Category Archives: writing

We Are The Land by Duncan N Pheasant

The land has spirit and we are the land…The rock pulses with energy and movement that we cannot detect…the rock sometimes shows himself and becomes recognizable like a face. The land is what we are, the land keeps us alive, the trees speak to each other about the land and share its nutrients, they live out their lives without any help from man. They are a community and we show them respect. Then there is the everlasting sky all others live beneath him with its many moods and gifts ,we offer prayer to all four directions. We say we don’t think about these things… we know all these things.

Permanent installation at Manitou Island Post Office

Growing up in Mchigeeng First Nation we were poor we didn’t know we were but didn’t feel like it…we had clean clothes food toys…No running water, no phone no inside toilet but we were happy…today I wonder about young kids seeing things on Facebook and tv like friends having parties, new cloths new toys, new this new that…big fancy houses…they look around their homes and community what do they see… What do you see ?

Our Ancestors foretold that water would someday be for sale. Back then this was hard to believe, since the water was so plentiful, so pure, and so full of energy, nutrition and spirit. Today we have to buy pure water, and even then the nutritional minerals have been taken out; it’s just empty liquid. Someday water will be like gold, too expensive to afford

Even the spirit, which belongs to the Great Mystery, returns to its source. Some of our people say this journey takes place on a path of stars. Others describe the spirit’s return to the Great Mystery as a drop of water falling into the ocean. It becomes a part of everything again as the light of a candle becomes one with the fire of the sun. That’s why we can sometimes feel our loved ones in the warm air, or hear them in a bird’s song…or even sense them in the…wind.
We feel them in certain areas or times of the year,, we sense them and think of them and dream of them. Sometimes they talk to us in the dream but most times it’s just good to see them…we wake up thinking of them ,The dream can last a day or we think of the dream for many years…yes they are with us..

Guardian of the Lake

A man by the lake wanted to live forever. A huge fish came about out of the water and pulled him in. The fish had spent his entire life looking for freedom from this world.
He told the man we will go to the door of eternity, you will step through one way and I will go through the other way. This sounded good to the man. They both went through the door.
There said the fish …I now will live a normal life and you will live forever. The man had become the fish. “Stop Wait” he said but the man who was a fish could not hear. To this day the guardian of the lake searches for the man who died a normal death many many years ago. The guardian of the lake, a huge ancient fish.

Mindemoya man

The Mindemoya man…A giant fish appeared to some men on the shore of Mindemoya lake ,they grabbed the fish and were surprised how the fish let himself be caught…they took the fish to the village and it began to cry like a human…A lonely woman came out to see what’s going on…she recognized the crying as her long lost husbands voice…she called out his name then the great fish began to speak “I was once a man but was turned into a fish, by a witch, because I rejected her…and my wife who I see now I cannot be with anymore” The people became afraid and dragged the big fish back to the water…The woman ran after them and jumped in the water with the fish…they were never seen again…next year the waters were teaming with fish and for many years after that.

I AM the Land

Nobody wants anyone to leave, We’re just trying to protect the land and waters for future generations, for all . 95% of British Columbia is unceded native territory as the treaty process for British Columbia started in the 1990s and has yielded only three treaties to date.
Enshrined in Canadian Charter of rights and freedoms Section 25A is the Royal Proclamation which recognizes and affirms indigenous title to land and requires treaties in order to legally possess. Where as no treaty exists those who willingly or inadvertently set themselves upon these lands must remove themselves forthwith. Canada is in violation of their own laws.

The Shaking Tent Ceremony by Norval Morrisseau

The Ojibway Indians had what we call a jeesekun, a shaking tent, or wigwam, where a medicine man does conjuring. There were two kinds of shaking tents. One had its power from the water, the other from the wind or earth. Some Ojibway built their shaking tent in the water, in order to receive power from it. Eight poles were cut and placed in a circle, and each pole was driven about two feet into the ground to keep the tent firm. Two hoops were placed inside the wigwam to keep the poles in position and would be covered with deer hide, birchbark or canvas. Rattles of tin or cari­bou hoof were placed inside to make a rattling noise.

Norval Morrisseau Painting
Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant’s Notes on
Norval Morrisseau Painting

All the Ojibway would gather and sit in a circle facing the shaking tent. This took place at night. The conjurer would disrobe, have his hands tied up and crawl inside the wigwam. He would not speak but would have one Indian, or all, start asking questions, whatever each one wished to know. As the conjurer crawled inside, the tent itself began to shake and the rattles were heard. The Ojibway believe a medicine wind blows from heaven in the tent and that is how it shakes. All the dogs tied close by began to yelp and were afraid but the people were not, for it does not affect human beings. What come into the wigwam to sing or talk are the water god Misshipeshu and other spirits of bears, serpents and animals, thunderbirds, the evil Windigo, the morning star, the sky, water, earth, sun and moon, also female and male sex organs. Each speaks in his own lan­guage but we have an interpreter whom we call Mikkinnuk, a small turtle who is the Devil him­self, who interprets for all these beings. So let it be known now and then remain a secret; it is the Devil himself who is the interpreter.

Norval Morrisseau
Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant

The Ojibway were given this shaking tent to do both good and evil. A lot of people of the Ojibway tribe used this conjuring tent to conjure people but a lot also used it to cure people, to find lost things, to defend the people from evil sor­cerers, or bad medicine-men, and to know about the future.

Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant Silent Hunter a living ghost that eats with it’s eyes
Mitchell Pluto Collection

Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant, Dedicated to Norval Morriseau on the anniversary of his birth
March 14 1932.
Spirit Warrior 18×24 canvas

Manitoulin island is a place of ancient spirits lying in wait within the cliffs and deep inland lakes. A man with a spirit face looks out across the cliffs as he paints on them. A weary hunter warrior realizes he now is a stranger in this magnificent stone garden He is a shadow man a shadow warrior.

The invisible man from the door of the unknown. He hears the pounding of the drum and heads to it. Modern day Ojibwe and Odawa men sing the songs of old. He stands beside them but they cannot see him He is a spirit warrior.

Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant Tribute to the hunter

written by ©Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant

Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant is a painter from the M’Chigeeng First Nation. He started painting in high school using colours and techniques inspired by Norval Morrisseau and other Woodland style artists. His grandfather, Ambrose Pheasant, told stories that were also a great influence on his artwork. Duncan uses his images to interpret Ojibwe legends and stories that surround the history of his ancestors and Manitoulin Island. Those legends which inspire his work are inscribed on the back of each original painting and a printed copy of the legend will be included with each purchase.

Perivale Gallery Duncan Neganigwane Pheasant

Madness in a Mad World By Wouter Kusters

Madness in a Mad World, or How to Stay Cool in a Warming World?

Draft version, November 6, 2020 Wouter Kusters, philosopher, writer and ‘expert by experience’

Introduction

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you”, says Yossarian, the main character of the famous novel Catch-22 (Joseph Heller, 1961). This satirical, though tragical, famous sentence is uttered in World War II, during which Yossarian, serving in the U.S. army as a bombardier in Italy, is in the grip of fear. He thinks there are clear signs that they are after him – which they are.

In 1958 an important study by Klaus Conrad is published, Die beginnende Schizophrenie, in which the German psychiatrist describes in close detail the various phases of what he calls ‘beginning schizophrenia’, and what we today prefer to call the stages of a florid psychosis: from the delusional mood, to a revelatory phase, an interplay of delusions and hallucinations, ending in an ‘apocalyptic phase’. This study is of high value, being the first of its kind that takes such a close look at what is actually going on in the experience of a psychotic shift. And its special merit is that it is not a single case study, but examines a large group of psychotic persons, all of the same age, same gender, under similar circumstances.

During World War II Conrad was, like most of his colleagues at the time, a member of the Nazi doctor union, and he was in the situation to be at the spot where it all happened: studying German front soldiers going mad. But although the occurrence of high anxiety and violent ideation in Conrad’s set of cases is remarkable, these peculiar circumstances of his field research are rarely taken into account when further examining his analyses. Instead, the coded and uncoded outcries from hell have only been inscribed quasi-neutrally and then locked away into medical archives as symptoms of an illness, not as signs of more comprehensive social, not to say, existential circumstances. Indications of what was actually at stake can be read only between the lines, e.g. Conrad (1958, 47): “In 1943 the boy again became seriously ill, was committed to a number of mental hospitals, and was finally a victim of the euthanasia movement.”

What will be the fate of the voices and lives of young people today, confronted with the prospects and facts of ecological destruction and climate catastrophes? How will psychiatrists describe their cases? How can it be avoided that their voices become neutralized, psychologized, stigmatized, and be silenced by the powers that be?

In this short paper I will sketch the psychodynamics of becoming aware of the looming climate catastrophes as a wakening process, analogous to individual psychotic processes. I assume that a psychosis can be considered as a perhaps impractical, but nevertheless meaningful answer to an existential crisis (cf. Kusters, 2020). I will draw these parallels under four psychosis related headings; intrusive messages, perplexity; trauma and mourning, and recovery – if any.

Intrusive messages

Let’s start with some facts. Global mean temperature will rise between 1.5 to 5 degrees Celsius this century. This leads to longer, more intense and frequent heatwaves, and unpredictable and heavier rainfall and thunderstorms. Oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic. The permafrost, the polar ice caps and the major glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising, and cities like Dhaka, Jakarta, Lagos, Shanghai, London and New York are threatened. Large stretches of land will become uninhabitable, because of the heat, the droughts, the lack of food and drinking water, which will probably lead to catastrophes like mass famines, mass migrations and war.

The facts and predictions are well-known, but what do they imply for our sanity and insanities, how do these facts influence our spiritual, mental and physical well-being? How can we stay calm and sane in this madness of world catastrophes?

Let’s take a look first at the individual level of a person with the first signs of a looming psychosis. At this stage things that used to be taken as normal at face value by that individual, now appear in a different light. The world has become a strange place to live, and daily routines and habits make place for an uncanny sphere of wonder, puzzlement, awe and anxiety. When this pre-psychotic onset develops you start to receive signs and messages through various media about a suggested secret, an idea, a vague plan or even conspiracy that lies at the heart of this strange world. Slowly you detect that everything is connected, and that the vague allusions and signs should be interpreted as indicating that everything evolves towards some kind of deeper cosmic change, towards a kind of revelation or apocalypse (see Kusters, 2020).

Examining individual psychosis, it is often assumed that these vague feelings and ponderings about meanings, mysteries and signs of revelations and catastrophes, only belong to an individual disturbed subjective reality, not matching objective reality. But when we examine the analogous path on the macro-level of the climate crisis, things turn out different. The intrusive signs and messages that we receive concerning the climate crisis, are from reliable sources in shared reality, and most messages refer eventually to our common practices of scientific research, with evidence-based and statistically proven hypotheses and facts. These signs and messages reach us through the internet and other mass media, and when we get in their spell, we find apocalyptic signs everywhere: in the air, in the water, in the subnarratives and hidden assumptions of numerous conversations today; in the background whisperings of the natural environment that is dying, and last but not least in the cries of anger and despair of especially the younger generations who take head to the streets.

Recently the signs and messages from the climate crisis found their expression on the human face of one of those youngsters. It was the at that time 15-years old Greta Thunberg, who had gone through a so-called episode of depression, anxiety, and autism. Her ponderings and utterances have been spared from the medical archives so far, and she has become the intrusive face of climate madness, of despair, shock and truth and at the same time the face of stubborn consciousness and action.

Perplexity: shock and truth

When further stretching the comparison between psychosis with climate crisis awareness, we see that just as individual pre-psychotic experiences may develop into a full-blown florid psychosis, all the climate signs and messages may also turn into feelings of general climate alarm, panic, anxiety, confusion, not to say, madness. But in contrast, while most people think that a florid psychosis is to be avoided at all costs, many of us think that these feelings of climate alarm and climate panic need first to be promoted, ‘lived through’, and to be processed in order to start to act authentically and to be able to live in truth. Or, as Greta Thurnberg put it in her Davos speech (2019):

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

So when being overwhelmed by the messages of doom, you may enter this phase of shock and truth. The better-informed psychopathologists (see Sass, 1992, Podvoll, 1990), and many of the experts by experience, know that on the psychotic path there is this sublime and terrifying moment of shock and truth, which might be a source of inspiration and wonder, but often also of awe, anxiety and confusion (see Kusters, 2020). At that moment the psychotic person is confronted with the truth of the depth of the abyss, or the unground of her existence; she is in radical doubt about everything in time and space, in history and geography, and she experiences, as the DSM calls it, perplexity at the height of the psychotic episode.

On the macro-level of the climate catastrophe it is not seldom found that people also mention a moment or a short period in time in which the truth about climate change really shocks them into perplexity. They become deeply confused and their whole world view tumbles down and turns around. As an example, some quotes from Mary Annaïse Heglar, communications professional in New York at the Natural Resources Defense Council (2018):

“…there was a moment when we had to face the reality of climate change. For most of us, I bet that moment hurt. I know it did for me… I skipped denial and went right to shock. I floated around on a dark, dark cloud. I frequently and randomly burst into tears… Where other people saw bustling crowds of people, I saw death and destruction. Even as I walked on dry land, I saw floods. I imagined wild animals, especially snakes, getting out of the zoos in the aftermath of natural disasters.”

Trauma and mourning

It may be quite a shock to find out that because of climate disruption all received wisdom, all earlier ideas about sense and meaning, and our place in history are no longer relevant. The truth of the climate crisis may well be followed by a so-called climate trauma. The Australian philosopher, Clive Hamilton (2014) said:

“Insight into climate change is not only achieved by knowing the numbers. There is also a profound feeling that you only experience when the facts touch you fully. Some call this the Oh shit, we are really in trouble moment. One achieves it by reading a scientific article, others because they, already familiar with the facts, undergo a profound experience in nature. Or they discover in another crushing way that their vision of the world is destroyed. Such an experience is inevitably traumatic and if you have not experienced it, you will not understand the problem either, because it is immensely large and transforming. The insight gained changes your mood, it fills your mind, it changes the wallpaper of your life. ”

Hamilton loosely introduces here the term trauma in the context of climate change, but how does this traumatic experience relate to other more usual individual traumas? The climate trauma first of all differs in the fact that the trauma inducing events lie in the future and have not yet become fully present reality. Normal traumas have their origin in events in the past, which slowly sinks further and further away into history. This slow distancing provides the possibilities in time and space for absorbing and processing the trauma. In the case of the climate trauma, however, the more time passes, the more serious and real the traumatic events become. We could say that while past traumas originate in the real, they develop and spread through the imaginary level, and become eventually part of the symbolic. This future climate trauma starts on the symbolic – theoretical and informative – level, develops into the imaginary, and ends into the real of a catastrophe sooner or later. Secondly, in the case of the climate trauma we know beforehand about the traumatic events and their possible consequences. In contrast with the usual traumas, we cannot say that we did not see it coming. Bruno Latour, the famous French philosopher remarks about this situation (2017: 25): “People have opened their eyes, they have seen, they have known, and they have forged straight ahead with their eyes shut tight.”

But how then could we live truthfully with these prospects, and deal with climate trauma? Just as with other traumas, the first thing to do is to acknowledge the truth, to be conscious about what exactly happened, or in this case, what will exactly happen. We should know and examine the truth, not hide ourselves from it, nor deny it, downplay it, or run away from it. Because, there is no time or place on earth to hide from the truth of climate catastrophes. The second step in trauma processing is to work through all the various emotional reactions that the climate truth invokes. Some of these emotions, like anger, grief and concern can be further processed in acting out, living more environmentally aware, and in connecting and sharing climate worries with others.

However, many of the emotions around the climate crisis do not so straightforwardly lead to new satisfying, positive practices. Many people have become cynical, apathetic, aggressive or deeply melancholic, despairing and inconsolable. They do not so easily connect to the mores and habits of the environmental movement, where the unwritten rules of conduct are all too often that you should hold up hope, and remain positive. For these negative traumatic feelings, there has been some attention among psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. Perhaps best known in this field of ecological psychology is Renee Lertzman, who says (2015: xiii): “The grief, mourning, anger, confusion and overwhelm that can accompany awareness of environmental issues remain largely unaddressed, private and professionally and socially taboo.” She then argues for a more compassionate and therapeutic approach towards those who suffer from environmental degradation, and who cannot or do not express their capacity for care in a positive way. She stresses the need to explore how and in what way individuals lost their relations to the natural environment, and the need to share and mourn about what we have lost already, and what we will further lose in the future.

Such approaches by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts could be helpful in guiding people through our bitter times. However, all too often it is assumed that climate anxieties and grief can in principle be taken away from the individual, be dealt with, without essential changes to our common ways of being, to our subjectivities, identities and ways of life. These essential changes – these miracles – did however not yet occur. And therefore, the experiences and fate of many is like that of Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist, who has been seriously affected by everything he has learned about the climate future. He writes: “I lose sleep over climate change almost every single night. I can’t remember how long this has been happening, but it’s been quite a while, and it’s only getting worse. I confess: I need help.” Holthaus went to see a counselor and, as he put it, the therapist “seemed unprepared for my emotional crisis. His simple advice was only, ‘do what you can.’”

The future, without miracles, is expected to be very bleak, and in terms of turmoil, world destruction, starvation, death and madness it looks too extreme and shocking to be manageable by therapies that focus on individual adaptation. ‘Do what you can’ is not enough to save us from despair. But then, how to deal with deep grief, anxiety and confusion, when mourning is no longer enough?

Schizo Recovery – if any

Sarah Myhre, an oceanologist and climate scientist, founder of the Rowan Institute, https://www.rowaninstitute.org/ says (2019): “I experience a profound level of grief on a daily basis because of the scale of the crisis that is coming, and I feel I’m doing all I can but it’s not enough. I don’t have clinical depression. I have anxiety exacerbated by the constant background of doom and gloom of science. It’s not stopping me from doing my work, but it’s an impediment. It is like I’m looking at the world through a looking glass, like I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. I feel like I’m walking around in an isolation chamber.”

This is not the place, nor is it my expertise, to come up with a solution that liberates the world from climate catastrophes. Instead, I will sketch roughly some ways-out, and ways-through found on the individual paths of psychosis, that may be of interest for those who suffer from feelings of world catastrophe. Perhaps we can learn from them, from us, who have gone through similar states of minds, through unspeakable fears of world destruction, along experiences of apocalypse, loss of trust in the world, fragmentations and revelations. Because in that frightening state of chaos, also uncanny new connections and new realities are explored. In a similar vein, Kylie Harris, psychologist, writer and activist, says: “Individuals healing their own personal trauma or crisis can become part of a larger movement geared towards healing the entire planet. Importantly, we propose that the emergency mode offers an empowering psychological state for individuals to navigate experiences of crisis. Rather than a state that exacerbates negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, panic, or paranoia, it is a state that can facilitate enhanced awareness and collective transformative action.” When examining these states, this ‘emergency mode’, as Harris calls it, what kind of help can experts by experience, with their real experiences with rabbit holes and isolation chambers, offer to people like Sarah Myhre – and by implication, to the whole world? A few suggestions are as follows.

Those who have been there before, have easier access to other ways of connecting with time and history, and therefore, with the future. In our normal non-psychotic lives before our climate awakenings we navigated on a kind of hidden clock and common calendar in which this morning is nearer to us than last week, and last year nearer than thousand years ago. But under climate change as well as in psychotic life temporal experience is different. Our time frames of our past and of human history explode into vast geological and cosmic times. The events of these decades of climate disruption resonate with those of 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs became extinct. The pace of human history fuses and is confused with that of natural history, and our minds lose themselves and fall back in the unthinkable fantasms and realities of dark time-spaces of the deep past.

Paradoxically, at the same time, we get out of our minds, seduced, inspired and fascinated by the fact that in exactly our life time, in exactly these decades, these years, these very months, weeks, days, and right now, humanity is on a cosmic time peak level. We may ruminate and phantasize over the graphs of rising carbon levels, that had been constant for millions of years, suddenly, exactly in this last decade, out of all times, shoot into the sky. We celebrate the intensity of these very moments that everything is being concentrated into our minds, the whole cosmos, the living natural species and the dead ones, into our knowledge, and from this intensity we may shift and drift away from all normalcy into the wild life and death. Every minor individual act in our age of disruptive climate change reaches out to cosmic times, to the creation and destruction of world, species, forces of ice, air and water.

My first suggestion then would be to develop a different stance towards time. Instead of using clock and calendar time as a means of knowing objective reality, and become paralysed by the seemingly determinate future, we ‘d better use dreaming time and imaginative time frames as ways of modulating time and reality experience in the present.

In our times we ourselves have become so powerful that we are able to influence, modify and destroy much of the ecological fine-balanced tissue on earth. We are powerful, we have knowledge, and this same power has grown so strong, that it undermines itself, and threatens its own ground of existence. This resonates with the paradoxical schizo-mix of megalomania and paranoia, in which we feel ourselves as master of our minds, that stretch out over all universe, and at the same time as being delivered to that same universe that overwhelms us. My second suggestion is then to learn from the seemingly deviant schizo ways of dealing with the paradoxes of feeling infinitisemally small and infinitely large at the same time, now that we live in a time where these paradoxes have become more evident and thrown in our faces in the real of the non-schizo experience as well. The climate crisis induces arousal, feelings of urgency, of high importance about everything that happens. It leads to a kind of strong moralization of everyday life. Every small decision has an influence on the whole, and we, schizos and non-schizos now live in a time that every minor act spreads through all networks on all levels at once, and then turns back to itself. Everything is connected, and everything is processed and counted in terms of its effects on the whole. The totality of networks acts as a new ‘superorganism’ of which we are all part. It is as if an imaginary Eye and Mind of Nature is watching us, and through the lens of which we also watch ourselves. Such vaguely abstract loops, such suspicions of agencies, and immediate paradoxical connections between yourself and the Whole, are the playground and the unbearable bottom of reality that are roamed on in schizo experience. My third suggestion is to learn from schizo experience how nonhuman forces and other ways of life are experienced, are absorbed into of schizo narratives and new kinds of ethics, in order to enlarge our sensories to reconnect with the desperate voices of Nature.

In conclusion, perhaps it is time to learn from the wisdom of how to navigate in these unknown territories from those who are experts by experience. And perhaps at least a tiny part of future solutions may lie in acting against the madness of the world, by learning from the mad – and keeping in mind what a modern Yossarian would say: “Just because you’re psychotic, doesn’t mean that world catastrophe is not happening.”

Literature

Conrad, Klaus. 1958. Die beginnende Schizophrenie: Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns. Stuttgart: Thieme Verlag.

Hamilton, Clive (2014). It is already too late. Interview in Vrij Nederland, https://www.vn.nl/klimaatexpert-clive-hamilton-het-is-al-te-laat/

Harris, Kylie (2020). The Rebirth of People and Planet in a Time of Global Emergency. An Open Letter from the Spiritual Emergence(y) Community. https://medium.com/illumination/the-rebirth-of-people-and-planet-in-a-time-of-global-emergency-ce83d222c813

Heglar, Mary Annaïse, (2018). When Climate Change Broke My Heart and Forced Me to Grow Up, https://medium.com/@maryheglar/when-climate-change-broke-my-heart-and-forced-me-to-grow-up-dcffc8d763b8

Heller, Joseph, (1961). Catch-22. New York: Simon & Schuster. Holthaus, Eric, (2018).

Climate Change Blues. Sierra Magazine, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2018-2-march-april/last-words/eric-holthaus-got-those-climate-change-blues

Kusters, W. (2020). A Philosophy of Madness. The Experience of Psychotic Thinking. Cambrigde (MA): MIT Press.

Latour, Bruno (2017 [2015]) Oog in oog met Gaia. Acht lezingen over het Nieuwe Klimaatregime. Translated from the French by Rokus Hofstede en Katrien Vandenberghe, Face a Gaïa. Huit conférences sur le Nouveau Régime Climatique. Amsterdam: Octavo.

Lertzman, Renee, (2015). Environmental Melancholia: Psychoanalytic dimensions of engagement. London: Routledge.

Myre, Sarah, (2019). It’s the End of the World as They Know It. The distinct burden of being a climate scientist. Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/07/weight-of-the-world-climate-change-scientist-grief/

Podvoll, E. (1990). The Seduction of Madness: Revolutionary Insights into the World of Psychosis and a Compassionate Approach to Recovery at Home. New York: HarperCollins.

Sass, Louis (1992). Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature And Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Thurnberg, Greta (2019). Davos Speech. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate

Shock Effects Book by Wouter Kusters

Wouter Kusters (1966) is a philosopher, linguist and writer. He wrote his dissertation in linguistics in 2003 on language change and societal change. In 2004 he published his first book on psychosis and philosophy, Pure Waanzin (Pure Madness). In this book Kusters connects lived experience of psychosis (his own autobiographical notes) to the so-called third person perspective of nurses, psychologists and psychiatrists. This book won the Van Helsdingen Award for the best work in the boundary domain of philosophy and psychiatry, and also the Socrates Award for the best book in philosophy in Dutch of the year. After a career switch to philosophy and writing, in 2007 Kusters published Alleen (Alone), together with co-author Sam Gerrits and artist Jannemiek Tukker in 2007, in which various stories are told about and from the isolation cell in a psychiatric hospital. In 2014 Kusters’ last and final work on madness and philosophy is published: Filosofie van de Waanzin. Fundamentele en grensoverschrijdende inzichten, in which Kusters present an all-ecompassing view on madness and philosophy. This work also receives the Socrates Award, and has been translated into English in 2020. Translations to Chinese and Arabic are expected in 2022 and 2023. Today Wouter Kusters is a self-employed writer, teacher, coach and editor, who often works on the limit area of philosophy and madness, and who has been extending his thoughts of expertise in madness and philosophy to more social and historical themes, that also concern madness on a super-personal level of analysis.

from Bio from Dr. Wouter Kusters Talk at https://suicide-and-its-prevention.eu/speakers/dr-wouter-kusters/

Publications and academic work

Kusters, W. (2021). Ontsnappen aan de verschrikking. Inleiding in het denken van Frederic Neyrat, [To Escape from he Fright. An introduction in the thinking of Frederic Neyrat]. Amsterdam: Lontano.

Kusters, W. (2020). A Philosophy of Madness. The Experience of Psychotic Thinking. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.

Kusters, W. (2016). Philosophy and Madness. Radical Turns in the Natural Attitude to Life. Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, 23: 2, pp. 129 – 146.

Kusters, W.(2004). Pure waanzin [Pure Madness].

Kusters, W. (2003). Linguistic Complexity: The Influence of Social Change on Verbal Inflection. PhD Dissertation. Utrecht: LOT Dissertation Series 77.

Feature photo Jonathan Bowers

ALL WRITING IN THIS POST IS A COPYRIGHT OF WOUTER KUSTERS. THIS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT

Shuffle Poetry by Alfonso Peña

Critical commentary on the book “Shuffle poetry” (2020) by Alfonso Peña
By Claudia Villa


Reading Alfonso Peña’s “Shuffle poetry” generates many questions, which challenge us as active readers, especially those of us who move through the surrealist texts of all time. Posed in this way, it is a new challenge that is presented to the reader of our texts, which joins the permanence of universal consciousness, the question and answer or the eternal question that dissolves in the chaos of the deepest dreams that we have not finished yet. Fully decipher. In this sense, we ask ourselves: is there or will there be an evolution of surrealism? This movement conceived by Breton mainly, as we know it in its beginnings, in its manifesto. It is a current that has been transformed, thanks to the social, cultural, economic and political crises that have arisen throughout the world. But this does not diminish the creative capacities and active cultural forces, quite the contrary, they are the support to increase the forms of dynamism typical of this style.


The movement that cannot be abstracted from the effects of these crises, which have occurred transversally, both in Europe and now in Latin America, is key and influences (to a greater or lesser extent), which has allowed an enrichment of the surrealist postulates. Mainly, because it allows the reassessment of different optics that come together in artistic elements that move to make notice of the changes and the force that is maintained and spreads like a kaleidoscope in different ways. Therefore, the vision of these artists, poets and writers that is patented in essays, poetry, narrative, photography, painting, literary criticism, among others, constitutes a permanent explosion of meanings that transmute into signifiers to make us see this structure as the game dreamed by the first surrealists, in which dreamlike and now virtual components underlie that cross each of our creations from side to side.


It can be affirmed that the surrealist movement, embedded as I said by permanent elements of modernity, has been reformulating itself, as the exhibitors of “Shuffle poetry” put it and also, it is interesting to understand their gaze as part of the total freedom that assumes each creator when faced with his work. Many also join the cosmic and ancestral call of our Latin American continent to capture in the works the roots of each aboriginal people and the reconnection with their first words, sculptures and the nature of man. This is how the vision of this surrealism, so rich in contents and games, radiates to multiple forms and ways of expression, both plastic, visual and written, which give life to a new surrealist approach, which although it has not stopped beating, as as it was conceived, it now promotes various multifaceted ways to enter into the perspective of reality or non-reality present in our days.


It is also necessary to comment on the expression of transgression that marks the works of the exhibitors in this book, which leads to a permanent need to play and to break the schemes that broadens the concept of freedom in creation. This is a common element that distinguishes these works, which are forged from inner worlds rich in dreamlike and liberating content, where transformation is a permanent axis of universes in constant motion, as represented in different worlds or parallel universes. Creation, in this way, continuously forges and destroys itself, which would constitute the object of its birth and constant evolution: mutations, evolutions, changes of form, content and continent, which are like permanent waves that contribute Surrealist art and its continuous reconstruction.


Another aspect that can be seen in “Shuffle poetry” is the permanent transgression towards social signs formed around a central axis that looks only towards one way of expression, which allows the constant reworking of other signs and other escape routes. towards the liberation of men as social beings who live within a community. The alteration of the meanings, already patented, by a single controlling mechanism, thus generates the ability to alter the represented codes that (on the one hand) are reflected in their own city languages, in addition to the reworking of schemes that are rearranged at any time. order or figure and who want more than anything to find a way of subsistence in the movement typical of the tribe. These forms are appreciated and reconstructed many times, from the collapse of imposed situations that end up being formulated from other varied points of view.
So, the ways that surrealist art takes to survive the imposed conceptions are varied, in an attempt to achieve dissimilar points that allow freedom of expression.

Claudia Vila Molina

Writer born in Viña del Mar, Chile. Professor of language and communication at PUCV, poet and literary critic. In 2012, she published her first book, The Invisible Eyes of the Wind. She has published in renowned Chilean and foreign digital media: Babelia (Spain), Letras de Chile (Chile), Triplov and Athena de Portugal, among others. During the year 2017 she participates in the Xaleshem group with poetic texts for the surrealist anthologies: “Composing the illusion” in honor of Ludwig Zeller and “Full Moon”, in honor of Susana Wald. In 2018, she integrates the feminist anthology IXQUIC released both in Europe and in Latin America. In 2020 she participates reviewing the conversation book “Shuffle poetry, Surrealism in Latin America” ​​by Alfonso Peña (Costa Rica), also writes a poetic prose text for the book “Arcano 16, La torre“, by the same author. Likewise, she participates in the book “120 notes of Eros. Written portraits of surrealist women” by Floriano Martins (Brazilian surrealist poet, writer, visual artist and cultural manager). In this year (2021) she publishes her second poetry book Poética de la erotica, amores y desamores by Marciano editores, Santiago.

Dream Incubation in the Temple of Sleep

Incubation is perhaps most easily understood in contrast to the art of Theurgy or ‘Work of the Gods.’ Theurgy is a process of anabasis or magical ascent whereby practitioners, such as the early Neoplatonists, especially Iamblichus and Proclus, achieved henosis or mystical union with a deity or the demiurge. However, anabasis was not always of primary importance, or even of interest, to many of the ancient Greek philosophers and magicians. More than five hundred years before the Neoplatonists arrived on the scene, Presocratic poets and philosophers, including Pythagoras and Parmenides, were preoccupied instead with katabasis—a dreamy descent to the domain of the dead, and to the dark goddess who rules over that realm.

Mirror Gazing Ecdysis Mitchell Pluto 2022

For the Platonists, katabasis was understood as the descent of the soul into a body upon incarnation. Hades, additionally, was allegorized and viewed as the very world in which we, as incorporated beings, inhabit. Socrates says to Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, for instance, “[perhaps] in reality we’re dead. Once I even heard one of the wise men say that we are now dead and that our bodies are our tombs.” Again, in the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates say to Simmias of Thebes, “[we], who dwell in the hollows of [the earth], are unaware of this and we think we live above.” And, later in the same dialogue, “Those who are deemed to have lived an extremely pious life are freed and released from the regions of the earth as from a prison; they make their way up to a pure dwelling place and live on the surface of the earth.” Therefore, the only way to go, for Plato and his successors, was up—in an anabatic flight to the demiurge, through the various planetary spheres that separate the divine nous and Monad from the sensible world below. Theurgy was the means by which such an anabasis was accomplished. The Presocratics, conversely, leaving Mount Olympus to the gods, for the most part, focused their energies instead upon katabasis; on transporting themselves to the netherworld.

Dream Mare Mitchell Pluto 2022

The means by which these iatromanteia or “healer-seers” directed this delirious drop was via the use of an ancient divination and healing technique known as incubation. In ancient Greece, this was generally done inside of sacred and secluded caves that were sacred to certain gods, daimons, nymphs, and other metaphysical entities. Eventually, the practice would be translated to special temples dedicated to the technique, and finally into a special incubation chamber, usually positioned adjacent to the temple itself.
The ancient Ionian Greek philosopher, recognized as the ‘Father of Western Philosophy,’ Pythagoras of Samos, for example, is said to have descended to Hades by entering an underground cave. While Pythagoras left no writings of his own, the late Neoplatonic philosopher, Algis Uždavinys, a past head of the Department of Humanities at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, Kaunas, explains,

the subterranean tomb-like chamber represents Hades for Pythagoras. Hence, Pythagoras descended into Hades, that is, the subterranean holy chamber (like the Holy of Holies, entered by the Jewish High Priest on the occasion of Yom Kippur) that he had made himself, according to Diogenes Laertius (Vitae phil. 2). When he came up, withered and looking like a Shaiva ascetic, he said that “he had been down to Hades and even read out his experiences [aloud to the crowd].”

A similarly famous although obscure Presocratic philosopher, Parmenides of Elea, celebrated as both the ‘Father of Logic’ and the ‘Father of Metaphysics,’ wrote a dactylic hexametrical poem recounting his trip to Hades, and the underworld goddess whom he encountered. At the junction of three roads, the goddess instructed Parmenides as to the true nature of reality. His proem to “Peri Physeôs” begins,

The mares that carry me as far as longing can reach
rode on, once they had come and fetched me onto the legendary road of the divinity, the road that carries the man who knows through the vast and dark unknown.
[…]
And the goddess welcomed me kindly and took
my right hand in hers and spoke these words as she addressed me…

In his proem, the divinity proceeded to instruct Parmenides in the laws of logic that we know today. That is, it was a mysterious, underworld goddess from whom Parmenides received the very rules of reason, with which he returned to the land of the living for the inauguration a new era. To a world which turned on mythos—mythology—Parmenides introduced the novel pivot of logos—logic. Although, we must admit that the weird way in which the ‘Father of Logic’ acquired that understanding appears to contradict the very laws with which he was entrusted.
Moreover, Parmenides’ words may provide us with a subtle indication of just what incubation may have entailed for these heroes of Hades. The first thing the poet mentions are the mares that pull his chariot. The chariot is a token of the sun god, whose solar vehicle is pulled throughout the skies by a handsome team of heavenly horses. Indeed, ever since the time of the worship of Shammesh or Utu, the sun god of ancient Mesopotamia, the chariot has been the province of the Sol. But, the sun isn’t just about the light—for, the sun also journeys into the Underworld, like Osiris in the Dwat, through the dark, intuitive animations of Aidoneus’ alcazar. Every time we venture into sleep, we quietly and blindly slide into the Stables of Silence. Hence the false etymology suggested by the word nightmares, ‘horses of the dark.’ Like the Hunter’s three-legged horse in the fairytale of the Princess and the Tree, these ‘nightmares’ “know everything”—including the invisible way to the “legendary road” that leads to “the divinity.” The archaic techniques of dream incubation are akin to these mystical, Moiraic mares, and they alone are possessed of the potential to move us from the familiar to the fringe—down the alien road that carries the “man who knows” through the “vast and dark unknown.”

P.D. Newman October 16, 2022

P.D. Newman

P.D. Newman is an independent researcher located in the southern US, specializing in the history of the use of entheogenic substances in religious rituals and initiatory rites. He is the author of the books, Alchemically Stoned: The Psychedelic Secret of Freemasonry, Angels in Vermilion: The Philosophers’ Stone from Dee to DMT, and the forthcoming title, Day Trips and Night Flights: Anabasis, Katabasis, and Entheogenic Ekstasis in Myth and Rite. The Secret Teachings of All Ages (TV Series documentary) 2023

The Hug
Acrylic on canvas 60x80cm
Hoda Hussein 2022

14 September 2022 7:17 pm Earth Greenwich time zone

A letter from Oranous to Pluto on the Sleep Temple

Who believed their bed was a four-legged bear taking them on their back for a night sky ride as their own bear cub? I did. And I always woke up in the morning and kept my eyes shut till I hear family voices in the house so I am sure my parent bear landed me in the right place to start another day acting like a human. It takes practice to master acting like a human this is why we have to do it every day. But we must also not forget who we are this is why parent Bear kept their legs and body in the human house but with their tail and head on their own and took me as their child on journeys and trips at night where I can be in awareness of all that is. No wonder it was very difficult to pretend I am afraid of the scarab that landed on my hand in the nursery! I was not. The teachers were. And that was weird to me. I suppose I also was weird for them. However, I kept that memory of the friend scarab insect that tickle my palm and I still smile at that. Who would think I had an oil well in my salon where I bathed in whenever exhausted and opened my veins to it renewing my blood completely in sessions where Hathor was standing at my back massaging me? Okay well, I had a Native American tribe settling their tipi in my living room so… Let’s say this is normal in my life. So what is a sleep temple or a dream temple? I am! Well, I guess we all are in a way. Always just believed in a sacred temple where the blood circulates around the heart like pilgrims around the sacred cube of “Ka’ba” hence ka and ba. But as I can move and I am not still at all I prefer to see myself as a Mer-ka-ba “boat in Arabic”. Oh, how I loved this when I knew that Mer meant beloved in the ancient Egyptian language! Yes I know I am loved and visited but all types of loving beings. This is so beautiful! Still, I don’t think I learned yet to act humanely perfectly and instead I look for my equals who also could not really perfect the like human acting. There is something beautiful in our imperfections. Kind of childish and more related to the womb than birth. A whole multiverse moving changing developing evolving in action inside the womb of space. A multiverse that is in fact one single child in process of becoming. Did I tell you I once dreamed of having surgery on my lungs and my heart? Well, I did. And the woman doctor gave me a prescription. That I followed! I would not be that committed following a prescription of a daily life touchable doctor, so-called “real” anyway.

Hugs Bye for now

Hoda Hussein

Hoda Hussein

Egyptian creative writer poetess and novelist, artist painter and translator. Published many poetry books and novels in Arabic language. Represented Egypt in poetry and novels festivals and encounters in several countries like Yemen, Spain, India, France, Cuba, and Chile. Made creative writing workshops for kids in many schools in Cairo Egypt. Received rewards for poetry, novels and for translations in Chile, Macedonia and Egypt
Was entitled as a universal ambassador for peace by the peace ambassadors circle that works under the UNESCO

The Inhabitant of the Dream Temple
Verónica Cabanillas Samaniego

The temple of dreams is located in principle in an unlimited place, it is not exactly an island, it is the sky itself in immense melancholy, surrounded by the sea and in the absence of farewells. Towards all directions a path towards you, and I discover each treasure at the bottom of the word. In the absence and presence of everything, I hear bordering a harmonious song flowing like an infinite abyss around us.

The Temple of Sleep in self.
Verónica Cabanillas Samaniego

The paradise that we have penetrated and invented is resolved like the design of a luminous dream, which we glimpsed to see a long time ago, until we rediscover the trace, shake off the dust and build the raft that takes us from me to you and vice versa, yes, on this side the sleep is deep, in this temple of gods we are simple people, trying to take forever a piece of heaven and looking for a dignified death, where our names are heard and pronounced only by hallucinated insects and dogs on the last day of the humanity, we only dream that on the last day of the world we will not forget to feed them, and the last poem we wrote and the last brush stroke on the white we gave, undermine my pain to the depths, and be reborn in a beautiful pack of dogs, in another time, another planet, another galaxy as far as we can see in the temple of dreams. Because only the measure of the vision is equal to the measure of what is imagined and because everything that one builds is the measure of what he managed to imagine. In the temple of dreams I realized that, and why I was already here

Verónica Cabanillas Samaniego.
Algarrobo, Chile, Octubre 2022.

Verónica Cabanillas Samaniego

Verónica Cabanillas Samaniego (Lima, 1981), is a poet and visual artist. She has exhibited individually in Lima and collectively in Europe and Latin America: El asombro del colmillo, Le Petit Canibaal, Valencia (2014); Ludwig Zeller, composing the illusion, Taller de Rokha Gallery, Santiago de Chile (2017); One hundred years of Surrealism, Espacio Matta Cultural Center, Santiago de Chile (2019-2020), International exhibition of surrealism, Kudak Gallery, Cairo-Egypt (2022), Echo of contemporary surrealism, French Institute of Alexandria, Egypt (2022). She published in 2014 TUyYO by desktop publishing and participates in various poetry anthologies: IXQUIC. International Anthology of Feminist Poetry (Editorial Verbum, Madrid, 2018); Wagered deep on the run of six rats to see which would catch the first fire / Surrealist and Outsiders (RW Spryszak, Chicago, 2018); Liberoamericanas, 80 contemporary poets (Liberoamerica, Spain / Argentina / Uruguay, 2018); Narrow doors in wide green fields / Surrealists and Outsiders (RW Spryszak, Chicago, 2019). She has participated in the V Lima Poetry Festival (2014); IV Antifil Alternative Book Fair, Lima (2019). Her visual work is published in Derrame magazine (Chile), Canibaal (Spain), La vertèbre et le rossignol N ° 5, Vies de Saint-Artaud (Canada), Vol (France), The Room (Egypt). She is part of the book 120 nights of Eros, a compendium of surrealist women made by Floriano Martins, ARC editions, Brazil (2021). She currently co-directs with Magdalena Benavente the magazine Honidi Magazine, in Algarrobo, Chile.

Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel

FROM THE SOUL.

The melody of silence.
I search endlessly for labyrinths across the fields I will find.
Plants have eyes and they see me.
I spill my blood of color pigments.
With the wind I always seek to know infinite mountains wrinkled by time.
That golden light lets me dominate, with veiled rain and magical scents from my hidden memories of a man of the land.
Luminous nature with an open belly shows me a trace of the sun.
Conscientious without desolation, living nature, the plants have begun to love me.

DESDE EL ALMA.

La melodía del silencio.
Yo busco laberintos sin cesar a campo traviesa voy a encontrar.
Las plantas tienen ojos y me ven.
Derramo mi sangre de pigmentos de color.
Con el viento siempre busco conocer infinitas montañas arrugadas por el tiempo.
Esa luz dorada me deja dominar, con lluvias veladas y olores mágicos de mis recuerdos ocultos de un hombre de tierra.
Naturaleza lumínica y de vientre abierto me muestra un trazo del sol.
De conciencia sin desolación, naturaleza viva las plantas han comenzado a quererme.

Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel Santiago, Chile, Octubre 2022

Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel

René Ortega, was one of the winners in the international biennial of contemporary art October 3, 2022. Rene has exhibited work in Chile and Argentina. He is involved in many cultural art programs that have related to hospitals, children and teaching art professionally. His most recent show was Mental Labyrinths at the Til Til Cultural Center Art gallery on June 18, 2022

“My concern is the human figure as a feeling of primitive and irrational states, whose main point are the heads, universal thought of the creation of man and center of the universe. All this led to a mutation of the plastic and pictorial language”.

Featured art photo Rene Fernando Ortega Villarroel

Angel of the Paths Claudia Vila Molina

Texts extracted from the unpublished collection of poems “Ciénaga”

5
21 seconds they play your name
Like a shooting star I count the spaces
To lose myself in the water.

6
We are stopped by the claws of the wind
It’s time to sleep they tell us
we are asleep
Like fugitive silhouettes
We have gone astray.

7
The angel of the paths leads
our light
his hands lengthen the stems of the day
stretch contours.

8
My cloud brings pieces of time closer
I’m gloomy like these worm-eaten plants
Someone else will come from the night
To collect some forgotten landscape.

9
Unexpectedly I open my eyes towards you
I like to hear whispers from the outside line
Your eyes open other doors
And they stay sheltered from the shade.

10
Since that time I remember you
You slowly invade my landscapes
Cold voices bring the threads of that web closer
They surround the absent body.

11
I will open my eyes once more
When the stars dwell in our bodies
And a drop slipped through the skin
Suspend all reefs high.

12
Violet petals fall successively on us
The wind is gone, but the shadow remains
Water slides streams into the night
And the last fire extinguishes my stars.

Poems extracted from the book “Poemas de sur”

House and Plum IV

Stealth remains attentive to all caresses
My kisses keep looking for their route
And I remember the first home, the smells tremble with their laughter
Your look weighs on the eyelids of the imagination
The smells will come to dream of the intimate past
So long without looking back
Memory takes so long
It’s something illusory like the blue roses in the garden
The bridge where I whisper a name
a silhouette arrives tired to tell me
that figure sits in the memories
And I can no longer hide
in the holes of the old walls
but if the shadow is your name
I will continue whispering inside the empty space
and the walls will see their signs in the passing of things
beyond we will continue drawing in the rooms
and they will continue to walk through those passages
where the smoke today flies calmly.

House and plum V

We remember the fog visits us through the window
The green eyes returned to tour our nights
And an old walker passed through the house
We return to the site of the visits
The lamps lulled the traveling sound
Only God listens to us on this winter Friday
And I whisper to you not to repeat things
Our gestures turn off the lights
Fall memories unwrap
That house creaked in the front room
Eyes flickered subject to the crackle
A voice speaks words
I don’t know them anymore, the voice is barely heard
Between the trees you fly to contemplate the past
And the tree held by the foreign night
We are silent to hear each other in this stillness
Sleeping trees glow in the dark
They stretch their arms towards the house in the silence
The wind returns
And we as relic-weary passengers
We take care of the necessary gestures
Things twinkle distrustful of destiny
And only tonight can they blink in regret
Because the trees examine our deep voices
And no one will be able to descend from the passageway
And listen to the unknown song.

written by ©Claudia Vila Molina

Claudia Vila Molina

Writer born in Viña del Mar, Chile. Professor of language and communication at PUCV, poet and literary critic. In 2012, she published her first book, The Invisible Eyes of the Wind. She has published in renowned Chilean and foreign digital media: Babelia (Spain), Letras de Chile (Chile), Triplov and Athena de Portugal, among others. During the year 2017 she participates in the Xaleshem group with poetic texts for the surrealist anthologies: “Composing the illusion” in honor of Ludwig Zeller and “Full Moon”, in honor of Susana Wald. In 2018, she integrates the feminist anthology IXQUIC released both in Europe and in Latin America. In 2020 she participates reviewing the conversation book “Shuffle poetry, Surrealism in Latin America” ​​by Alfonso Peña (Costa Rica), also writes a poetic prose text for the book “Arcano 16, La torre“, by the same author. Likewise, she participates in the book “120 notes of Eros. Written portraits of surrealist women” by Floriano Martins (Brazilian surrealist poet, writer, visual artist and cultural manager). In this year (2021) she publishes her second poetry book Poética de la erotica, amores y desamores by Marciano editores, Santiago.

Featured art photo Peppermint Patty girl Oil, collage Mitchell Pluto 2022

John Olson Five Poems

Here’s The Situation

Here’s the situation: the world is ending and people are singing their heads off. All the songs are raw. And all the melodies are unglued. How does grass become milk it’s a miracle. Mainstream is the prevailing mown lawn here except now the sidewalks are cracked and people want to sell their homes to get away from the homeless. Here I am wearing a crystal wig and a robe of baked potatoes. And yet you linger to ask me if I’ve ever been to Tucson. No, I haven’t. But I hear it’s the hummingbird capital of the world. I’m running down the runway trying to catch a plane called redemption. Clothes aren’t as silly as you might think. They hang in the closet awaiting fulfillment and keys. I can never get my shirt on right and my pants are always a size too big a size too small or no size at all just denim and plenum and dumb. Consciousness is always messy. Here I am dangling from a fever tree. It happened in Las Vegas. We gambled all night I had a royal flush in one hand and a sweet roll in the other. A bag of bread and water is everything kid it’s the whole show don’t let no one tell you different. The more you bend the more you spend and the more you spend the more you bend it’s an endless cycle with suspension forks and a bell. No thought is worth a penny. It’s worth the entire gross national budget. Of thought. The sound of a sturgeon is subjective to everyone except the sturgeon. This is the point I’ve been trying to make by avoiding it completely. That heron at the end of the pier is the essence of it. But if you need to ask what it is I can’t tell you I don’t know what it is either. But I can hear it in the dark.

Wings And Bats And Spines And Things

I wonder if hanging upside-down is good for you. All the blood rushing to the head. Maybe bats are on to something. There’s a practice called inversion therapy that involves hanging upside down. The idea is to reverse the compression of gravity on the spine. It may also increase the space between the vertebrae, which helps to relieve pain. There are, however, some risks. Blood pressure increases, the heartbeat slows down, and there’s increased pressure on the eyes, which is not good if you have glaucoma. So, like everything, it’s a blend of good and bad.
What about weightlessness? We should all have weightlessness devices in our homes. Wouldn’t it be a gas to have dinner on the ceiling? Better not light any candles up there though.
My legs feel so cumbersome and old when I got off the bed to go feed the cat or get a snack or another book to read. That’s when I feel old. I can maintain the illusion of youth while I’m running. My body lets me do that. Which is an odd way to look at it. I’m not separate from my body. I don’t think. Is it possible there’s a soul in this configuration of blood and bones?
Let reality be reality. Advises Lao Tzu. Ok, I can do that. Sounds simple enough. But where is it, exactly, this legendary reality? Is it the sponge in the sink? The cat on my lap? The books on the bed? I think it’s the clothes folded on the bureau. And the ache in my left leg. And the hard winter coming down the pike for Europe with the Russian gas cut off. It’s all the exorbitant fees and taxes for travel. Actors arguing about a scene from Hamlet. The till of a register filled with old dollar bills. People in glum silence checking their groceries. What’s next? People growing their own food? Take note: no one gets a discount for checking their own groceries. There is no reward for your subservience. None whatever. WTF!? Is that Lao Tzu checking a frozen pizza?
The bedpost is such a hand place to hang a mask. Two eyes, two ears, two lips and a nose. They all had them: Denis Diderot, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
How do you get a hummingbird to pose? I don’t know how Audubon did it. Whenever I look into the eyes of Sitting Bull I see turquoise on a ridge of sage. Bullfrog in a North Dakota creek, a copy of The Brothers Karamazov in my hand. Buffalo grazing. Protoplasm contracting and expanding on a glass slide. Sentence contracting and expanding in a glass eye. Whenever I look into the eyes of Sitting Bull I see a sky darken with passenger pigeons. Beautiful dark sheen of a box containing the ashes of a beloved cat. September 1st. 1914, the last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo, aged 29, with a palsy that made her tremble.

Tarmac Sumac

Tarmac sumac. Way down there at the end of the runway. What is this world? An automotive jar embroidered with starving tornadoes. Ductile commodities. Petulant expeditions. I stayed up late one night listening to the geometry of quartz. This is where I learned how to retaliate without losing my urine. Cerebration means thinking. It’s a delicate operation. I’ve got shapes on my shoulder moving up and down. They’re wings. Tread softly, because you tread on my wings.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve fucked up. Forgive me if I deviate. I’m flying to Kauai. I hear they serve wonderful breakfasts there. And that it’s possible to see the universe get up and do the hula kahiko. I promise to behave. I’m going to wear a Jack Spicer wristwatch. It tells time by stitching railroads together with the thread of the dead. The time right now is 9:12 p.m. The light at the end of the tunnel is Puffing Billy. Two hundred tambourines tattoo the whistle. And bring us good fortune in the form of an incantation. We shall navigate by the stars. In thy orisons will all my sins be remembered. Bbbangbbang! The craving for love is the engine of the world.
There are forty-three muscles in the human face, most of which are controlled by the subterranean diesel poppy (also known as the honeysuckle nerve). The expression I’m using now is called the plunderer’s regret and involves a nook, a menu, and a table by the window. This is where I confess all my sins, then wash them down with a shot of Glenfiddich. I’m not catholic, but I could be, given the right circumstances and an upbringing in a socialist country. By catholic, of course, I don’t mean the religion, I mean the ability to resurrect myself as a syllabus, a course with universal intent and a pontiff in the cuff of my pants, where I keep my Vatican.
Some of us, it is true, have found life silly and meaningless. But the beauty is undeniable. Each stone is a rhapsody of form, a ray of sunlight in a glass of water. The fork moves with the tint of chrome and is a hive of chocolate fingers. I have sewn a sow with a sough of slow air and find that the phenomenon of living is compounded luxuriantly by each quintessence of dust. We are all comrades in life grimacing at one another, enjoying what remains of the wild tea in the surrounding hills and terraces, stubbornly boiling our gypsum as one pleads mercy from a king.
There are no answers. There are only armchairs for reading. This is plenty. Meaning narrows the spectrum, which is better served by selenium, Hollywood extravagance, and prescription glasses.

Kitchen Epiphany

I can sit and stare at a wall for a ridiculously long amount of time. Eventually, there will be holes I can crawl through. And this is called music. What we see is what we believe and wish reality to be. Music is different, music has a different source than aqueous humor, and as such, swerves past our cognitive bias, and dazzles the brain with its gargle and ooze, its trumpets and gongs.
I find makeup fascinating. But the curves on a cello even more so. And these are called accidentals. Changes in pitch are gracious. They feed on the fine-tuning of our perception. We regain control of our existence when we hold the thread of our desire. The satisfaction of seeing clearly, even when it is painful, is due to the exhilarating power that we draw from it.
I live on a hill. I’m a little closer to the sky than I used to be. Which is currently choked with wildfire smoke. Most of the smoke is from the Chilliwack and Pasayten fires to the northeast, and the White River fire northwest of Lake Wenatchee. The planet is bursting into flame.
I wish I could walk into Proust’s novel and persuade Swann to break his addiction to Odette, which is destroying him, but that would ruin the novel, which is driven by lusts for names, for language, for things that never exist as intensely and vividly as they do in expectation, or in the imagination, where the mind and external reality come together, and form a union, or skin.
The spirit feeds on pearls. The air is shattered by gun glass, said the sharp-mouthed hoodlum. I hooked these letters on ruby hooks but when I came back they’d formed a sentence which required me to wear embassy shoes. Where can I find a pair of embassy shoes? I shall ask the Ambassador of Clouds. They’ll be laced with lightning. And their soles will be a roaring bonfire balanced in the heart with a pole and a heap of spinning plates. I do this willfully to the west of language in an attic full of the kindness of the dead, who sit in the corners knitting God.
I took the high road to the gymnasium. The dwarf slumped by the ice machine woke up, brushed himself off and walked away. I heard a snowflake drop to the ground, uttered by a polar bear. I shook the hand of a storm on a metal welcome mat and bowed. Never play solitaire with a sparkling cognition. This is what it does. It slides out of a vagina and says hello world what’s up? And so I say unto you respect the bean. Walk through the dazzling mathematics of the peach. The kitchen empties its contents like grenades. And everyone explodes into conversation.

Abundance

Is it flamboyant to look international at a wedding? I do not spurn nurture nor nurture a spurning of spring. This is what I like to do I like to strap carriages to my feet and walk into weddings I haven’t been invited to and sit down and talk like a country. It makes me feel perforated, like a sock, or a sociologist. I like the way gymnasiums guzzle space. This is why everyone likes to run around in them and dunk basketballs and wave pompoms. Hazard is the wizard of zippers. Which is another way of saying car keys, or suitcase. Ontology is everything. One must always expect the unexpected to expectorate. Waterfalls interrupt my canoe ride with a splash, a hiccup, and a hi ho Silver! This turned into a song and sung at another wedding. Renditions reside in sound like desks help writing to come out of wood. Or Karen Carpenter, who was not an actual carpenter, but could sing the bejesus out of any random superstar. I learned everything I know in the knowledge that nothing is ever truly known. Especially Karen Carpenter. Could you lend me a million dollars? I feel my tongue move back and forth like a symbol. I think I should find an agent. I could take it on the road. We know what is said at mass but what is leaves of grass? Is it a form of plexiglass? Or a God particle spiraling in a forward pass all the way to Geneva? What happens in the esophagus rarely if ever stays in the esophagus. If you have a language in you, now is the time to let it out. Languages, like wine, need to breathe. It gives them abundance. It fuels proliferation. Proliferation is the perforation of the real by the unreal, which is sand to the goat and mud to the muddled. All else is mute resignation. Miscellany wanders the perimeter. When miscellany penetrates the barriers, we will unleash the kraken. We shall discard facsimile for filigree, put tinsel on the whiffletree and revel in calligraphy, where the fonts meet the fountains, the sky meets the mountains, and wanton possibilities step from the shadows to say hi.

written by © John Olson

John Olson with Athena

Mingled Yarn John Olson


All lives, it seems, are composed of multiple strands, multiple perspectives, multiple stories & yarns. This particular weaving of a life started as a simple autobiography, following my wife’s suggestion. I balked at first, since I’m neither a retired Civil War general or a former President of the United States. Nor am I a Hollywood celebrity, a Self-Help guru or a noted French chef. I’m just a writer. I enjoy writing, & I’m always on the watch for things to write about. That adage “write what you know” is true. So I decided to take the plunge & try to stitch a narrative together, using words as my needles, my life as material. That material, however, segued loop by loop out of strict autobiography into the variable disperse dyes of fiction. Fact & fiction are intermingled. How much is lived experience & how much is invention are stitched so closely they often overlap & become a surprising new color. Life is a continual purling of insights & observations into crazily stitched patterns. All you can do is put it on & wear it.

Olson writes as if language was his own invention — which of course it is. How else to explain the force-field of dark and joyous energy that he conjures out of words?
~ Andrew Joron, author of The Cry at Zero

Olson’s brilliant prose poetry lurks around the corner of every idle speculation and seething anecdote.
~ Andrew Bleeker, from his review of The Nothing That Is

John Olson is the author of numerous books of prose poetry, including Weave of the Dream King (forthcoming from Black Widow Press), Dada Budapest, Larynx Galaxy and Backscatter: New and Selected Poetry. Mingled Yarn is his fifth novel. His other novels include In Advance of the Broken Justy, The Seeing Machine, The Nothing That Is, and Souls of Wind, which was shortlisted for a Believer Book Award in 2008.

Featured picture Entanglement in a sombrero galaxy, a hummingbird ankoku butoh 9inx10-1/2in oil, collage on sandpaper 2022 Mitchell Pluto

THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT

Diana Calabaza de Júpiter

I still don’t know if I’m an artist. I have always considered that calling oneself an artist is something pretentious. It is true that I create new things from an intellectual and also a subconscious act, but I feel more comfortable when I think I am creative. On the other hand, I have not studied Fine Arts and this fact makes me think that I am an outsider. However, I don’t care about everything because I’ve been painting since I was a child and I will always continue to do so. Painting has allowed me to pay rent and eat, other times it has not been like that. If I defined myself as an artist, would I change anything?

Above all, nature inspires me. I can paint something like a portrait of a person, but it will never be quite so. The animals, the plants, the mountains, the rivers, the universe, the water, the rain, all the elements and the stones, also the cells, scales, wings, spores. All of this is always present because it is Nature and I feel that humanity ceased to be a part of it a long time ago. That is why I try to bring these two worlds closer together through painting and dreams. It is like imagining a hopeful future for the planet, even though it is not actually possible.

I am not a tarot expert. I have many different decks, even an oracle of my own creation. My intention is to edit a deck of Major Arcana as soon as possible, it is a project that is taking me a long time precisely because I understand the tarot in my own way. And I think there is no universal way to understand it, so the fact that I am not an expert in tarot would not be a big problem because I would know my own tarot perfectly.

I think it is a language in itself, another kind of language. But I also believe that its divinatory character is a construction. When Visconti decks appeared in fifteenth-century Italy, their intention was not to guess but to memorize the hierarchies and their functions. Divination as such is much older. The current tarot brings together many characteristics of memoizable hierarchical archetypes that we now identify as tools for self-knowledge. I believe that the tarot can help us to know the things that we don’t know that we already know. It is like walking at night along a path full of brambles but illuminated by the soft glow of the full moon

I started a dream journal and loved the experience but didn’t have enough consistency to stick with it. I would love to be able to take it up again but I need a suitable environment and environment that I don’t have right now. I remember dreams from decades ago and from time to time they come back to my mind and give me the same sensations as at the time of the dream. Other times my dreams return to places I have already dreamed of, as if they wanted to finish telling stories. Somehow I keep in my memory the most relevant dreams, their sensations and what they brought me throughout my life. On the theories of dreams and their materialization in daily routines and in life, I would like to recommend the literary work of Julio Monteverde.

I try to make my relationship with the subconscious conscious when I’m awake. Creations are born from that place and we must remain attentive to their movements. For me it is like a call at any time of day or night that reveals other realities to me. Sometimes I know how to take advantage of that call and transform it into what you can understand as art. Other times it is too blinding a light that has the power to paralyze me and shows me through its light a deep and infinite darkness. It is what you can understand by anxiety.

Nature is the biggest influence I have. There are also some people and artistic movements in those influences, either because of the color in their works, because of the absence of color, because of their way of describing heaven and hell. There are too many but these are a very small sample of what I mean: Chagall, Redon, Remedios Varo, William Blake, Teresa de Ávila, El Greco, Goya, Diane Arbus, baroque music.

I’ve been under another the name Jupiter for quite a few years. This month (September 2022) I have started a new cycle that has been brewing since spring. I would like to get more light on the road and be able to keep my feet on the ground, something that has never happened in my life.

Alto Giove
è tua grazia è tuo vanto
il gran dono di vita immortale
che il tuo Cenno sovrano mi fà
Ma il rendermi poi quella
già sospirata tanto
Diva amorose e bella
è un dono senza uguale come la tua beltà

High Jupiter
it is your grace it is your pride
the great gift of immortal life
that your sovereign nod makes me
But then making me that one
already longed for so much
Loving and beautiful diva
it is a gift without equal like your beauty

For this reason, through Jupiter and almost by way of a “sigilo”, I intend to attract another way of seeing things without leaving aside my causality and gloom. I could have chosen Saturn and it really is what I wanted but we already know how Saturn treats already melancholic souls. I can’t afford that. Jupiter, as in the piece that Nicola Porpora (Alto Giove) composed to be performed by Farinelli, was a haven of peace in the stormy world of Felipe V. Leaving aside the stupid monarchy, Diana was a lunar goddess, daughter of Jupiter. In an astrological sense, Jupiter is associated with positive concepts such as abundance and optimism. And finally, I often say that “I live on Jupiter”, referring to the fact that I live in the clouds, that I am not attentive to reality and that I am a dreamer.

Lechuza is one of my music bands. We have started this summer of 2022 and we have just published our Demo. We are two friends making music, working with our hands on record packaging and trying to make nice videos of our songs. We are called Fantasmita and Ruda. Proceeds from sales go to an animal shelter. All the information is on our Bandcamp, and of course the music.

written by Diana Calabaza de Júpiter

Diana de Júpiter artistic training is intuitive and self taught. She prefers not to rely on any institution to interfere with her experience. Her themes hang between the dark and silent. She has worked for several Spanish publishers such as Aurora Dorada and La Felguera. Diana has had solo and group exhibitions in Spain, Mexico and the United States. She is currently preparing a complete tarot deck while painting daily.

Diana de Júpiter Clothes

Dianadejupiter

https://www.etsy.com/shop/Dianadejupiter

Hypnotic illustration and magical craftsmanship

Five Poems and Collages Gary Cummiskey

On Sundays

My plan was to kiss the woman
at the bakery counter,
but the manager rushed forward 
and whacked me on the head
with a spoon.
He recites Homer on Sundays,
though not when it’s raining,
and he takes no chances
with troublesome dreamers like me.

Forbidden steps Collage by Gary Cummiskey

At the side of the road

There were headless
mannequins lying
at the side of the road
with so many cars 
moving slowly past
and not a single driver stopping
to take a closer look
or even perhaps
load them into the boot
and take them home

Sensation desired Collage by Gary Cummiskey

Door to door

She waits in front of a door
propped up in the sand
somewhere in the Kalahari
She does not see
the woman on the other side
of the door
kneeling down
and peering 
through the keyhole
She sees only the man
in the green jacket
walking away in the distance
with a cat at his side

Love&Lust Collage by Gary Cummiskey

Zoo

Standing behind
the iron
bars
I peer
down
at the animals
When I look up
again
at the sun
I vomit
blood
from my nostrils
and my eyes turn
black
like their fur

i know what i like Collage by Gary Cummiskey

Underground currents

A thin man
with a walking
stick
and a balloon
in the
cobblestone 
streets
of the war-torn
city.
She turns,
rushing
through
the underground
currents.

Image gallery image
Image gallery image

Gary Cummiskey is a poet and publisher living in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the founder of Dye Hard Press, which he started in 1994. He is the author of several poetry chapbooks. His selected poems, Outside the cave, was published in 2021. In 2009, with Eva Kowalska, he compiled Who was Sinclair Beiles?, a collection of writings about the South African Beat poet. An expanded edition was published in 2016. His short story collection, Off-ramp, was short-listed for the 2014 Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award. His work has been published in the UK, US, France, Denmark, Sweden, India, Egypt, and Greece

Featured Photo: Lets Hope, Collage by Gary Cummiskey

THIS WRITING IS AN AUTHORIZED DUPLICATION WITH PERMISSION AND EXPRESSED CONSENT

Six Poems Uche Nduka

SHED

But the psyche.

                   But the anarchy.

But the abyss

                 turned entirely back

                                        on itself.

But the altar. The crone.

                  But the panther. Testimony

from a tranced pirate.

                    But the music that showed up.

But the fast train.

                    The visitation.

But the asylum & sanctuary.

                   But the breakdown.

The breakthrough.

                     But the brown-eyed barometer.

FLASH FROM A MAZE

An overfed guitar,

tired balls.

The fag-ends

                     of rambles.

So what.

I write like this

              to wake sleepy monks

in the wilderness

                 of the street.

The end of summer

will be when

                  memory matters.

Wanderers head home.

So much given already.

So much given.

So much to give.

Do you remember

eating pussy

at sundown?

I do.

SEEING IT CLEARLY

Stumbling in your

alphabets the lovers

went up up up

loosed upon the island

                              triply blessed

our arguments

& disagreements

                    are part of

                                  the full picture

I was lost

irrevocably

inside your knickers

& now

         you’re gone

pounding the pavement

                           poems stuffed

                                             to the gills

BRAND NEW SHIELD

Losing interest

is beside the point, we

didn’t dare figure out

the prequel, a woman’s busy

hands in the rainy season

of a nation’s beginnings,

this unholy war in holy lands,

latitudes left each other a

note, sailboat of our spirit,

those heedless selfies, the

blisters of blue irises, somehow

we braved the blast of

loneliness & sang out of tune,

no resolution, no conclusion, we

hung a new star over gathering rains.

RESCALE

Three thistles.

Four inkwells.

Terracotta tracker.

Clay coil pots.

Weaver star.

Fooling with gouache.

Black line.

Osprey in water.

You’re back again

on the sunroof of

the car as it speeds

down the freeway

with the wind in your hair

or at least try to

in the public mirror

reality & words

an actuality common

to both of us

wedged between what

is said & what is.

IF THE STAMEN

The mountain

remembered us

rainbow in the attic

the riddle

is our measure

all theology begins

with lovers that leap

& curse

don’t expect me

to present a balanced picture

this poem is a ballet

without shoes

I cling to your legs

with their stores of sweetness

like the beneficent cunt

opening its wings

I reject the entreaties

of dead language

you dance the book

from right to left

the ocean is our sky

Written by  © Uche Nduka

Uche Nduka
Photo by Fiona Gardner

Uche Nduka was born in Nigeria to a Christian family. Raised bilingual in Igbo and English, he earned his BA from the University of Nigeria and his MFA from Long Island University, Brooklyn. He left Nigeria in 1994 and settled in Germany after winning a fellowship from the Goethe Institute. He lived in Germany and Holland for the next decade and immigrated to the United States in 2007. Nduka is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including Living in Public (2018), Nine East (2013), Ijele (2012), and eel on reef (2007), all of which were published after he arrived in the United States. Earlier collections include Heart’s Field (2005); If Only the Night (2002); Chiaroscuro (1997), which won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize; The Bremen Poems (1995); Second Act (1994); and Flower Child (1988). Belltime Letters (2000) is a collection of prose. His work has been translated into German, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, and Romanian.

Books by Uche Nduka

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Uche-Nduka-Facing-You-1662811183-1662752885387.jpg

Featured Picture: Moon in Capricorn. Oil, Collage 2022 Mitchell Pluto

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Utopia is Feminine and the Morning Star Enrique De Santiago

“The time will come to assert the ideas of women at the expense of those of men, whose failure is consummated so resoundingly today. It is up to the artist in particular, if only in protest against this scandalous state of affairs, to make everything that arises from the feminine system of the world as opposed to the masculine system predominate to the maximum; of emphasizing exclusively the powers of women; better still, of appropriating her to the point of making it jealously hers, of that which distinguishes her from man in her way of evaluating and wanting.”
André Breton, Arcanum 17

17 Star Tarot Card 9in x 6 1/2in
André Breton
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren

This is another example of the surrealist passion for tarot. The title of Breton’s long prose poem, Arcane 17, refers to tarot card 17, the “stars” card (Les étoiles), usually a symbol of free-flowing love and renewal of forces. However, Breton’s imagination brought new associations, multiplying the morning stars and infusing them with fluid meanings. Breton describes the figure in the center of the card as a naked young woman kneeling as she pours out the contents of two urns, one into a pond, the other onto the ground. He associates this woman with the legendary figure of Mélusine, a legendary mermaid who became a symbol of the difficulty to reconcile “reality” and “magic.” There is hope, however, that the “inexhaustible” urns could renew our disenchanted world. Indeed, even though the pond gives off the “pestilential odor” of social conventions, it is still longing for “a new dream.” The fragile butterfly is another symbol of “consoling mystery.” Chilean painter Roberto Matta designed the four colorful illustrations in the shape and size of tarot cards (or “arcanas”) pasted in the book.

The Importance of Magic for Surrealism, Spirits, Mediums, and Tarot. Cornell University Library


Utopia is Feminine by Enrique De Santiago

Love descending incandescent and calm
from the primordial nature of the universe
to embrace the hope full of your walk
in your women’s hands that welcome
in your womb container of light
on your lips that educate and dismiss poetry
on your back that holds the arcanum of the morning
with that epiphany that looks like your body.
This is how I take flight rebellious
bathed by the celestial of the bodies wrongly called celestial,
where I learned to love the brevity of the possible in the impossible
to go up with my luggage to another utopia
clearing away the old tears
in front of a showcase that is empty
and that is condescending with my people
in its persistent lack
where I also know my measurements
and who excessively hugs them
in these hours of opaque tides
with their lost leviathans
of heads sunk in the mud of consumption
without noticing the hands of those who ask
between remains of bodies
that are invisible to him
and alien.

Morning Prayer Monroe Tsa Toke

A star, as Bernard Roger recalls, “has served forever as a guide to nocturnal navigators whether
over the oceans of the globe or over the philosophical sea of the Argonauts.” Echoing him, Jorge Camacho notes the star “has shown the solitary sailor his route over the high seas. By faithfully following it throughout his long voyage, he is sure to reach port safely.” The star burns with such an intense gleam in the surrealist imaginal realm that in 2004, the Czech painter Martin Stejskal organized a large exhibition near White Mountain in which it “was declined in all its natural, cultural, as well as mythical aspects, in the union of traditions (astrology, kabbalah, alchemy, Freemasonry) as in the poetic union of the male and female in each individual, borne by the work of surrealist friends, and by the uncarved stone placed at the castle entrance that bore this phrase that sings in our hearts like a magical couplet: constructed on the side of abyss, on philosopher’s stone . . .” as Marie Dominique Massoni points out in issue 5 of S.U.R.R. However, “You can never see this star like I saw it. You don’t understand: it is like the heart of a heartless flower,” as Nadja, the “magician,” says.,,

A harmony founded on the spiritual in all its forms, love of humanity in all its beauty, we can thus clearly see the richness of the esoteric domain approached this way by the surrealists, who incidentally made the Star, in the Deck of Marseille, the symbol for the suit of Dreams, whose face cards are Lautréamont, Alice in Wonderland, and Freud. This deck was conceived (these things are never invented) between the Villa Air Bel and the café Au Brûleur de Loups.

The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism Origins, Magic, and Secret Societies By Patrick Lepetit

Star Tarot Symbolique Maçonnique Deck by Jean Beauchard

“A very powerful myth continues to have a hold on me, and no apparent contradiction of it in the course of my previous adventures can prevail “Find the place in the formula” merges with, “possess truth in one soul and one body: That the highest hope has the power to unfold before it the allegorical arena which holds that every human being was thrown into life to search for a being of the opposite sex and only that one who is paired in all respects, to the point where one without the other seems like the result of the dissociation of dismembering a unit of light”

Arcanum 17: With Apertures, Grafted to the End. By André Breton

Featured Painting by Enrique De Santiago She raises the day, oil on canvas, 140 x 100 cm.