a row of trees attempts to loosen the bounds between disciplines, and is committed to publishing new works across a variety of fields, backgrounds and mediums.
Patrick Farmer – Editorial
I didn’t give a talk at the Symposium of the Whole. I was supposed to (initially elaborating upon an essay I wrote some time ago called Amateur Perspectives, but then slowly following theurgy, myths with two tongues, lemurs, sympathetic magic and enchanted languages of nonduality, ambiguity, duplicity, and the dialectic of tuning world soul with cosmic soul in the work of Wilson Harris. I was hoping to speak about condensing and at the same time leaping boundaries, opening and closing trick doors of neural fields as ongoing creative praxis, quasi Neoplatonic conjunctions of knowing arriving through likenesses and the multiple persons who are part of the abundance of psychic life. Perhaps a little about that oceanic being, reversion, a desire to return to archetypes of whom we are copies and from whom we proceed, where pathology present in daily living is not cast away as inward deviance, but presents as inward feeling and as nesting materials felt in individual sense and experience of death and difference, lunar balance*), but on the day, all I could seem to think about was photosynthesis as time travel, for whom I haven’t been given language, only feral ash-sigils.
*I hope to publish this, and other little gut gods, lectures, and books, through my substack.
The morning of the Symposium of the Whole, at a market stall outside the venue we encountered lapis lazuli. Wrapping around reality like an astral duct, lapis can attract to their auratic personality those who are involved in fruitless digging (or to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, those who have experience but are missing meaning). It was the only message I was able and willing to hear, a kind of contact metamorphism at a distance.
I stopped worrying, resisting that I had nothing to say, and opened like a cranial germ (reminding me of how when CAConrad first met Hoa Nguyen, they said it was as if she burst out of a mountain).
Within Nguyen’s words I hear that a true jade vibration travels as it sounds // sending a vibration up the face // pyramid-shaped. All faces are vibratory, and there is no one without a face in cosmos, including cosmos. I listened with everyone in the Symposium, and continue to do so here, all faces in some way piezoelectrically coiled with each other, many worlds present on either side of multi-dimensional galvanised masks, like the twirling countenance of Jean Cocteau, wreathed in laurel of psychological eyes, depicted in his Orphic Blood of a Poet–singing through a shared mouth coming to psyche’s plurivalent light, cooperating in the whole of every part.
If we feel time spun by Atropos, spectroscopic polynose samara–fruit of sycamore, we are affected through the protean voices of oscilla (spinning little faces) suspended above Saturnian altars like albedo lights. Vacillating within the same vocal meridians, spinning mirrors were once lowered toward the surface of a sacred spring, and upon peering into their grief lights, priests would see a person in their care, either alive or dead. Such votive offerings from aleatoric limbo could signify both transition and threshold, gifting mantic protection in order to navigate difficult and trying times, bringing to mind the mind that contingency requires.
Mirroring and mirrored, a couple of days prior to the Symposium we had picked up a copy of Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, which guided me (not the first time, nor the last) from umwelt to be amongst mitwelt, cosmos of relations, ongoing homeostasis of poetic physiognomies, a long ion of mercurial archetypes…dissolving and recombining–differentiating and integrating–literalising and poeticising–pluralising and specifying, continuously…
Lapis remained in my pocket for the duration of the Symposium. I felt that when it was time to write, all I would need do is hold them and the words, feelings, tentative homes, narratives, and medicine bundles of the day would be there.
When I returned to lapis, I relayed an imaginal geography written by someone else in another time. This crafted a practise of extending virtual space (know thy self phasing with know thy images), a holding of the possibility of distended boundaries, a language of digestion and fermentation, wet vegetable love, reminding me of how Charles Fourier considered cabbage to be image of Eros.
As I hold lapis and hear Symposium, the speed of the page becomes a galvanic language of Metis, a net mesh of bonds, impenetrable pathways of Gaia and Old Night, interlaced networks of supple mollusc bodies to whom we stoop, and meet our feet…
…who is knowledge–whose is knowledge–who does knowledge want–told by parts not wanting to become whole–parts dying never knowing whole–whole unable to help becoming otherwise–whole not wanting to become otherwise–whole made to be otherwise…
…these phantom frequencies reverse in noctilucent murmurs of cosmic spinning and telluric morphing, new Eros roses (myths never were but always are) and cornelian neuroses (Orphic Eros seated in egg who has split in half).*
* In one version of this Orphic cosmogony, two halves of egg form celestial and terrestrial bounds, and upon splitting, Phanes, dazzling germ (also known as Protogonos, Erikepaios, Metis, Dionysos, and Eros), flows with place.
Parts curl with imaginal passage and presage, poetic basis of mind and cosmic sympathy as ethical canticles of fine feeling, where parts looking at wholes see wholes, when wholes perceiving parts see parts. Twofold Metis-Phanes (a tentacular heap, welter of psychological life) tunes ears to fragmentation, homes in between wholes acting as partial fullness of archetypal experience, participating with pathology by way of necessity, a syzygy of shimmering gong fields between Ananke and Athena (attempting to be free of personal binds and loving with a boundary stone) singing their many bonds by way of invisible gossamer geometrics and geomagnetic language swallows.
As if stratified nest of a long tailed tit–personified concatenations of thread, lichen, spittle, and burr–intuited outlines for Symposium of the Whole came from a book of the same name by Diane and Jerome Rothenberg, and outside of such outlines is a need to perceive with cosmos psychologically, that is, with soul, wherein active imagination takes precedence as all divisions of life and areas of thought shed their sharp categorical imperatives, no longer divided from each other into neat compartments, becoming psychological places of reflection and diffraction.
A correspondent form for an ontology based on radical conviviality could be held in light of archetypal Ananke as grotesque, pleroma of celestial honeycombs, faeries and immortals, bodies of cinnabar sprouting fly agaric. Aesthetically, grotesque vibrates with stalactites and stalagmites, resonating liquid crystalline flesh and vegetation, amberat and sinter, peat, mud, and silt. Grotto contains and is contained by such grotesque bodies, unfinished, outgrowing boundaries, transgressing limits, bodies disclosing their essences as principles of growth exceeding their own limits…eating–drinking–defecating–birthing–dying–beautiful grotesque bodies–biophilic bodies–folkloric bodies of permeable boundaries–Erotes rubbing and creaking–whole continents adrift–creaking and pullulating sparks filling air with ozone–shifting with mythical dreams and cross-cultural synergies in ritual remediation–chaos and ritual space–divine invasions of polymorphous psyche and substance…
Alchemy, the seven Po of Daoist subtle substrata, and the Hermetic Art of Memory are just a few perspectives that rely upon and even sometimes delight in the pathologised and the grotesque (wherever Ananke is we find Athena too). Shifting toward images of hologrammatic polytheism akin to Uranic inclinations (nothing that hurts shall come with a new face, says Aeschylus in his Prometheus Bound, a text vital in the study of liver and entrails), I’m coming to feeling amidst such miasmatic Metis vapours that without a pathological ear such forces will often pry their way through other channels. If our thoughts are beings then we cannot say we are alone with our thoughts, everyone–swirling, baroque and curvaceous, chaos chaos, neti neti of ritual place–is a kiss and a knot.
A midline of nested holes began to emerge from the Symposium and my prior inability to think with any other than temporal phyllotactic remediation became a little clearer. Jerome and Diane Rothenberg named their Symposium of the Whole after Robert Duncan’s, forming a crossroads of sibylline antinomies winding around previously excluded ‘orders’, akin to ouroborotic method…female–proletariat–foreign–animal–mineral–vegetable–unconscious–unknown–soul–criminal–failure… These tricksters of microbe maps are a labyrinth of lines we follow so we might come to realise that they are also the lineaments of our individual faces, wherein waters of Eros writhe, wherein thesis merges with Thetis, creating Daidala, co-mingling of fire and water, a marriage of elements birthing a kind of talismanic Metis who knows both sides of the line at the same time, downward parabolas birthing a transitory ability to perceive words moving in polymorphic spirals of tendrils and limbs.
So much of whom I’d hoped to speak with during the Symposium (now refracted off lapis Oort Cloud of spiral psyche) was under the tutelage of Chaldean Hecate and their insidious pathological compression as product of thought into the nobodaddy perspective self of ‘evil’ witch, a tale of the nominalist fathers and the gentile prism of violent abstraction. On the surface of such lunar tutelage, like shapes of alchemical silver, I hear Duncan and the Rothenbergs through their new readings of poetic past and present, trying to remain open to the variety of voices and stances around their subjects.
In some ways it’s as ‘simple’ as new vocabularies sublimating like tacit clouds of cuttlefish ink, but we need be careful here to not make the Puer (Peter Pan) mistake of ejecting the old and hoarding the new as if some sign of unshakeable progress. Such fields are ecotones, as co-opted professional jargon can often provide solar opportunities to unpack hidden political and psychological content from tell-tale words and phrases, the military metaphor of nationalism springs as pernicious example, wherein a border-crossing is a violation, not an act of trade, or love, or harmonial association.
When skin becomes solely a barrier, Chthonic beings are subjugated, excluded, no juice, no slime, no dirt, no placental wetness of becoming.
As amateur cosmopolitics, the notion of discipline speaks coterminously to the difficulty of not having a conceptual home, another kind of grief light, full of crows pecking away at nigredo, churning energy within matter as vibratory change agents, human body composed of the many feathers of newborn Eros birds. We can prepare our shadows to be chewed apart or not, says CAConrad, but the chewing will commence.
I’d initially considered starting my talk for the Symposium with quotes from W. S. Graham, Plotinus, and H. D., it seems fitting they’ll now end this part.
W. S. Graham – Implements in their places
Somewhere our belonging particles
Believe in us. If we could only find them
Iamblichus
Everyone is in everyone, in each according to their soul (my iteration)
H. D. – The Dancer
I am a devote of Hecate,
crouched by a deep jar
that contains herb,
pulse and white-bean,
red-bean and unknown small leek-stalk and grass blade;
I worship nature, you are nature.
