In Search of the Iron Fairy (aka Alabama Whirly) + excerpts from Sonetsu's 'Unknown Craftsman'

 Fundmentally, human beings...need belief, free play of the imagination and intuition in their homes and workshops or they become starved.

All the cog-wheels and electronic brains cannot assuage these human needs in the long run It is for lack of such essentials that we turn to dope of one kind or another, or to destructiveness.

Basically this is not so much a revolution against science and the machine as a seeking of a means of counterbalance by employing man's first tools, his own hands, for the expression of his inner nature The problem is how artist-craftsmen are to function rightly in a world of machines.

Probing further, one is forced to ask what the function of the artist-crafstman is...

 Enthusiasm and play of imagination, for example, occur as wet clay spins under fingers, but take place with varying degrees of intensity, depending on how free of inhibitions one is.

Both the creative gift and the freedom are essential

In an artist-craftsman it is the degree of life force canalised into a craft.

The degree: the purity: the intensity. We can relate the work of individuals to the magnificent communal creations of unknown, humble, and usually illiterate artisans of past ages and draw inspiration from them

His main criticism of individual craftsmen and modern artists is that they are overproud of their individualism.

the good artist or craftsman has no personal pride because his soul knows that any prowess he shows is evidence of that Other Power

"Take heed of the humble; be what you are by birthright; there is no room for arrogance".Handcraftmanship, if it be alive, justifies itself at any time as an intimate expression of the spirit of man.

Such work is an end in itself and not a means to an end

If, however, it ceases to serve a functional need, it runs the risk of becoming art for art's sake and untrue to its nature, depending upon the sincerity of the craftsmanThey did not do it for its beauty, they merely did it.

And yet, "merely doing" something is in itself a great source of beauty, implying as it does a state of freedom not bound by concepts of beauty, much less fear of the ugly.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, --
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That find no object worth its constancy?

The long straight road

The zen of automobiles

I long for the infinite

Look to infinity:

That place where the horizon meets

The lip of the earth

Where sky eats its way into the oneness

I yearn for the long, straight road

Where you can gather pace

& merge into the sky

Almost flying

Through the barren winter landscape

Where everything is sodden & bare

Not me though – I am alive

Zooming through this picture

Of myself

Running from my true terror

Behind me, I leave but scatters

Debris from the hubris of my choices

My choices, you see I made them

Not my conditioning

Nor my upbringing

But the product of both

& that part of me that would always be me

essentially, biologically, without all the rest

Immaterial, so be it

Not everything can mate with matter

But to be immaterial would be to

Have no connection to the ancient mother

& what would anything ‘be’ if not from the

womb of the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars?

If not the womb of the universe then what?

What matters, is what is inside you truly

I cannot pretend to know the truth anymore

Than any other, for the ‘truth’ is only what we know it to be

Our truth, the truth of our soul

Gasping for meaning

& yet you glimpse it and it is gone

Here – now – gone

Like the very breath of the invisible

Was the very breath of the cosmos

And the breath of every living thing

Material and immaterial!

Bachofen 'Myth, Religion, and Mother Right' (1854)

The passing centuries and all the innovations they bring have little power over tombs and tomb cults.  Their symbolism, rooted in the oldest institutions of our race, passed unchanged, though ultimately no longer understood, into the era of waning paganism, and even into the new era opened up by the Incarnation of Christ.  It forms a bond between early and late generations, annulling distinctions between time, space, and nationality.  The symbol of the egg provides a remarkable example for the transcending of time, while the motif of Ocnus the rope plaiter passes beyond national barriers and is encountered in Egypt, Asia, Greece and Italy.

   It is this character of permanence that makes the ancient tombs so very meaningful.  And this wealth of meaning  is further enhanced by the insight the tombs give us into the most beautiful aspect of the ancient spirit.  Other spheres of archeology may captivate our understanding, the contemplation of tombs wins our hearts; it not only enriches our knowledge but provides food for our spiritual needs.  Wherever possible i have taken this into account and attempted to intimate those sublime ideas which the ancients conceived in the presence of life and death which cannot be expressed in language but only in symbols.  Herein i have primarily acceded to a need inherent in my own nature, but perhaps i have also come closer to realising the supreme aim of archeology than is possible through an approach limited to the form and substance of things.  And this aim, i believe, consists in communicating the sublimely beautiful ideas of the past to an age very much in need of regeneration.

The Illustrations of one John Toth

This guy's work is hot and steamy cool!  I don't want to ruin the surprise but i think we can look forward to hearing and seeing more from John Toth in the Animals issue of www.loveisthelawmag.com.  We are just trying to figure out the logistics of a trip to Paris to see the St. Sebatien Forever Exposition, which is where we found these homoerotic contributions to a uniquely vanguard art movement utterly aligned to the LitL ethos: aesthetics, seduction, musings.  Check out John Toth and more at this event:
EXPOSITION COLLECTIVE SAINT SEBASTIEN FOREVER:du 15 JANVIER au 29 JANVIER 2010Vernissage vendredi 15 JANVIER 2010 à 19H30GALERIE OBERKAMPF - PARIS103 rue SAINT MAUR Métro SAINT MAUR ou PARMENTIER ( ligne 3 )
Maybe we'll see you there!

Saint Sebastien Forever

EXPOSITION COLLECTIVE SAINT SEBASTIEN FOREVER:
du 15 JANVIER au 29 JANVIER 2010
Vernissage vendredi 15 JANVIER 2010 à 19H30
GALERIE OBERKAMPF - PARIS
103 rue SAINT MAUR Métro SAINT MAUR ou PARMENTIER ( ligne 3 )

Start Time:	Friday, January 15, 2010 at 7:30pm
End Time:	Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 7:30pm
Location:	Paris Galerie Oberkampf

I just discovered these artist's work whilst working on Love Is The Law.  Thinking how great it is to have a platform to share other people's creativity with like-minded individuals.  I have a lot of writing i need to do for the magazine: a more animalistic look at the greek classics i mentioned in my Mythos piece, a continuation of the psychoanalytic perspective on erotica/eros that i am providing for the magazine.  Waiting for my love to come home, so that i too can go home.  Wish to paint and read and cook good food for my family.  Insomnia is taking its toll, but the thought of tender embraces carries me through these waters.  Soon they will become the waters of forgetfulness and life will take flight on to the thawing grasses and sprouting daisies.  In the spring, new life will bloom and all our worries will be washed away by the cool breezes of beatitude.  In the meantime, i'm gonna try and make it to this exhibition in Paris since a whole 2/3rd of the editorial team are going to be there if i do, and perhaps get some interviews from these crazy talented cats the other side of the pond that has a tunnel under it!  Wish me luck!!

Jung on the symbiosis of the Doctor-Patient scenario

It is obvious that in the course of his practice a doctor will come across people who have a great effect on him too.  He meets personalities who, for better or worse, never stir the interest of the public and who nevertheless, or for that very reason, possess unusual qualities, or whose destiny it is to pass through unprecedented developments and disasters.  Sometimes they are persons of extraordinary talents, who might inspire another to give his life for them; but these talents may be implanted in so strangely unfavourable a psychic disposition that we cannot tell whether it is a question of genius or fragmentary development.  Frequently, too, in this unlikely soil there flower rare blossoms of the psyche which we would never have thought to find in the flatlands of society.  For psychotherapy to be effective a close rapport is needed, so close that the doctor cannot shut his eyes to the heights and depths of human suffering.  The rapport consists, after all, in a constant comparison and mutual comprehension, in the dialectical confrontation of two opposing psychic realities.  If for some reason these mutual impressions do not impinge on each other, the psychotherapeutic process remains ineffective, and no change is produced.  Unless both doctor and patient become a problem to each other, no solution is found.

 

The doctor who does not know from his own experience the numinosity of the archetypes will scarcely be able to escape their negative effect when he encounters it in his practice.  He will tend to over- or underestimate it, since he possesses only an intellectual point of view but no empirical criterion.  This is where those perilous aberrations begin, the first of which is the attempt to dominate everything by the intellect.  This serves the secret purpose of placing both doctor and patient at a safe distance from the archetypal effect and thus from real experience, and of substituting for psychic reality an apparently secure, artificial, but merely two-dimensional conceptual world in which the reality of life is well covered up by so-called clear concepts.  Experience is stripped of its substance, and instead mere names are substituted, which are henceforth put in the place of reality.  No one has any obligations to a concept; that is what is so agreeable about conceptuality – it promises protection from experience.  The spirit does not dwell in concepts, but in deeds and in facts.  Words butter no parsnips; nevertheless, this futile procedure is repeated ad infinitum

            In my experience, therefore, the most difficult as well as the most ungrateful patients, apart from habitual liars, are the so-called intellectuals.  With them, one hand never knows what the other hand is doing.  They cultivate a “compartment psychology.”  Anything can be settled by an intellect that is not subject to the control of feeling – and yet the intellectual still suffers…if feeling is underdeveloped.

Jung on the psychology of the doctor

Though there is treatment known as "minor psychotherapy," in any thoroughgoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play.  There are many cases which the doctor cannot cure without committing himself.  When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself in his authority.  In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help.  Then the doctor's whole being is challenged.

The therapist must at all times keep watch over himself, over the way he is reacting to his patient.  For we do not react only with our consciousness.  Also we must be asking ourselves: How is our unconscious experiencing this situation?  We must therefore observe our dreams, pay the closest attention and study ourselves just as carefully as we do the patient.  otherwise the entire treatment may go off the rails....

As a doctor i constantly have to ask myself what kind of message the patient is bringing me.  What does he mean to me?  If he means nothing, I have no point of attack.  The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected.  "Only the wounded physician heals."  But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armour, he has no effect.  I take my patients seriously.  Perhaps i am confronted with a problem just as much as they are.  It often happens that the patient is exactly the right plaster for the doctor's sore spot.  Because this is so, difficult situations can arise for the doctor too -- or rather, especially for the doctor.

Every therapist ought to have a control by some third person, so that he remains open to another point of view.  Even the Pope has a confessor....

He wanted to be an analyst.  I said to him, "Do you know what it means?  It means that you must first learn to know yourself.  You yourself are the instrument...If you are not convinced, how can you convince him?  You yourself must be the real stuff.  "

Jung on the difference between psychiatry and psychotherapy (the training analysis)

"With cultivated and intelligent patients the psychiatrist needs more than merely professional knowledge.  he must understand, aside from all theoretical assumptions, what really motivates the patient.  Otherwise he stirs up unnecessary resistances.  What counts, after all, is not whether a theory is corroborated, but whether the patient grasps himself as an individual.  This, however, is not possible without reference to the collective views, concerning which the doctor ought to be informed.  For that, mere medical training does not suffice, for the horizon of the human psyche embraces infinitely more than the limited purview of the doctor's consulting room.

The psyche is distinctly more complicated and inaccessible than the body.  it is, so to speak, the half of the world which comes into existence only when we become conscious of it.  For that reason the psyche is not only a personal but a world problem, and the psychiatrist has to deal with an entire world.

Nowadays we can see as never before that the peril which threatens all of us comes not from nature, but from man, from the psyches of the individual and the mass.  The psychic aberration of man is the danger.  Everything depends upon whether or not the psyche functions properly...

The psychotherapist, however, must understand not only the patient; it is equally important that he should understand himself.  For that reason the sine qua non is the analysis of the analyst, what is called the training analysis.  The patient's treatment begins with the doctor, so to speak.  Only if the doctor knows how to cope with himself and his own problems will he be able to teach the patient to do the same.  only then.  In the training analysis the doctor must learn to know his own psyche and to take it seriously.  if he cannot do that, the patient will not learn either.  he will lose his portion of his psyche just as the doctor has lost that portion of his psyche which he had not learned to understand.  it is not enough, therefore, for the training analysis to consist in acquiring a system of concepts.  The analysand must realise that it concerns himself, that the training analysis is a bit of real life and is not a method which can be learned from rote.  The student who does not grasp that fact in his own training analysis will have to pay dearly for the failure later on."

From Derek Jarman's 'Wittgenstein'

“It was once a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. When he finished with his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon. So, the clever young man looked the world around him he created and decided to explore it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he forgot about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears. But as he grew into a wise old man he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They are what make the world turn. He wanted to run and dance. And the words and things scattered upon the ground, were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous. But the wise man saw that that was the way things worked. But something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he’d come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring him self to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice; at home and neither. And this was the cause of all his grief.”

HOLLOWNESS

The

Big

Black

Dark

Empty

Hollowness

Presses

Me

Against

The

Edges

And

Absurdity

Of

My

Being

Melanie Fiona Rocks

Avoid Success

The quote is from Okri’s book In Arcadia:

If you believe in something your very belief renders you unqualified to do it. Your earnestness will come across. Your passion will show. Your enthusiasm will make everyone nervous. And your naïveté will irritate. Which means that you will become suspect. Which means you will be prone to disillusionment. Which means that you will not be able to sustain your belief in the face of all the piranha fish which nibble away at your idea and your faith, till only the skeleton of your dream remains. Which means that you have to become a fanatic, a fool, a joke, an embarrassment. The world — which is to say the powers that be — would listen to your ardent ideas with a stiff smile on its face, then put up impossible obstacles, watch you finally give up your cherished idea, having mangled it beyond recognition, and after you slope away in profound discouragement it will take up your idea, dust it down, give it a new spin, and hand it over to someone who doesn’t believe in it at all.

Yoshida Hiroshi

Hiroshi Yoshida(1876-1950)

Hiroshi Yoshida is known as a Western-style painter and printmaker. Born in Kurume, he lived and worked in Tokyo. He first painted landscapes in oil, but won early fame as a watercolorist. He developed an interest in printmaking in 1920 and self-printed all of his work excepting his first seven prints. His early printwork depicted views of Swiss and American landscapes.

Fond of traveling, Yoshida was also an avid alpinist, with mountains and water figuring prominently in his works. A significant contributor to and organizer of important exhibitions at the Toledo Museum of Art, Yoshida's work was well represented, with 113 prints in the 1930 show and 66 prints in 1936. A romantic realist, Yoshida's style resembles that of an English 19th Century watercolorist applied to Japanese themes.

He traveled to America in 1899. Hiroshi Yoshida is noted for the subtle colors and naturalistic atmosphere. His works won numerous prizes in Japan and in the world, gaining strong Western influences during his travels. He later established the Japan Alpine Artist Association.

Excerpt from “A New Earth” By Eckhart Tolle:

“…The whole comprises all that exists. It is the world or the cosmos. But all things in existence, from microbes to human beings to galaxies, are not really separate things or entities, but form part of a web of interconnected multidimensional processes.

There are two reasons why we don’t see this unity, why we see things as separate. One is perception, which reduces reality to what is accessible to us through the small ranges of our sense: what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. But when we perceive without interpreting or mental labeling, which meand without adding thought to our perceptions, we can actually still sense the deeper connectedness underneath our perception of seemingly separate things.

The other more serious reason for the illusion of separateness is compulsive thinking. It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectndness of all that exists. Thinking cuts reality up into lifeless fragments. Extremely unintelligent and destructive action arises out of such a fragmented view of reality.

However, there is an even deeper level to the whole than the interconnectedness of everything in existence. As that deeper level, all things are one. It is the Source, the unmanifested one Life. It is the timeless intelligence that manifests as a universe unfolding in time.

The whole is made up of existence and Being, the manifested and the unmanifested, the world and “God.” So when you become aligned with the whole, you become a conscious part of the interconnectedness of the whole and its purpose: the emergence of consciousness into this world. As a result, spontaneous helpful occurrences, chance encounters, coincidences, and synchronistic events happen much more frequently. Carl Jung called synchronicity an “acausal connecting principle.” This means that it “is not causal connection between synchronistic events on our surface level of reality. It is an outer manifestation of an underlying intelligence behind the world of appearances – a deeper connectedness that our mind cannot understand.

But we can be conscious participants in the unfolding of that intelligence, the flowering consciousness.”