*a quick and yet full feeding gallery here, as the above painting, by johfra bosschart, whilst not a style i would immediately gravitate toward, is very dear to me due to my mother, who recently passed, living with his saturn painting for all of my life – a zodiacal round, soul being a society of animals – as his paintings very much remind me of the dragon postcards my father would send to me as a child, whilst he was incarcerated, postcards who have since set themselves on fire as dragon language*
Perhaps we can gently add space to place as storied amoebic synergy… a place must be maintained or desire ends, as the Sapphic, quartz laced saying goes.
What of John Berger’s attempts to refine place as synthesis in his book, The Shape of a Pocket? In this garden of a book, beringed with linden fuzz, he says that in Russian, place can translate as situation, that a place is more than an area. Place surrounds, enfolds. Place has extension of presence and consequence of action, inextricable interiority of anima and animus, inosculated psyche in whom we are.
This place is love, a dream, a relation, constant transformations of molecular emotions feeding mythos of storied place as tender affinities of sky and water, sweet and bitter, boundaries who are also potentials.
When we get our memory back, love will remember their age, as time can turn love to boundary stones.
I don’t feel we can talk or think about place without gifting attention to their geographies, especially in the heart of Doreen Massey, who so often spoke to place’s vitality.
Places do not have single identities but multiple ones
Places are not frozen in time, but are processes
Places are not enclosures with a clear inside and outside
Places ask how we make room for others, who then perceive with our senses, asking water, as white soundless sphere, for their duration, a way to count poetry with sound
We can love a place, and still be dangerous to them
Within as without these fieldless fields, we find we are doing a great deal more subconscious communicating with one another than we are experiencing of spectral reality, visually tuneable electromagnetic lumps.
Amateurism is not a being or a calling, but a hearing heart, as Robert Walser might say, an extension of boundaries as balance, a lithic grotesque, where every stone corresponds to an organ, every organ to an emotion.
This is not calling for people to drop their speciality, this is not a calling at all, this is a softening of boundaries as a practise of loving well, attending to slippage and their inherent difficulties, psychic barbs of empathy, attending to a will to extend selves, holding an ability to extend and also throw boundaries as a plurality of stones, where possible, and when wished, to bend by a magic round, as Edmond Jabès might say.
In Parker Palmer’s Active Life, he writes that to be alive fully is to act, that action is visible form of invisible. For me this is a deftly cymatic principle enfolded in Mei Mei Berssenbrugge’s act of hearing as the fragmentation of fragments occurring as they disintegrate.
Intra-acting wave patterns are home to a range of harmonic emotions in which frozen lights of physical bodies, or who some call electrostatic fields, couple with Earth’s isoelectric fields.
This is just one aspect of potentially visible form frozen within they who are invisible, felt through who Palmer calls action.
What of rest’s vitality? To fill we of course have to empty, to learn to balance (synonymous with beginnings of psychological leanings of gravity stage–and how important this feels in relation to learning to love well).
Outward manifestations of those who are inward are synonymous with higher vibratory rates of anti-nodes, invisible lights coagulating as edged matter flowing.
Matter matters, which thoughts do we think thoughts with, which categories do we categorise categories with… When we love we are a part of our selves, and categories, like edges, both appear and disappear. At infinite speed we’re everywhere in a state of total rest, space between stars being self-same-space between cells. Interstellar medium as electron field.
Touching world we are touching our selves, or to paraphrase William Blake:
Wise people see outlines and therefore they draw them.
Mad people see outlines and therefore they draw them.
I recently heard Richard Rorty speak someone similar:
People whose ideas we find useful we call geniuses.
Those whose ideas we find useless we can idiots, or insane.
As Parker Palmer says in a talk about knowledge and violence (which he refers to as violating another’s integrity) every mode of education, no matter what their name, is a mode of soul-making, of formation and deformation, of learning and unlearning.
Under the long shadows of a triadic rubric of correspondences he says is vital to the western academy, Palmer visits ‘objective’, or the notion that we cannot know anyone truly and well unless we know them at arm’s length (reminding me of Karl Jasper’s boundary situations and the Kantian a priori of an ultimately lifeless cosmos). This, Palmer calls a fear of subjectivity and relatedness – though he is quick to point out that objectivism, which he is here criticising, arose at a time when radical subjectivism got 'us into a lot of trouble, referring specifically to witch trials, and that there is some kind of value in the fruits of true and untrue.
In his Mysterium Conjunctionis, Carl Jung claims that roots of dualism grow from love, and that there is an unresolvable pairing at psyche’s nondual ground…one concealed with and from another. Below one layer, one limen, there is always more life, subterranean biospheres, fair fields of Enna, or what some refer to as dark oxygen (though the distinction seems a little superfluous), stratified dis of descending water, suffused with oxygenated cells.
I say one concealed with and from another, but this does not mean they must remain so, there is a pattern who connects (or seeks to) at work, and if, let’s say, images are left in emotions, we might be torn to pieces by their prolonged cohabitation – this also goes for prematurely abstracting ourselves from them, as to experiment on someone, even oneself, is to find that they are also experimenting on us.
As Palmer states, drawing on the work of geneticist Barbara McClintlock, we must develop a feeling for the organism, a tender and delicate, prolonged empiricism, one predicated, poised on a threshold of intermediate distance and intimacy, a love relationship who does not annihilate difference or take love themselves for granted, listening for propinquitous veins, thanking them, not reaching right into them for what they can do for us and us alone, psychic veins with whom knowledge is suffused.
That love is a god, not that god is love, helps to make someone personable, borne of respect, bereft of sole objective realia, of numbers denoting sensorial threshold. This is an Orphic predisposition, of not seeking control, but listening for entrance.
Palmer’s second word is ‘analytic’ (holding in mind that a basis of their developmental signification refers to loosening, or lysis), a form that, if one sided, can promulgate a titanic hubris of absolute knowing, a freedom to chop ‘things’ into pieces, to abstract them from their environment with little to no desire for their reintegration in order to sustain objectification, an extractivism, human exceptionalism, a dominant mindset who only holds at a distance, who shouts.
The third term Palmer draws our attention to is ‘experimental’, taking someone who has been made into an object and has no say in their being cut into pieces, before being moved around in a paradigm game of mistaking truth for belief.
By way of example, Palmer talks about one culture being subject to another cultures’s insane caprice, hell bent on finding out what it might it look like to remove part of their political system and replace them with some of their own, a body politic, reminding us of how, at least to the best of my understanding, all names give to human organs, glands, body parts, etc, have been named by, and ultimately for, men.
Parker counterbalances these terms with four more in relation to words as qualities of spirit and inherent energy: personal, communal, reciprocal, and transformational.
A mesh work of knowledge occasions emanating from underlying nebulae of personable skrim, communal truth as coincidence of opposites, an ever present emphasis of one found with another (tiasos, no god ever appears alone), truth as personable relation, like attracts like.
Parker’s last term, transformational, entwines variations of truth as personal, communal, and reciprocal, so they are alchemical, coagulating, coalescing, putrefying. Truth being mercurial, they are who seeks and changes us, as much as we hope to change them.
Palmer’s, what I would call amateur vocabulary, for me engenders a process that Raoul Vaneigem calls an alchemy of self, where to extend is akin to asking, who can protect themselves from not loving in this world?
Amateur perspectives (I’m more interested in amateur as state of mind, as part of multiplicity, rather than profession or identity) consist of practising a delicate empiricism in which every way of knowing becomes a way of living, every epistemology becomes an ethic, wherein extension of boundaries reveals as much shadow as ego.
Coming to knowing and coming to loving are heard together as often as possible in terms of resituating practises of objectification (knowledge near identical with love, love with knowledge), their undulating bodies inhabiting each other like parabolas of humble hesitancy along whom contemplation holds a cultivation of wider awareness.
Intellectual imagination of heart keeps images alive as love, whom, practiced in small gestures, can intertwine with knowledge. To be knowing about someone is to engage both with them and their place within our selves, wherein we endeavour to make room.