressing screen (which is odd, it being there). On the right, Jesus, on the left, a kind of rug that was popular at the time, you can see one in Five Easy Pieces, which featured both JFK and RFK as the bookends of the 60s which are fading away fast.
I noted of this on a post, as it is shown better when the spy comes back to ask the reader what she was up to with his wife
indeed, one reason I might be reluctant to let Sirhan Sirhan go (it was in the news) go is that his part in history was epochal and era-changing, he changed to course of history, making the assassination a “prophetic” event
“He’s an old man now, I suppose, but still a twinge. He changed American history. What if? what if Bobby had defeated Nixon in 1968*? what if Nixon-Hoover hadn’t’ve declared war on the war at home? what if there was no Watergate? what if the neutralized old left hadn’t of stepped aside, exhausted, for southern centrist Democrats for the whole next generation? what if Edward Kennedy had not had to say farewell to his aspirations (“the dream will never die”) in 1980? what if the Reagan reaction had not happened? what if, forty years later, we were not still stuck in poison politics gridlock? WHAT IF? the man altered the course of American history, but go thee thither, fade away”.
The fact of this coincidence is extra-cinematic, and cultural, in the sense that it is part of a culture of the streaming time, which nonetheless somehow echoes a bespeaking of 2021, as in 1975. But it is also a hint that the reader takes her work very seriously, and her ethos is that one’s birth chart is important. She also seems to worship personages in history who maybe had terrific or troubling birth charts, case studies proving the importance of her craft. Since both Kennedys were killed, the bookending of that, making of them the martyrs of a time stolen of its what if? potential, is an icon which proves her point, destiny counts. As such, JFK and RFK each, and then together JFKRFK becomes as if a DNA strand, a counterpart to a birth chart, twinned, as if, to suggest an evil fate, which nonetheless bespeaks the fact that such a strand of omens or chart positions can become one’s destiny. Thus, this movie places the DNA strand of selfhood, in this case one’s birth chart, and what they call, crunching it numerically, as one’s “zodiacal potential,” is the key to one self, and in effect one’s soul. Still more importantly, they exploit it, as they take it from theory into practice, and the practice part is if they find a person with a truly terrible chart, predicting that this person will unleash chaos on the world, they will want to take him out; and, likewise, they want to find and cultivate those who have an excellent chart, as more of them, people with high positive potential, could save the world. Much in the manner of contemporary CRT, a theory is immediately applied to spying in an entirely spurious way, but nonetheless bespeaking the effect of 70s movies to take everything to its end. So, this is important.
The seer, who is Indian, has a Virgin Mary behind her, and that will factor in, in the final answer
we see a glimpse of nudity, Kate seems to have no problem stripping in the room with complete strangers, this sort of surprises one, and goes against the grain of her personality as she generally presents herself. Her one nipple is hard, however, indicating that she might be turned on by this, as again she is not having sex with her husband, that is why she is here
we also see, however, she is in the real world, so there is a peeper
then the movie blacks this out, to move on
to then give us a computer-style squareletter shift, too many of these.
This fade out is curious, somehow. The fade out picture could be construed as another type of picturing, we’ll see.
I also picked up, in second viewing, that Rhav has a middle name, Reborne, or “reborn’, (this is the only movie that Alison McCarthy appeared in, I quite like her, another little detail of uniqueness)
Next up, she gets her husband worried. First, he is surprised that she agreed to take off her clothes. Why he is so antsy about that, at this point, we do not know. Also, he is concerned that by protesting that the facts of her life were false, the reader risked giving away their secret, which we also do not know at this time. The distance between them, and that there is something going on that we or she does not know about, is indicated by a strange primitive celt statue set on the floor between them.
In fact, it is a modern statue, my guess, and since it is a nude it is a sign indicating that he cant believe she got naked for a stranger, or outside of the house, that he would be interested in that, but, for some reason, he can’t be, and it also could serve as a Woman at the Fountain statue to bespeak the darker potential of her sexuality, which goes beyond the confines of the marriage as it is currently playing out, unconsummated.
In Pretty Maids All in a Row, the book, I found a good deal of strange verbiage describing the influence that being close to women had on men, in the words of the time. Pollini talks of the “warm form” of the woman, and her form in general, and that the form emits an energy, which has a sexual element, but is really a life force, a general charisma that makes one want to be around them. In the language of film this is not objectification, but it is figuralization, that is, she is seen here not as a real woman but as a figure of a sense epitomized by the statue and thus more a spirit, a dream guide, a dream figure, put in the movie to movie things here or there, without the complications of her real humanity. In this scene, it appears that Kate is this kind of figure.
The same thing happens in the next sequence. A congressman meets the spy and then is invited by him back to their private jet flying to Washington DC immediately. At this point, aboard, they meet a colleague, a very pretty and vivacious woman, Rhav, who also seems to have a charisma that outsizes her actual role in the movie. She has about her a love at first sight aspect. As such, she too is a figure, a dream guide, and not “real” in the movie. That is what accounts for the effusion of her aura off screen to the viewer. And her charisma is expressed even if all buttoned up, and completely professional. She cannot help it, because she is not “real.”
though it is amusing that when she retreats to the bedroom, and it is dormitory style, she has no trouble stripping and being found later by the congressman all spread out, deepening his smitten state.
Kate is also repeatedly made to feel marginal and not real by not being entirely filled in on what is going on. The host at this invitation to dinner, which is quaint, is unaware that she is not in the know, so when he talks of the zodiacal potential chart of the Virgin Mary, when Kate goes to the restroom, he has to be scolded, he said too much
The reference to the Virgin Mary is curious, he sounds like a mad science, if he thinks he can somehow capture that profile again. The science gets weirder at the office. Not only do they crunch the numbers and learn the zodiacal potential profile of every human being on planet earth, but they also isolate those which are outside the norm, evil or good, and those they seek out in practice to exploit. He sees this ZP graph as a sort of DNA string, the essence of a person, a key which they can eavesdrop on and exploit. The idea is reinforced by a strange picture on the office wall, in an office, some office art, in the shot
it is a variant on Durer’s Adam and Eve, a picture of the origin of human life, but of two women.
It is also strange that Kajerste practices a kind of sex magic by firepit, and what he does is pose as the Renaissance man, then ask the subject, here a woman, to strip and stand before him, point to point
and then it is as if he has “intercourse” with her by means of a kind of spirit formation of paralleling of bodies as he presses her over, we never see her breasts
and with sighting of a severed head, I think, on a post, this must entail some method of transferring of his power to her, to make her an acolyte
and then it goes black out
it strikes me as yet another example of body magic involving twisties, that is, like the extreme crucifix made by witches to be swum tying big toes to thumbs opposite handedly, that the being an extreme full-body sign of the cross, all over apotropaia, I call this extreme body magic
it could also be construed as an example of the three-stars of Orion’s belt translated into the ZP symbol
but as they are practicing 70s not 60s mad science, they have lost faith that a progeny of man and woman can result in a high zodiacal potential, in fact, almost in the manner of a neo-eugenicist, he says that most people have very average profiles and no wonder they just fade into the woodwork. What he is interested in, what makes this science fundable, is that they are looking for the zodiacally privileged
this chart then exists like a key to the self, or a type of self, he says that it is incredible important that they can look into souls, by this methodology.
these prototypes, he actually calls them, can be learned and reproduced and improve the human race because they have the models
it is therefore strongly implied that normal birthed people born of man and woman are not going to have high profiles. Therefore, a purer type of sex is needed, to produce with greater average these privileged. Though we are going to find out that the means to create the absolute most privileged forms is an extrema example of parthenogenesis, unpolluted by the randomness of sexual reproduction (just like in The Wicker Man, a small culture mad for breeding), so here (in the picture) lesbianism would be seen in the 70s as an almost supernatural means of sex, which could serve to host a kind of parthenogenesis, no? We have seen (Vampire Ecstasy), that, indeed, lesbianism, yet considered a perversion at the time, was nonetheless attracting to it a rhetoric which declared it to be transcendent. It is all but pictured as supernatural. So, in an office, this is an intercessional wish picture, pointing the way to where they will have to go with this.
Again, movies scores points with one, based on current interest. Deep summer has surprised me this year, by spilling out into days after. Indeed, for fun, I have let a certain rhetoric of essence inhabit my dream theory. I argue that if you are suspended in a state of Syngogy, as a result of a second nightmare in the Eldritch formation, that second dream will entail searching for a series of breadcrumbs all of which add up to one’s “Umwelt” (Uexhull’s term), or DNA, on the basis, then, of bringing that telesmatic discovery back to consciousness, to live in a state of “white album”. I do not believe this, technically, but poetically, in dreams. Also, my interest in the sweet spot which all artists, abled or disabled, must find, from which to generate flow and power as artists, is the practical outcome of theory. This IS on my mind, as indicated in my comments on Niki de St Phalle.
I had this idea with Senga Nengudi as well, a show she did recently at the museum level. I thought it would be better served with a progressively bootstrapped presentation, in a corridor or tunnel, released bit by bit as a series of breadcrumbs, that is, as an Umwelt. Here I call this sweet spot the perischoinismus, a roped off place, often of a lightning strike, then it is also, as per my recent treatment, a “hor-izon”, a good binding. It is also my belief that disabled artists end up working in a strictly controlled binding or hor-izon in order to enhance the possibility of them operating out of that sweet spot. So, his rhetoric echoes of the moment, the belief that one’s star chart is all but DNA, deterministically then expressed in the world, and that then exploited in a suspect practice.
For my cult, of course, that Umwelt would have to be part of my being as a sequitur, second born twin. And so I was surprised again, WHILE WATCHING THIS MOVIE, to find mention of Caroline Kent at MCA, and that she paints abstractions and sets them in milieu or incubative spaces in ways to enhance cryptophasic communication, because she is an identical twin. It would follow that for an identical twin, one’s Umwelt, or hor-ion, the special formula or equation that is one’s sweet spot, would have to be framed by twinship, and then involve cryptophasia. It then surprised me when making a quick post on her work, some other thoughts occurred to me.
Text, “Excitingly strange doings as Caroline Kent at MCA Chicago expands the scenographic to explore cryptophasic communication between identical twins. Another identical twin artist! three things wow this younger identical twin: I think I’ve been intrigued by her sculptures before, but here I see they function as what I call Cassandra statues, palladial warnings maybe unlistened too; in Victoria/Veronica not here but in 2020 show the presence of houseplants as whisper forms makes me wonder if my houseplant trope fascination have something to do with my position cryptophasically and a twin thing; I have NEVER seen a painting talk to and sotto voce through the wall it’s on before like this, ever, so have to work that out. I can’t tell if Kent is the older or younger so at present I assume she’s just trying to grasp the overall wyrd doubleness of crypto communication, which has always confused outside observers, we don’t seem to communicate at all but everything that needs to be said is, sort of. Up to April, 2022”.
“The green is at MCA, Chicago, others, Victoria/Veronica, is from 2020 (personal response, could my obsession with the “true image” (veron icon) be a twin thing? And my ongoing parsing of all the ways between the gates of horn (truth) and ivory (deception) dream statues communicate too? (Kent’s use of the word “shorthand” also reminds me, unthought of in years, I was so fascinated by my mother knowing secretarial shorthand, which I assume is obsolete now, that as a teen I taught myself how to do it. So, for these, I think I’ve been intrigued by her sculptures before, but here I see they function as what I call Cassandra statues, palladial warnings maybe unlistened too; it looks to me like her sculptures are like herms, which negotiate the crypto communication”,
is, in fact, my interest in Houseplants, and alibi formations in general, a twin thing? That is, does my sensitivity to them indicate my need to understand their unspoken communication. Is it a special sequitur skill to be able to read tropes? Certainly, my bespeaking movies, that is, other people’s work, and ferreting out by tea leaf reading hidden tacit meaning of them IS a sequitur skill. In the same way, when she mentions Veronica, is my need to map out where all these types of statues vis a vis truth are located, in a chain of “translatio” from the veron icon, to multiple copies of it, then the cultus developing, is my drive to map this out ALSO a twin thing? that is, a need to be able to interpret unspoken communication. This strongly suggests, for now, that it is in sequitur-POV cryptophasia that my ho-rion lies, and where also lies the Orion’s belt of my deepest inosculation.
I mention often the scene in Constantine (2005). So, her cryptophasia was letters fingered transparently on blown breath spots on windows. Mine would be, I have decided, the secret meanings embedded in maps, based on the game we used to play with those, then. So, for example, a map
I would then leave a message to him, by way of playing the war game, something like this,
then in a progressive map, as the next action took place, and THERE, in the battle results, I would hide a bit of information, whatever it might be (in fact I do not have much in the way of this mental capacity anymore), and that would be a clue, leading to a place, that would go on and so and on, and THAT would map out, in the medium of our cryptophasia, my message from beyond. or something like this
Thus, an Umwelt is recorded and used to convey messages. And that cryptophasic sequitur communication would be the hor-ion of my soul and deepest truth. Then, however, getting back to the movie, we see a strange crypto form, in a painting, apparently
the image had an uncanny quality as it seemed to relate to an image in a book I was reading in the time, the geometric form in Durer’s Melancholia, this from Hoare, as the image was made use of on the original cover of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus
and he argues that the form on the cover is the geometric device in Melancholia
with the elements of the riddle, hourglass, scales and musical notes fed in, like this
meaning that this image is a transposed involution of the above
containing in it, fate, harmony and justice, it strikes me that whoever designed the cover thought that the “building” behind the paralyzed angel is in fact the roving Rosicrucian college, not a building, but an allegorical vehicle trundling across the land of Germany
with an occult meaning. And, then, too, with three elements, all of it then transposed to a geometric star form, this is also a transposition of my concept of the horion or Umwelt or Orions’ Belt of one’s go-to signature dream form, or found of creativity in one, as noted yesterday, so, stunningly weird synchoretherrhoe coincidence.
But, now, in addition to the theory of the hor-ion, and cryptophasic communication, brings me back to the strange and unique form in Kent’s show at MCA in Chicago, which I at present have no answer to
The reality of a spirit depth to this form, of course, dismissed in a hyperallergic review by the singleton who thinks his wonderful soul is all that is required to get to the meaning of things. And following from the scene in Constantine (2005) that there is, indeed, one medium of communication by which identical twins cryptophasically speak to each other (in Weisz’s case it was finger writing on the blown breath on windows, as noted) but for me I would guess it is the Map Game we played at, which means that if I left behind a message from the grave in a cryptophasic form it would have to be some sort of progressive symbolization by way of pareidola seen in steps in conquest on a certain map, that he would relate to, something like this (though I do not have a meaning now).
More proof supporting the notion that a drawing game could lead to a style of drawing, with an element of cryptophasia from the artist Kim Jones.
In other words, Jones played a drawing game in his childhood, as did I and my brother; but, then, he developed a simple system of xs and o’s into a drawing style; which would mean that in order to recover the cryptophasia of the game I would have to go back, look at the language of marks or signs made use of in old maps of that sort, from the World Book, and then abstract and recreate them, as marks as the basis of drawings. The question is, then, are Kent’s abstract forms also derived from a cryptophasic medium origin).
hen, too, the above (the Faustus cover) is a star, but not entirely, it might also be a dreidel, no?
so, the fact that all this relates to this form, in the prologue
spun out from the face of the man in the moon, then did take an ultimate form in the movie, the maximum positive zodiacal profile
More evidence that as the 70s pulled away from 60s the popular culture began to abreact despair by displacing real hope into fictional fantasies of instant totalist solutions, after watching The Astrologer (1975) in which secret organization seeks a eugenics magic bullet to building better humans and Alexei finds out from crunching birth chart-based “zodiacal profiles” data of everyone that the “maximum positive profile,” ie, perfect human prototype, appeared only twice in history, once, in the first century for a girl who would become Mary, BVM herself, and, then, a second time, in 1953 (yes, 1953! my heart skipped a beat) which leads to one of the most curious performances of the decade by one-movie-only 1973 Playboy Model Monica Tidwell* who is utterly miffed why Alexei won’t touch her but then later when they figure it out has one of the most joyful happily naked nude scenes in all of 70s indie movies!
which may be explained in the book, to be continued
and then it all bears upon Tidwell’s performance, here effaced as the ghostly road in the painting, perhaps bespeaking the mystery about her hymen
it all relates, strangely. So, right as I am watching yet another 70s movie interested in discovering a magical theriac to solve all earth’s problems, I am converging on playing with similar ideas, this adds greatly to my viewing.
Then, after Alexei gives the congressman the talk, of the privileged few
the telescope opens up, I guess it was once used to read the stars at certain star chart moments to identify who is among the elite, and thus a certain ethos of catasterism here, meaning that the special ones are also enshrined in the stars
but then this dissolves into Kate, at home, preparing for Alexei to come home. This identifies her, in the subtext, as the one with the MPP profile, strange shot with her illuminated by the opening in the observatory
Disclaimer: As I only see art virtually now, this is a thought piece and not a review.
When, when you come to the demon, approach is cautious. I believe that Altmejd or gallery staff decided to include details in the slideshow, to create the effect of an approach, and surprise, with Unicorn, this shot lets us imagine that approach from behind it, a common horror movie ploy, is plausible
then one comes around and there is something decidedly off about the head, it has become detached
but then one swings around the front, and the shocker, a full skull opening, yawning wide
this is a common play in horror. Later on, in The Unborn (2007), when Casey dreams of the footage from a mysterious film of her mother’s asylum, she comes through the guardians at the gate
to then see her mother, sitting alone, of course, in a bay, of course, and by at least three, of course, curtained, of course, windows, lost to consciousness and the world.
apprehensively she circles around
and when she gets there, she springs the trap, the maw of the dead mother opens up wide
she spills a fetus out of her (her second born twin brother Jumby)
waking her up, to then see from her window, seemingly awake, but haunted awake
the psychopomp
indeed, it is the second, syngogic dream in a three-dream formation that usually involves nightmares of a more roaming sort, but mainly to visit the demons, and encounter them one way or another. This is nicely played out, for example, in The Nun (2018). In this movie, the formation is split, or externalized, to others, so it is Fr. Burke who dreams the first haunting. This ends him up stuck buried alive in a grave in the graveyard down the hill. It is left to Sister to hear him scream, and come looking. I remarked upon first analysis how strange it is, she walking in classic shots of gown prowl through the castle, but this is how this dream goes
then she comes upon a group of nuns apparently praying in the middle of the night, a real event,
but then it turns out it is a haunting, the demon-ghost does a walk around the perimeter of the room, the nuns gone
and then shows up as “real” in the mirror
and from in there, attacks her.
this then chases her out, down the hill, into the cemetery to find Fr Burke
but she only senses him because, set up by the prowl, and then the haunting, she has one of her episodes, a dizzy-vision attack, it distorts her face, the view
and she then digs him out, just barely
thus, this second level is the place one meets the demons, and by negotiating them you decide whether it is dream or life, but it is actually, simultaneously, both. For that reason, I place these three figures, Troll, Smoking with Onself, and The Unicorn, as encounters by way of the Green Eye of a second dreamer prowling the perimeters of one’s Umwelt, to then come upon TIND-TIRH, and live in a state uncertain if this is a dream, or really happening. It sets up the steps to the final level.
In this regard, though I think it slightly misplaced in the slideshow sequence, I consider Splitting Smurf to, in fact, be an image of the daimon overseeing frozen hell. As noted, in the third dream in an eldritch formation, one now thinks one is awake, and walking out of dream. But, in fact, you are still in a state of sleep paralysis, or dysmetropsia. Neither require drugs. I experienced both elements in episodes in my twenties, as I have mentioned umpteen times. The core, and optimal, experience here is ophthchthony, that is, seeing down through the darkness to the truth shot. But, of course, it never always goes according to plan, so there are splats, leaps, bounce outs and the like here too. All elements of this phase I locate in epigogy, previously called opistogogy, because it happens behind the eyes, either through Heaven’s or Tannhauser Gate. On the intraphase vigilogogic level, this is where, if you are in pain, or in and out of consciousness, of undergoing a proning for covid, this is likely where one sees CEVs, as I noted in my response to the covid-suffered drawings by Jennifer Coates, opening tonight.
If, however, the dysmetropsia of it (and the Nun had her dysmetropsic episode, to allow her to see the darkness), you are bounced out through the gates, behind the eyes, into the ambient-epiogigic space, where I have spent so much time of late exploring. This is the zone of monsters, or extravagant imaginings, or wide spins, and deep rrhexient spins and dives, a deeply vertical space. Blake placed Antaeus at the gate, lifting Dante down
I place Altmejd’s Splitting Smurf
the difference being that while Antaeus was up top lifting Dante down to the place of sacrifice, or of the exhomophage figure, at the top of the cenote, Splitting Smurf sits below in Zudecca and his whole being, if not here a giant (perhaps some day), encompasses the entire ambient terrain, as graphed out in a scirpograph
he has four eyes because he has moved through the Tannhauser Gate, to Heaven’s Gate, he sees truth and lies. He sees consciousness, and vigilogogy-hypnagogy, syngogy and epigogy, he sees the core of mind, the adjunct spaces, the ambient and the sentient, he sees all. His pineal gland third eye is slowly splitting open, at present it looks vulvalike, he has no nose, his hands are raised in hear no evil, speak no evil, etc pose, to indicate a transmutation of sense to another level, to the seeing of the unseen, or the monstrous
he gazes at his hands because, like Antaeus, these are what he uses to manage the passage of dreamers in this zone, he has doubts if he can do it
the back of his head still shows last lingering signs of having once been consumed by the green slime of the Trump years, but now the “ice” of blue has formed all about him, making him more steady.
Altmejd has his own details, his face, from behind, looks like a mask, the back of his neck is marked SPLIT, indicating he might be a store dummy, momentarily invested with power
Altmejd might also see him as a bureacrat transformed, his pencils, used for test-taking, or the filling out of forms, at the side, his body in fact more like a tabletop sculpture stance, not a human body.
but he signifies, to me, crossing over into the deep spin, and into the cenote, a totally different state of imagination, way, way out and down, as as been indicated by my treatment of the”hell on earth” trope in Mandy, and other movies, and my treatment of the monsters and hallucinations in the Amityville movies, particularly 2 and 3. But the key development that came to me, in fact, right as I saw this, is that hell on earth is frozen by frozen hell, which may or may not be a good thing. The phrase, we wont see that til hell freezes over means it will be a long time, my hope is now is the time of hell freezes over, perhaps
it follows, in my reading, that other quartzite works could be construed as figures carved out of the cenote, and, as such, effulgies, or effulgence sculptures, based on a freezing of the negative space of the cenote and all of its spins, I have mentioned the monsters coming up out of the cenote as pictured in that movie
and that and that this hellhole, the very picture of the vertiginous spin down the cenote, a peripteral phantom version of the central core of consciousness in hypnagogy
resulted in a splash of water, and then a freeze, freezing the negative space as an effulgy
then that blast up through the house
to freeze the radiators
cause freezing chandeliers to fall
and even send the sailfish flying
so all of the quarzite bespeaks the same position, subordinate to the oversight of Smurf.
this effect also bounces off of the Troll, but, again, I do not hold artists to my graphs
but, for me, and I think Splitting Smurf and The Unicorn ought to have been switched in position, Smurf is the presiding god of day
to then allow the final event, the Enlightment of the Witch, takes place in the place of sacrifice, atop the cenote, the deep fall into the deep brain, and she truly is taken apart and lifted up in a way to transcend every sheela na gig or google pic of childbirth, an effusive all-open being
The first thing you notice is that while her head and legs seem to have been generated by a kaleidopscic split, splitting her in half, but opening her up, her whole central belly as if rises up from inside her, as a second belly within belly, to then, all of it tattooed with safety sigils, give birth
The witch’s arms are behind, hold herself up, but then there are the arms of this other body on or in her, which is also being, like a placenta, birthed, opened up, and then shed like a snake skin. The head is literally a Rmmr graph of a force from below surging up through the cenote’ created by a splitting head, to open up to a new god, floating above even the place of the sacrifice, and a floating eye. This is then the witch of Frozen Hell Realized, doubts overcome
Her hands, her fingers, like in the Haunting of Hell House, Tanner’s fingers, surge with ectoplasmic visible energy
her tattooed, painted, four-breasted, and open-wombed body gives all but easy birth
with a hint of Grace Jones in her
and spread wide too
plus the polymastica goddess
and the baby crowning, amazingly, still
sent on his way, with a magic path, provided by tattoo
as if Nilotic apotropaic birth tattoos, to ensure a good birth (because they knew nothing else about it)
with Bes, of course, tattooed all over even the birthing stone
and Altmejd, of course, exploring these interiors in this way, in his own way, imagines the legs turned to wood but having to be lifted by fairies, almost out of Disney
is it “ok” for a male artist to give voice to the process of birth in a symbolic way? To the rationalists, whose intersections exist it appears only to put up barriers at, no; but a maternal universe is lived in by both men and woman, all humans are “born of woman,” it is only the spirit of it, the atmosphere, the general tenor of things which is so much less damn male egotism, that makes it advantageous. Men as well as woman worshipped the goddess, the goddess did not reign only in cult over amazons in separatist nations. Also, Freud’s argument that the birthing process for all gendered babies, the tension of resistance and curiosity, pushing and pulling one at one (which Corman used as a dramatic push-pull of his corridor crawls, changing the nature of the trope forever), allows for even the male to imagine what might the influence of that birthing be on his subsequent life. In my case, with an extraordinary birth, that is, I was a second born twin, and waited eight minutes in a womb that had already expelled one baby, I see the birthing experience as quite a bit more traumatic, fitting even for a subgenre birthing horror movie, of which there are many. For all this reason, and mostly because it is NOT rational, I am fine with Altmejd giving to the sacrifice place in epigogy the power of an enlightened witch (the opposite of the Blue Witch who has pursued me). I also take this Enlightenment of the Witch, at a time when the June Witches are invoked, the day of the Vorhees Vortex, and Midsummer (for which I read Ritual (1967) this year), coming up, this signifies a complete release to living in frozen hell, that is, all the horrors of hell on earth faced up to, but put at bay by the power of the imagination. All in all, then, Altmejd’s work, which I have responded to with cultic affection since I saw a werewolf swipe in the wall at Andrea Rosen so many years ago, bespeaks a moment in time, as the USofA comes out of covid, hopefully to help the world beat it too.
Enlightenment, in this case, equals the white album state. That state is not easy to reach. You have to experience second-stage syngogic dreaming, and prowl out one’s dream path in hypnagogic space; you have to then encounter TIND-TIRH, him to then flip it up to then pass on that knowledge to the final phase of ophthchony, seeing through the darkness to the truth. But if that eye bounces out and thus out to the epigogic if it carries the wisdom of the Umwelt up out into conscious life fighting dragons, and that algorithm, as it were, that pathway, directs one with confidence in the world, in dealing with the treacherous monstrosities, that is living in the white album. I discerned the three-dream Eldritch formation in summer, 2018, when I unlocked the mysteries of movie hypnagogy; during lockdown, I found the psychomachia of the Corposant placed in it, and worked that out. That made me think that dream paths peculiar to oneself, as in my reading of Bosch’s Garden, could be one’s soul. By incipient impulses but then finally with my study of the Amityville movies, I decided that syngogy was a separate state of mind, and then through either the Heaven’s or Tannhauser Gates lead to the epigogic realm of monsters, including the cenote dropping deep into the brain, where hell on earth lies. And, finally, coming out of lockdown, I argue that Zudecca, frozen hell, can be a state which, aware of hell on earth, keeps it at bay by living in full agency and power of the white album, one’s dreampath made conscious in life, to lead one to afterlife existence too. It strikes me as somewhat uncanny, then, Altmejd shows up for me precisely at the right moment, when I ponder how or if, against the odds of my impairments, there is life after covid lockdown.
Disclaimer: As I only see art virtually now, this is a thought piece and not a review.
David Altmejd’s show at David Kordansky, The Enlightment of the Witch, really struck home again, in my mood of “synchroetherrhoe” everything all at one flowing together, as it seems like I have survived the covid lockdown era, and so I winged it in an attempt to read it, on FB
and so, then, I take you through it.
“For every synapse, a figure points the way. David Altmejd, long time fav, at Kordansky, on a neurozeroedin soul journey: reduced to a state of miasma, an entome (a being torn to pieces) whose only life derives from the bad witch’s spell, cast into a nightmare, hell on earth
“but when that hell on earth is come back to,by way of a Cassandra figure (the realization of a witch here).
“to under the aegis of Ophthchthon*, in a zone of epigogy, wherein by having discovered your true dream path, you can flip reality upside down to enter Zudecca, or frozen hell, the world where hell HAS frozen over, your psychopomp is Splitting Smurf
sort of like Blake’s Satan
he shows that at last Zudeons are defeating Quanon trolls, their leader, Troll, possibly the demon TIND-TIRH**, gibbetted on ice
and by way of “white album” guides, even a unicorn, where in waking reality you hereafter act without fear according to your dream and truth; at last to enter the cenote’ of magic, the Enlightenment of the Witch, and a rebirth.
“This is really happening, and this is really happening”, and it is happening, NOW, TODAY.
And. then, I also provided a key
now, this notion of Zudecca came to me a day earlier, as I also posted, about Deana Lawson
but, then, as I do, on FB, where I play with theory “for entertainment purposes only,” I pushed it, and so looked up frozen hell, and the frozen hell phase we are now living in, and it turns out that in the fourth level of the ninth ring of hell Satan sits in ice, in Judica, but then since that title seems to whisper of antisemitism I took a Muslim name for the hell of ice, zambeera, so it becomes Zudecca.
This notion is built up on the power of the surge of “synchroetherrhoe” events that have taken place in my reading and movie culture in the last sixty days. Time and again, I find that no sooner do I lay out a new possibility in theory, that some art is out there greeting it, realizing it, as in the Sunrise and Sunset show in Berlin, and other places. Theoretically, this is based on the whole reappraisal in 3D of the full dimensions of the three states of nightmare in the Eldritch formation, and about the emergence of syngogy and epigogy as types of consciousness that relate to states of dreaming in the flips and turns of the activation of the Eldritch formation.
The change came when Wolfwalkers (2020) helped me work out the greater complexities in flips in the syngogic dimensions of what happens when one wakes up a second time in the eldritch. That is, to return to it: first, there is the first nightmare, you have, whoosh, it leaps you back up to the lattice, in hypnagogy.
this can be not unlike a conjure attack situation, a true, classic nightmare, in all its forms, this is where Fuseli’s nightmare takes place, and she is not woken up from it. But, then, in the eldritch, when you wake up from this nightmare, you are in fact still sleeping, this is the no sweat part, and in that state you experience a more intensive dream experience
but this dream has a more intense nature, you appear in it as not you, but as you embodied in some abstract or other form (in Wolfwalkers it is the girl represented by her smell, by the Umwelt, that is, of the wolf she has become). As a result, this dream has a transformational and Umwelt quality
and, for a human, that dream path, specific and unique to you, perhaps, is the equivalent to an animal’s umwelt, the few steps required to keep it alive in the hunt (I give the example in common terms of a path used by a person to get to a site onlline, by a well worn step by step, so I always get to my rmarts site by going to “Bava Black Sunday”, then clicking over, there, three steps, same three steps every time, it is like the sequence of a safe combination). that is,in this dream, by the Far Path to the Far Door, etc
but this second dream has a shock hid in it, which involves contact with the demon TIND-TIRH, “This is no dream, this is really happening”, and so this realization, this fusion of dream and waking reality, or some deeper reality, results in a fierce ephialtic leap, which brings up the whole substrate of the dream, so a FLIP, and this then creates a state where in syngogy freeze you cannot quite tell the difference between dream and reality.
This flip happens this way
but, now, you are in the third nightmare, and several things can happen. Most opportune is you can, from your paralysis, like the episodes I had in my 20s, experience in a freeze a dysmetropsic flip, and that then opens up ophthchthon, as such
Theoretically, this would then let you wake up enlightened, to live in the security and certainty of your Umwelt, to live in a state of white album.
But there are also other things that can happen in the epigogic state, which is my name for it. If white album insight takes hold it can open up from inside-vigilogogic, or inside-hypnagogic mind space to the cenote space I have been writing about, with a different scale of imagination at work in it, since March, and its working out that way in The Amityville Horror, so if the realization of living White Album is the key, that can open up the path to, under the Blue Sun, the cenote to deep brain, as such
so. The white album controls ophthchthony, and if you see the “truth shot” that can then cause a final leap to full realization, and leap you all the way out into fata morgana ambience, to then through either Heaven’s or Tannhauser gate (as fill in later), experience an encounter with monsters created by the emanations of hell on earth.
But, in a recent essay, working through the nature of hell in Dracula (1979) I went back to Alien for an analysis of the land of the Blue Sun. This brings to mind the balcony POV which I addressed in the Irish movie Spectre (1996) with Alexandra Paul and considered as well as Ash’s perch over the perilous outing in Alien (1977). According to this trope, as I wrote about it in Alien
they are overseen in their exploration of the ping by Ash, in his bay window, the Blue Sun itself
the graphic space is, just like Jodorowsky’s long shot, a mis en abyme, care-less of the gradations of ambient vigilogogic space. But, then, the planet will have to be considered, relative to them, an ambient space, that when they land on it, drops into a spatial equivalent of hell on earth, in sentient outer space, and then when they land, they are overseen by Ash, who is suspect and later will be revealed to be death, so it IS a thanatopsis of sorts.
I suppose the only place, hypnagogically, that such a place in “outer space” could exist in the mind is below the bottomless pit of hell on earth, and so I have to term it Tartarus, which was a special hell below hell which was reserved solely for demiurges or gods hurled there from Olympus, and imprisoned in perpetual darkness (the Greeks had to have created the idea to conform to some psychological pressure)
this is what the whole construct, everything vis a vis each other, looks like
I guess I will then have to argue, keeping a logic operable in my working out of the relations between
Alien hypersleep 2 9 21
hypnagogy and vigilogogy, a flip from Tartarus on up over the whole rest of the other construct, to make by another form of the Big Sleep, the Hypersleep, a delirious dream flipping formation, all of it feeding in
the most telling fact-in-form, that is, a form they came up with which in fact corresponds to hypnagogic psychodynamics of Ash’s bay window as oversight, and it is blue, and since he is suspect it is death, that is, he knows death is a risk, and he wants to minimize revealing concerns as to that, since the creature is more important.
this secret evil, sabotaging things, is reinforced by this shot of an evil overseer, The Blue Sun thanatopsis eyed evil one
everything around so that they cannot see anything
then, also strange, as if combining the color scheme of my rendering of hells on earth, here sunk into the deep blue of Tartarus, we learn that the atmosphere is “primal,” so Chloros reigns
it is also amusing that this is the first time we get a view of the cat as overseer, the cat represents the sanity of the living moment, I suppose, ever watchful for deceit and evil, a guardian god, watching over the watchers. This position makes of him the embodiment of the Blue Sun, that is, thanatopsis, he is, simply, by this, the realization of the saying that “death has come to our little town,” or, as Pleasance said not a year before in a movie he will be much more remembered for and kept itn “he’s come home,” and he is death, death has come.
This posits “outer space” as imagined as a hell below hell on earth, and it is in that zone that the deepest things happen, I called this place Tartarus, it would be here, in this graph, but you can get to it ONLY by way of Heaven’s (for truth) or Tannhauser (for lies, or monsters, even) Gate, with the balcony or gargoyle like Antaeus looking over it
I do not want to create another type of –gogy for this, but, let’s face it, THIS is where the monsters are in the mind, in the deep brain, down the cenote, in hell on earth activated, with the formicarian and the ommatidian gaze, this is where almost ALL of the artists I really like are mentally located, doing their work, encountering the sentient universe of monsters and the like, by way of epigogy, after your life has learned the truth.
BUT….there must be a benign aspect of this too, no? so, let’s posit that in entering into this world, you come out of it, and this is due to being in ambient epigogy
and IF you are able to overcome the demons, and the monsters, and not submit, then Tartarus freezes, and becomes Frozen Hell, or as I call it Zudecca. We are now, I argue, due to the afterschocks of BLM reckoning, the Biden Presidency, then the changes to the mediation and practice of industries due to covid lockdown and its ultimate consequences, no doubt to come, in a period of hell hath frozen over. And this is where the great positive demons are now, so while I see Blake’s Satan in ice, he is in, in fact, Tartarus
that ice then expands and the whole thing, as in an effulgence of ice, LIKE IN AMITYVILLE HORROR 3D, and the whole of the epigogic POV of the ambient and sentient becomes Judecca, hell frozen over, that is, a kind of heaven on earth.
and at the top of it, replacing Antaeus, who lifted you down in, you get, I think, Altmejd’s Splitting Smurf, who just might be the first time any artist has given sight of this particular daimon, or god of day, the god of today (yesterday, June 2)
so, that is where I am at, right now, June 2, coming out of covid lockdown, and in the nervous energy leading up to my possibly reentering the world of talking to artists (though now it has been postponed, and maybe the moment will pass), we are in Zudecca, where religious, agentic, hypnagogic, syn- and epigogic dream-based art is on the rise, and on the march.
So, now I have to go back to see if when I go through Altmejd’s latest, it actually shakes out that way (as opposed to my toying with the possibility on FB, which is my “art”).
Altmejd says that his exhibition begins in the conscious mind, where things are in pieces, and that’s what is going on entering in, we are in, that is, waking life, or life informed only by consciousness.
and so Matter is, like man at creation of a Claymation god, just a hunk of clay
but this is also a sort of screen wipe moment, to clear the eyes, for them to then see something beyond
and like in work by Jonathan Meese this past season uptown, I like that lumps of clay are affixed to as if a dummy’s head to signify parts of the brain that one knows one needs to get to to live in full, but which are not got to in thinking too much. I see suggestions of cerebellum, succulus, temporal lobes, and tinnitus censors, which need to wake up, to get to it
but, then, the other entome or miasmatic pieces primarily made use of as trophies over doorways elsewhere, we come to the Realization of the Witch
this terrific sculpture takes us to the shore of the in-between, and she will be the one to take us across into hypnagogy. The fact that she is a witch, and she is separated from a hand, even questioning it, as if it is more ghostly than her head, indicates her in-between state of being, I guess I take her as an example of the Hanged Woman trope, the one that leads us in
and her crossing over, her wriggling in the wobble-wobble, is conveyed by a telling detail below, a sort of snake form, suggesting the force flowing through her
that said, the fact that she “lords over” a small sculpture set on the floor, an exciting little piece, indicates that she may rest deeper, or may in the looking, actually sink in deeper as you gaze on her, as this figure is the one trapped in the Suspirialike kunstkammer space that lies under the lattice in hypnagogy,
which places her in the role of the conjure demon, and then this as an object encountered “under the bed”
so, alas, she is a psychopomp, but also a jailer, the keeper of the kunstkammer, where beings subservient to her are kept as entomes, beings as if insects with wings torn off, under her spell, like Patricia’s fate in the kunstkammer in Suspiria (2018).
in my reading, Troll is also a prisoner of a partner sculpture, or scrylpture I called them in my post-y mode, wordplaying, and he could also be TIND-TIRH. It is characteristic of Altmejd in general that he skips quickly through vigilogogy and hypngogy, and does not even venture far into the tunnels and adjunct places of it, or the ambient from it, but moves quickly into the second and third dreams, as his work has always from the first existed in that part of the mind I now call the epigogic, which is the place of a more extravagant imagination unafraid of encountering bad demons and even monsters. And so we leap quickly.
if we peruse the prisoner works as separate little dreams, coming upon Troll can be seen as the intenser scare of the syngogic elements of the second wake-up where one thinks one is awake, but you are still sleeping. It is here, in its flips, that one exclaims this is no dream, this is really happening, thus the demon. Altmejd, in language typical of the 20th century educated art world, states that it is with Troll that he feels the work crosses over from the conscious to the unconscious. My more precise phrasing is that it is here that one’s dreaming self encounters a very powerful demon, who can flip a dream to make it into a reality (the archetype being, in fact, the Satan in Rosemary’s Baby, whose mephitic green mist causes Rosemary Woodhouse, Catholic girl from Omaha, to exclaim, etc). He is quite fearsome
he is clearly in a gibbet formation, that is, reduced to a paralyzed position. He has no arms, which appear to have been ripped out at the sockets. his face bifurcates below, then it splits out again above, so it triangulates itself, so that he has
his hands are as if separate beings, disconnected, with a life of their own (their reach, like the phantom reach of Dracula in Coppola’s telling, might signify this encounter)
he is triply bald, as if a joke on the triple crown of the pope that Durer and others demonized in the prints of the Reformation, he also has a sort of mullet, sort of pony tail
but, in fact, upon close-up, and there is a reason why the tour has so many closeups, is that he is imagined much as images are in movies during transformation scenes of werewolves and the like, and in this his physical being manifests delirium, or, in fact, a syngogy stage of dream where one does not know if one is asleep or awake
the fact that his hand has cored out, with crystals, and is turning blue, suggests he is rotting, and dead
he might also be turning into stone
in my commentary I posited that as a troll he epitomizes the era of the green slime that we fell into in the Trump years, but I do not find in careful autopsy any indication of such a critique.
I did not mention Smoking with Myself, but here too I think this is a self wandering in the syngogic stages of the second nightmare, unclear what state one is in. Perhaps this figure embodies what one becomes when meandering in the Umwelt of one’s being, charting it out as one goes, in the dream, more intensely searching for the truth.
this is indicated by the fact that he has lost his head, and now has dragonfly wings. This suggests an Umwelt state of being, pared down to creaturely essentials. Here, too, the details are critical, he has a hole in his head, or his neckhole, and we see that the whole thing rot due to the green slime gone mineral, that is, he died by trollism.
sort of leaping forward into the epigogic imagination, so, in my view, not right for this piece, Altmejd even gave figural expression to a delirious almost sequel-to-Nightmare on Elm Street level hallucination as after his neck is severed he sees in the severance of it a reflection of his face, and in the stump another, and he imagines those two as if in the mirror of the cutting, as if this was a case of twinfire, sharing a cigarette with oneself, after death.
much more cryptic are the strange symbols inscribed on its body. This is the Green Eye, which presides over the second nightmare, and then some secret codes
sequentially, The Troll and Smoking are part of this sector of the mind, and present hauntings at that level.
Smoking is the form the self takes when it ventures in this second sweatless dream to seek out the wisdom of one’s Umwelt, in the dreaming space; while the encounter with Troll is an encounter with TIND-TIRH, my demon of the moment, or god of day, and whose encounter is so shocking, one declares it, “this is no dream, this is really happening”.
a few more words about this second stage syngogic dream. This is a zone in which one must walk some, what has to be seen is far off, and you must go through. stage syngogic dream.
with mention of Glaser’s broadsheets of celestial phenomena in Nuremberg; Jung’s Flying Saucers (1957, internet archive): The Empty Man (2021)..
Now the question is, how do I view other phenomena recorded, over time?
This requires creating a taxonomy of types of sightings, determining if any other demons are seen. Above, tracing out the phases of Glaser’s sighting, a kind of body tunnel was formed horizontally in the sky, but then the rising action in and around the sun, and then the condensation of it all to the black spearlike form, which Jung says is phallic, seemed to tilt to an emphasis on the vertical, and thus the formation of a figural, Xyston, the spear demon of Nuremberg.
following from this, it would make sense that once that impression is imprint on the local mind, other events after might well be read as more of the same (the “It’s just like 9/11” syndrome continued in the NYC mindset in response to any accident or explosion for over a decade). This immediately brings into play the Knight in the Sky that people saw
here is a later version from 1566
close up
this shows two knights fighting on the left, a slain knight lying right, and then a king on a throne, holding the same black spear. The arrangement of figures is odd, a sure sign of a logic beneath it, out of which one is piecing together a pareidola. All of it is oddly framed in split screen cloudscape, which perhaps bespeaks by way of a le fanu eye projection the externalization of the eyes and something in them. The emphasis on the frame also suggests a half-lilfe override. The rest of the marginal turmoil is rendered in simplifying cloud.
But in the earlier one, we see one knight charging, and through the deadfall of all of the sundog effects zipping this way and that causing people to not only see crosses, behind the blood, resulting in blood crosses, but soon enough every object in the list of tortures in the Arma christi, sacred relics of persecution in the Passion. We can see chalices and the crown of thorns, the scourging pillar, the whip, the lance and sponges, it would seem the whole of the passion was falling from the sky onto them.
the arma christi became a significant source of cult items and imitatio christi cults at the time.
it usually happened that they were in art either separated to exist on their own as abstraction or in the letterspace of the symbolic vigilogogic state of fellow feeling empathic imitation of christ, or they floating overhead in scenes of the life of christ, as andactsbilder aid in meditation on them one by one, as if saying a rosary.
with such a graphic appeal that they were also incorporated into family coats of arms
It could then be said that the eyes of the religious person at the time were as if cataracted over by a tendency, should anything odd show up in one’s eye, to see arma christi. This much then argues that it is culture that colored the nature of the eyesight. But then there is the extra dimension of media’s role in creating a general sense of what the sky is versus the ground, and how they relate. This one of various sun spots and halos that appeared over Vienna in the 1520s is entirely abstract, with the rain turned to cats and dogs, so to speak, and then the below part being just an emblematic representation of elements from the Noah and ark story. This simply indicates that in the construction of the milieu by media it worked out, as I have argued, that a picture with the drama of wonder in it in a broadsheet format that had to grab a viewers eye first with spectacle, and then they read all about it, the sky was the vigilogogic, and the ground with the hypnagogic. When you looked at the sky you were literally looking up through the very wobble-wobble of the in-between, or low sky luorosphere, just overhead, and since sky was associated with heaven, and earth with the here and now, and acheiropoetoi and other miracle images had a habit of dropping out of the sky, a binary crossover formula developed which prompted people to see the sky in entirely fictional, religious and figural fashion.
and then it follows that if ever there was a vertical turbulence, it did not take much to create of the arma christi in one’s mind a figure (as I did to create a Frankenstein in my novel Arma Christi), and thus sword and elements become a knight.
but there is another dimension here. This seems to be an apocalyptic scene, because the knight is charging in protection ahead of the saved, streaming apparently back down to earth. This is an important inherited visual trope. In Durer’s Apocalypse, there is a tendency to make heaven crowded, to convey the idea of a host, so here with St John (these homely wooden doors of heaven are the detail I most appreciated seen in Waetzoldt
again, in the Adoration of the lamb
but in the whore of babylon
there is, in fact, the host, appearing en masse, and compressed in a crowd, in an almost medieval style, and they seem to ‘figure forth,’ that is, as pareidola, from a vertical opening in the clouds
this means, according to my graphs, that Durer’s vision, and the vision of the sky as derived no doubt from his influence, it was, as said, the “sky” above the in-between, and the symbolic earth, as if in a nexus reflecting the things of the earth; but it was also topped off by a fata morgana, which the small figures en masse are a mere pareidola of the clouds, and thus have an inherent vertical push.
then when that downward figural impulse touched the central core of consciousness and its turbulence approaching a nexus at the borderline, it took on a vertical, singular figural form, a knight. Thus, one has developed a core sun space, all the turbulence around it resulting in abstract forms, not unlike its raining buckets or cats and dogs; and then there was a cul de sac where a more figural cloud-based fata morgana formed, to give a forward downward thrust to the sighting, maybe to make you duck.
This then left those seeking to render the appearances with two choices, cover the arma christ rain, which goes beyong the blood rain crosses
but then up in the corner in the high sky you get a glimpse into an imagined heaven and there, here, there is a battle of knights, here staged as a battle of demons, or fallen angels. This one also includes similar calendar-oriented sun and star imagery, which has biblical import too. Then, to progress with the evolutions, if you saw the sun illuminate oddly, that could be presented vertically, giving, half way between bookread figurals and weather events, a vertical presence, almost monstrous
and such vertical readings of them, impellations, if you will, can take on a religious significance to alsto construe where and now as the gateway to an out there
as long as the suspect vector, as well as the fear vector, were switched to ON, there is a tendency of the frightened mind to, upon report of any disturbance, to bounce to the worst case scenario, and then step back, fearing that it is coming in on you, targeted. Presuming, for the moment, that in 1566 Glaser had a nightmare the night before, or even just before that predawn hour, the witching hour, he would then “wake up” to a second dream which he nonetheless thinks, while walking it, he is awake, and there in searching for meaning he will detect that whatever it was that was keeping his sense of safety intact, in terms of personal and community space, and lebensraum, that theory, he would then sense that the vectors have pulled in from presence to Figment, figments were forming, he then encounters TIND-TIRH, who now spins down through the figments, then back up by way of the fata morgana to come down upon him like a demon occupying and figuring out the horror of the falling into nightmare, a demon like this
in other words, there might, somewhere in these dynamics (my formulation here is less than optimal), be the construal of megafigures, which haunted, then, the imagination of people living in Nuremberg at the time.
it is interesting then that when Jung addresses two of these pictures
he sees mother-ships, and then alchemical symbols, he argues that the Christian reading of the cross is a nonstarter because this is a natural event, and that as such the crosses represent a more primal meaning as combining opposites, all elements of the vertical and horizontal uniting to form a quaternion. This is the marriage symbol, he says, then all the UFOs are actually amassing together to celebrate the marriage flight, and that the dawn hour only intensifies the honeymoon feeling by offering up the aurora consurgens, the revelation of the light, an idea from Boehme. Interesting.
but, then, this follows from his previous interpretation of two other works of art included in the text. The Fire Sower, oddly, is a vertical figure seen as if walking over earth
he argues that because it strolls by the city, and the city seems to not be affected, this is the fire of the philosophers, descending from heaven
for that reason, the city is in one reality, the fire sower in the other, and, as such, he IS the symbolic figure representing the crossing over of two worlds that do not touch. In that capacity he is aforementiond Mercurius Katachthonios, a hermaphroditic demon that rises up from the earth in the form of fire,
in other words, he is homo maximus, the full human being fulfilled as self living in dream, as compared with the paltry ego that scuttles about in this world.
he quotes Revelations, he is the fiery minister,
the unconscous strolling by the conscious, the same figure is quoted in Durer, the figure of the unconscious that makes your rational mind eat the book, because it is such a shortcoming, compared to the real dream of it (and this, then, again, the minister as if of the arma christi built up).
for Jung, then, he is also the in-between figure. In his mental world, a work of art had a conscious surface, and then an unconscious depth. This figure represents the unconscious depth surfacing, for a moment, this homo maximus, or Anthropos, the filius hominus, Lucifer, the holy ghost.
This echoes on a recent viewing of The Empty Man (2021), where James goes out to the camp, and then sees a group of cultists circling a fire, that is getting higher as they do
then, by their energy, it rises higher still, with a hint of figuration
then we see it shoot up, high
and, by this, James, standing across the river, has a dizzy spell, which opens up to the milky way
and when he sees it, he spins
which strangely relates, by triangulation, with the image on the front page of the NYT announcing the end of the war of Afghanistan, copying Elsheimer’s famous painting, the first painting on earth to show the Milky Way, and said by some to be an omen of bad times coming.
and, then, right at that moment, the chanting stops, the fire goes out, it is dark
and very quickly this mere Presence, on his conjure vector, remains off in the distance, but where they are going is concerning
then they get to just across the stream from him, all stop, and seem to him to look in his direction, the ultimate scare as the vector contracts to the Famulus position, you realize you are the target
then they get to just across the stream from him, all stop, and seem to him to look in his direction, the ultimate scare as the vector contracts to the Famulus position, you realize you are the target, and they chase him, back over the bridge
all the way to his car, and all the time he is thinking, what the fuck is this?
like I said
what it was was a large fire figure, not that different from the one in The Fire Sower, and when they got it to form into a high as if twister that reached up into the sky, to bring down the spirit transmitted there, it then by way of the Milky Way conjured James to it, he felt the spin, they felt that someone nearby felt the spin, that must be the new mediator, so, conjuring done, they go get him. In other words, while from Jung’s perspective the Fire Sower is ambiguous, here, not so much.
I ought to here to pause to explain where Jung’s psychogeography is located vis a vis mine. His view of the world of the mind is yet a modernist frustum. It foreshortens mental life into a battle between the conscious-rational and the unconscious-irrational, as such, in the frustrum, his mind acts upon the rings of saturn, and vacates as a no man’s land the whole in-between zone, which in his topology is ALL of the realm of the vigilogogic and hypnagogic that I spend so much time working out, all of it occult. As a result of this split his conclusions are highly polarized, and, on the positive side, prematurely reassuring with its psychic optimism that one can see such beings as the homo maximus in one’s REM (only) dreams, or in the realm of the occult, parallel to REM but vaguely placed as a counterpart to the conscious, but apart from REM, the unconscious. In recent colonizing and inhabitation of the various byways of the in-between, as I work it out in examples from movies, the unconscious comes into direct contact with the conscious mind far less often than Jung imagined. Which is why so many of his readings seem far-fetched and overly figured out. Indeed, it seems very unlikely, that this figure, the Fire Sower
would be seen by most people in an entirely positive way. Similar figures that have appeared in horror like it certainly do not emit such a positive vibe. I immediately associated this figure with the scary grasshopper demon that towers over Hobbs Lane in Quatermass and the Pit (1966), a destructive force (I will further explore this when I read the Midwich Cuckoos and compare to Jung’s also rather benign reading).
this image, most closely parallels the demon of Hobbs lane
this image underscores and informs even more the sighting of positive imagery in the third painting Jung “critiques” using alchemical symbolic theory symbols, The Fourth Dimension
in this one, he counts up the circles and squares hovering about, and decides that the fourth dimension is what is represented in the background
again, he splits the canvas between the city, in conscious life, on the right, and, then, the hauntings, in the left, the unconscious, or the fourth dimension. He sees a cross and a waterfall, in midcanvas, separating the two worlds. Then, he all but describes a kind of symbolic cymbal-clanging similar to the one Glaser saw on April 14, 1566 over Nuremberg, but he counts numbers, believing that number is the entity that allows the crossing over, and that the main figure is the embodiment of all this
he then zeroes in on the central face, and sees it as the key element, resulting from the presence of which the “ground structure” of the painting is the quincux, the quinta essentia, quinessence
this is very good, and I wish, but in my reading, my keep of the concept of the quintessence, is based on Dixon’s analysis of Bosch’s Passion, christ the face of quintessence, amidst a world of men drunk in overkill of the various humors, mad with as if humor poisoning (reinforced by Veronica, a blue boy construct)
but I made a point of it again
In The Fourth Dimension, a work of art analyzed in Jung’s Flying Saucers (1957), Jung sees one large hovering pareidola (hidden face), then it breaks down into three, or four others, forming, he says, the alchemical quincux, which sweeps the whole scene from the third dimension over the in-between into the fourth dimension where endures unexplainables like “synchronicity.” He also mentions the “foo fighters” seen by US pilots over the Rhine in 1944, the best original eyewitness photo looking very much like the faces in The Fourth Dimension. I would have no problem if the implication is that my maternal “homeland,” from Strasbourg to Trier along the Rhine or Moselle, were in fact like a Euro Bermuda triangle in the fourth dimension.
and it strikes me that these faces are part and parcel of the haunting face in a classic OEP, original eyewitness photography, the face of the foo fighter seen by US pilots over Germany in 1944. And whilst it could be argued that they were seen as if in repentance of the horror they had to inflict to bring Germany to its knees, the notion that there is a Bermuda triangle in around Hartog and Ouijan etc, is fun. But, seen at proper scale of sleep stages as they impact the mapping out of mind, this is a nightmare demon rising almost like a Death Mask over a city, that is, a close cousin to the one I saw in Glaser’s 1566 study, this is FOO, cousin to XYSTON.
He, however, goes on to see a kind of god, a being come up from the “unitary substrate” with four faces, only one of which is human, like seen on Ezekiel’s wheel
Jung finally calls him the refrigerium, the cooling being who finally puts out the fire,
he also brings in Hildegard of Bingen, but that is outside this purview.
In any case, Jung reinforces the seeing of mostly a figurative element in the events in the sky over Nuremberg. But, to continue in the taxonomy. It appears that when the vector switched to OFF, and culture was becoming more ‘rational,” in an interregunum before it went back again during the Thirty Years war, astronomical realism begins to replace, say, astrological supernaturalism. There follows, this from a meteoros site, simply pictures of what the rationalizers latch onto as proof of the science of it, various forms of halos.
as part of the corpus there is also the emergence of another subgenre, the three suns. I have not seen these before, but they bespeak at least the notion, still extant in internet culture, that astronomical events figure significantly on earth. The truly strange thing here is that in my formulation of the roving form of the second dream in the Eldritch formation in a state of syngogy, and when searching one finds a “thrin” of objects, or three of them, which I call Orion’s belt, the impellation par excellence, consisting of the sweet spot of the dreaming mind. It may then be that these, when further explored, are, in the text, given a more visionary prophetic meaning, to be continued.
and then the more science that was fed in, the more graphics from the scientific literature, where the answer as to what these are lies, overcast the sightings, and these feel like gates to me, portals, of possible escapist significance.
Then, these, they say, are the aurora borealis, seen, apparently, over Nuremberg, in the years leading up to the Thirty Years War, at present, in my view, inconclusive.
though it may be that when the fear or suspect vectors switched back to ON, tensions building, these sightings began again to have a more ominous quality
and it may be, in this one, that things circled back to seeing a battle anew in the aurora borealis, if that is what this is.
Finally, to address some of the pecularities of Durer, which suggests his buy-in to this popular broadsheet visual tradition or corpus. There is no question that Durer’s Apocalypse is part of this popular tradition,
here, the sun and moon, and the rain of…..in this case, fire, shooting stars,
which crossover from heavenly logic, into life, to persecute, hit people
and in the culturing of trying to figure out what they mean I saw in Waetzoldt, likely because of the inosculatory effect of holding up over my chest a flaking crumbling book with a dried out binding, diving in, I saw that in one of the Apocalypse series, the gate of heaven is nothing more than a wooden shutter opening on the life below
as such
this further reinforces the notion that, as mapped out in my graphs, fata morgana lies above, in ambient space, the deadfall, Raven’s Gate, place of sacrifice, peripteral phantom wall, and the overall periaequductal reduction of materiality in ambient haunted worlds, altogether, when on the sideline of hypnagogy, the half-life TALUS structures
that even Durer knew of such half-life places in the imagination of mankind, all mental spaces that Jung seems (in Flying Saucers–in a 1903 paper on the psychology of the occult he did adress hypnagogic states) to be blind to, inside the modernist formalist frustum.
rmarts 