alchemy
Just started Avatar: the Last Airbender for the 2nd time. Taking notes. Now that I’ve mapped the 4 element onto the alchemists and my own psyche, the show has a secondary allegorical meaning. To Sontag’s point, the show is good in itself, but it’s straight forward enough that you can see a symbolic layer over it without much friction.
James Turrell’s 2014 exhibit at the Guggenheim—“Aten Reign”—translated to “Sun God.” It’s a visually encrypted meditation, one that you unlock by seeing a shape and it’s inverted shape at the same time (the tunnel & the pyramid). It is an alchemical mood, and there’s something about connecting Egypt to alchemy (alchemy actually translates to “f
... See moreTerence McKenna on translating the Hermetic corpus over Plato:
... See moreNear the start of the Renaissance, Jemistus Pletho brought books to the Florentine council for translation. Medici said, “Plato can wait, I’m getting old, do the Hermetic Corpus first, it’s much more important, we’ll do Plato later.” A few years later, 1493, Cosmo Medici died and never s
Terence McKenna on language and contradiction:
... See moreEvolve language and understanding to make our way back to the garden, back to Eden… Christ opened the door to paradise, but he closed the door to Eden.. We have to make our way back to the alchemical garden, that’s where meaning is, that’s what we feel, not rational schemas that are rationally beating u
Terence McKenna on the imagination:
... See moreThe imagination is central to the alchemical opus; the process goes on in the realm of imagination, taken on to be a physical dimension; we cannot understand the history ahead of us until we imagine a journey into the imagination. We have exhausted the Cartesian paradigm; the future of the human enterprise i
Terence McKenna on the alchemist’s view on nature:
... See moreThe modern existential myth says we are cast into matter, lost in a universe with no meaning, and we must MAKE it. This is the absurd in Sartre. “Nature is mute,” is as far from alchemical thinking as you can get; for the alchemist, nature was a great, open book'; they put it through processes, to l
coincidentia positorum : (an alchemical term) the union of opposites; you can’t understand anything unless you simultaneously grok what it is and what it isn’t. By a mere shift in perspective, a thing’s opposite comes into focus, and the opposites melt into a new whole. This has many symbolic expressions: the hermaphrodite, soul/luna, mercury/sulfu
... See moreNew sources around alchemy:
"Alchemy: The Poetry of Matter" by Brian Cotnoir
The Ezra Klein Show: This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor -- talks about the process of creating something from nothing, super relevant to drafting and the experience of the "rewrite" from a visual artist perspective.
The Ezra Klein Show: Best of: George Saunders on Kin
Real-time stereotype inversion: as situations come into play, try to shape a stereotype as fast as you can, WHILE ALSO forming the inverse of that stereotype. See a person, situation, appearance, or etiquette as a set of opposites that are both true at the same time. That guys not rudely blasting shit music in a quiet neighborhood. It’s a party! Et
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