Sustainable Enchantment Part II

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TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE ENCHANTMENT

SUBLIMITY AND THE HUMAN ANIMAL PART II

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LANTERN JOURNAL

2014 RE-ISSUE

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TOWARDS A SUSTAINABLE ENCHANTMENT

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M DA NE Z A HOR S K Y EMI L Y L ODIGE NS K Y J ANE T S IM P S O N

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* S UB LI MI TY A ND THE H UM AN A NIM A L PART II

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"Let parents bequeath to their children not riches, but the spirit of reverence."

-Plato 18

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Table of Con te n ts Preface 12 Condicio Sine Qua Non Winter [Citrinitas]: 18 To Have a North Spring [Rubedo]: 42 Oyasin Telos Notes/Bibliography: 48 That Which is Sought External Image Index: 56 From Whose Hands Have [ ]

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Preface

[Co n d ic io S i ne Qu a N o n]

One of our central endeavors so far has been to articulate the differences between arbitrary and emplaced form. In prefacing the second and final part of this work I'd like to look at Aristotle's concept of holymorphism as a means to further segue into where we're headed next. Traditionally, this concept described the relationship between matter [that which something consists of] and form [the relational aspects of the material], which together became substance. The stock example is that "formless" matter [a lump of clay] is placed into a form [wooden mold] and thus a brick is made which equals substance. Classical interpretation would go a step further and state that the passive/potential matter is changed and manipulated by the active/actual form. Aristotle posited that form is always seeking to be materialized and matter to be informed; they are like lovers held together by the context of substance. However, there is a philosophical error inherent in this presupposition that would make them dysfunctional partners at best.

We know from basic chemistry that a lump of clay, no matter how seemingly "formless," undoubtedly has extensive structure both at the molecular and material levels. Thus, it isn't that the lump of clay doesn't have form, but instead that it doesn't have the form we deem worthy to be recognizable as such. This alludes to what we looked at in part I. In Holloway's description of cultural form creation he asserts that the world is made "actual" primarily through human manipulation and mastery.

What we continue to seek in part II is a more congruent description of our relationship with and construction of individual and cultural form, both in methodology and practice. By understanding and recognizing structure in all things we can find a more accurate way to describe the brick metaphor as an encounter between two structured matters [a bound composite of both matter and form] that generates new structure as a result of the interactions between them. Both matters are simultaneously active and passive, potential and actual in relation to one another. Similarly, we alluded to Koestler's "holons" as being both part and whole simultaneously, with both drawing information from the other.

A helpful way to contextualize holymorphism is the alchemical framing of color, specifically vermillion. Chinese and Arab alchemists, as well as Roman priests, believed vermillion to be one of the most powerful of all substances. The pigment was originally made from the naturally occurring element cinnabar. However, vermillion as we refer to it here comes from "metacinnabar," or mercury-sulfide. Metacinnabar is created when mercury and melted sulfur are crushed together resulting in a dark black powder. This is then placed in an airtight container [as the process is highly toxic] and subjected to heat. What follows is a violent and fairly rare type of chemical reaction called Sublimation.

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Normally a material transforms directly from a solid to a gas skipping the liquid state materials are usually subject to. Vermillion is an example of the truth "up til now," reminding us that our knowledge is often and continually bound by our vantage point. Indeed, the last thing we expect a black powder to do is disappear and then reappear somewhere else as little red crystals. The process is described in myth as Ares [Mars/ Sulfur], the god of war, and Aphrodite [Venus/Mercury], the goddess of love who could not be more opposite coming together and producing a daughter: harmony, out of death comes sublime rebirth. Antiquity would paint this as the threshold between heaven and earth, a moment that allows for the marriage of opposites [usually chaotic] to create something wholly transcendent.

Sublimation itself literally means: "to make sublime." Drawing from the possibilities that sublimity offers us we can plainly see limitations in our normal assumptions on truth. The recognition of these limitations can engender a sense of awe towards the cosmos and thus our place in it. In short, sublimation can lead us to emplacement. For us, the relevant lesson is that to craft form [cultural or individual] while bearing in mind holymorphic [relationally interdependent] truth makes us recognize not only the parts of a larger system and their connection to each other, but also that they are naturally compelled to each other, even when in seeming opposition. This truth allows us to create sublimated form through use and to emplace it through context. It makes an artist of man, and opens him up the fruits of the “Great Work.�

The whole point of expanding on this is simple: birth and death are certainties, however actual living is full of discovery and choice. Inevitably the choice to seek Eudemonia [a flourishing and fulfilling life] is an internal one. Thus, our internal choices, through the subsequent behaviors and actions they engender create cultural form. It follows, then, that a flourishing life would inevitably, or, at the very least, probably, lead to a flourishing culture. It could even follow that one is not entirely possible without the continual feedback loop of the other.

Holymorphism and its alchemical ties to sublimation are the condicio sine qua non [without which not] of Eudaimonia. Only the initiate who came to surpass the search for wealth or fame could finally achieve the philosopher's stone. There are prerequisites of intention, for the Eudemonic life leads to something else that is often confused: Apatheia.

Wholly different than our word apathy, apatheia is more akin to the idea of freedom, freedom from impulsive or ego driven reaction much like ideas of "Sorage" from the Upinashads. To achieve it is learn the wisdom of the sage, to embody harmony, the axis point and meeting place of balance. This is created through a tedious and mindful process that syncs with cycles and developmental stages alike. Just as we looked at the four directions of the Medicine Wheel in part I as the macrocosm, we now overlay that with the microcosm of Transumtation. For to achieve either Eudaimonia or Apatheia isn't an easy task to accomplish, nor should it be. To achieve the work was to get it right, right in the face of previous failures and thus learning. Right, because you know what you're trying to do and why you're doing it in the first place.

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A pprent ic e I n c o r p o r at io n

[WE ARE ]

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I l l u min at ed

I n c or p

T hresho ld

[AX IS MUN DI]

[ I A M]

W

E

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[I]

Se ve r an c e

So let us look a little more closely at how these stages mirror development and integrate into the wheel as we've seen it. On the next page you'll see the wheel with these stages added, followed by a description of each.

Nigredo/I [Severance]: We begin by seeking the prima materia or "purest" state of matter, which then must be separated by fire and violence. Psychologically it's about entering that dark chaotic space of one's inner demons [the shadow] By intentionally creating a container we can allow for the flame to burn bright. We lose sight of material objects, identifying who we are apart from them, thus shedding light on the differences between our core and constructed identities. Completion of this phase is signaled by a "death" of the old self. In every journey there must be a moment in which you can affix the memory of its start. Severance on the wheel is to leave the familiar, to acknowledge that experience by its very nature is paramount to losing innocence while trying to maintain a purity of intent. It is the first moment in our lives in which we give credence to death and to shedding the extraneous. It is to knowingly or otherwise be thrust into the beginning of a paradigm shift.

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Recall the famous phrase from Corinthians: "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me."

To sever is to accept that the West is an inevitable transition, that storm clouds brew in the distance and thus, that change is on the horizon. It is also the proclamation "I": the child moves towards adolescence and begins to think more about distilling "I" from the experiences they are a part of. "I" is to undertake reflection about what "I" is and thus to move towards the realizations sought or otherwise that inevitably arise out of their seeking.

Albedo/I Am [Threshold]: We move from the earthly power to that of the moon, which represents our own identify reflecting light back off of a surface like that of water, reminding us of who we are and thus who we're becoming. We do the work, going through the motions while spending deep internal time figuring out just exactly who we are. The matter becomes conscious of its form just as we realize what our gifts are; we are thus changed and can't unlearn them. This is the end of the lesser work, the identification and the marriage of opposites. It is a milestone for the seeker. To accept that a moment will come in which we are called to articulate ourselves. Moments that once past will leave us forever changed. We cannot go backwards, we may revisit the West or the South but they will never be as they were, because we won't either. To look into the unknown without assurance but to take the experiences we've gained and to place enough faith in our efficaciousness, to believe that no matter what lies ahead, we choose not simply to bear it but to make the best of it. In this we move from "I" to "I am," we exclaim "I am worthy, I am capable, I am [whatever I need to be]." If severance is a death, then threshold is in the same breath to acknowledge the possibility of new life.

Citrinitas/We Are [Apprentice Incorporation]: The yellowing is most associated with the sun. The light is great and strong as if it had no source, no longer reflecting like it did with the moon. It is a death of the sense of self in that it is separate and individual from other things. It is to realize the fallacy of the subject/ object distinction. As stated earlier the youth's vision was not simply their own, it belonged as much to them as it did to their community. One cannot become a man or woman in a vacuum. To do so is to pay reverence and respect to the community that acknowledges you upon your return. Just as in Communitas [to offer ones gifts], the beginning of incorporation is to admit that together you can do things impossible of the individual. It is important to remember that when moving along you don't leave the South, West, or North behind but take them with you. Your experience, like a spark cast among the fire. After all, what is a community except the varying individual experiences made aggregate. Upon the youth's return they were given a name, one allowing the village to acknowledge that whereas one person left it was both the same and a wholly different person who returned. This was worn like a badge of honor, a marker of achievement, of having a specific place among their people.

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Rubedo/Axis Mundi [Illuminated Incorporation]: This is the fire of fusion, the return to the chthonic power. This is where we coagulate or come back together through merging of spirit and matter. To truly and finally turn material into the philosopher's stone and thus gold [Apathea]. The Self recognizes and manifests itself as holon, both part and whole simultaneously through interconnection. After the duty and responsibilities are done, when the wood is gathered, the bills paid, when our time is our own, what we choose to do when free is what defines us. We begin to see the circle for what it truly is and thus are drawn to all directions. We realize that to play or reflect, to go about our work or to teach are all equal parts of the fulfilled life. Happiness is not simply to survive but to flourish, thus we are drawn not to any single direction but instead towards the center. We began the journey in the East attempting to understand "I," moving to "I am," and then "we are." Here we come back again and into embodying not I or we but the very center of existance, the axis point between all things in which we pull from each stage and direction equally. Through this all things and us are one, to exist at all is to acknowledge interconnection. This is the point of actualization, to illuminate the darkness not in spite but to offer contrast to, not simply for us but for our people and thus, all people.

In the end it is important we come back to Condicio [originally meaning agreement] of Sine Qua Non [without which not]. In other words, to seek the stone as a metaphor for Eudaimonia, there must be an agreement, both in you and the work you're doing. To flourish is to be well aware of the path leading up to that point.

However, in the later post Pagan Latin, Codicio was changed to Conditio, which translates to and became the root for our word: condition. Words, just as Saussure will point out to us later on are simply placeholders for intention. To give up agreement of truth for condition therein is to turn one's back on the grey and accept black and white as final arbiter of TRUTH. What I hope to seek through language, art and a little magic as this work comes to a close is a world in which the gray tones reemerge, then give way to colors unseen. Just as those unkown tongues can be heard and spoken, I'd urge us to create a palate not limited by what we know but challenged and inspired by what we don't. I'd challenge us to stand up nervous but determined, to let our torches burn open and defiant in the darkness, and in doing so, that we might help light the way.

M Dane Zahorsky, Summer 2013

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Winter [Citrinitas] [To H a v e a N o rt h ]

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"Each time I jouney to the horizon I find a hole instead."

-Nancy Wood

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L anguage and Saussures' Game of

Chess:

So far we've examined the role of Greek and Native North American culture in the hopes of finding ways to begin the process of making them composite, and eventually aggregate. The main aspect of this is the interrelation of cultural practices paired with a reverence for the natural world. It should be noted here that I'm not attempting to make a case for ancient Greek environmentalism or to not allow for the possibility that Native North America could have evolved similarly to other modern civilizations without European contact. The point is that though we think historically, we tend to neither learn from history, nor seem willing to accept the implications of our reality.

It's with this that we begin to examine the conceptions we've come to take for granted. By looking at language, philosophy, and history, we will see how this came to be. This is not to diminish the individual experience, nor to generalize human interaction with sublimity as a whole. Instead, I hope that by examining where our concepts have taken root, we might do a little cultural weeding and make for a better garden. To accept that humanity is not the creator of, but in collaboration with, a morality neither diminished by relativism nor bounded by tacit convention.

We may culturally determine how morality is practiced geographically and there are always exceptions individually, but I'm speaking of something universally applicable.

We know ourselves as particulars by acknowledging universals. Marx's claim that history is reduced to class struggle obscures our root driving force, the search for meaning.

William James, one of the founders of American psychology, understood this.

In looking at religion pragmatically and phenomenologically, he returned over and over again to the same conclusion: we are Eliade's homo-religiosus [1], for to live at all is by nature an attempt to understand the purpose of that life. Every culture on the planet practices some form of religion, even atheism when studied carefully can be shown to operate dogmatically. The thing that binds us together, the great leveler, is our endeavor to codify morality through some process that either binds man to god, nature to man, or man to himself.

The praxis to establish this is enchantment. There are as many words to describe this as there are people who've studied it, secular and religious alike. Yet each of them draw from the same source, whether Longinus' sublime, Otto's numinous, Eliade's heirophany, or Joyce's epiphany. Each depicts a moment when there is a connection forged between the known and the unknown. Whether as a reminder of humility, the emotional response to revelation, or the mental fabric of driven inspiration, each in their own right has a deeply changing effect on the observer. The reason I have chosen to focus on sublimity in particular is our western connotation and interaction with it. We seem to have lost the ability to maintain it over time, or in a way that brings our focus back to investment in THIS place.

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One of the most substantial means by which things change over time is through language. The ways in which we record and communicate determine the ways in which we think about and live our lives. The famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure likened language to a game of chess: each move, though made possible by the rules, informs the players what those rules are both conceptually and bodily. They can even change one's perspective and interpretation of the game itself. In this way, language becomes a giant web of dependent meanings, each word understood in relation to others. Each of us live within this web. We might call it the very flesh of culture, learning to view what is both known, unknown, and expected by the syntax and semantics adopted. This is never more apparent than in how we explain the development of infant cognition, as they master object permanence.

When an object is placed before an infant and they close their eyes nothing is yet in place to lend it continuity over time so when they open them again they do not recognize it as the same object. Nor do they have the ability to comprehend different sensory data as independent, so the same object heard and seen bear no separation of meaning. The world itself is one seamless fabric, ironically, much like what sublimity can do after convention begins separating and conceptualizing objects and experiences in time and space. As we learn to distinguish these senses, experiences, and objects, we learn their meaning in association with convention. Yet we seem to resist the routine stepping back to look holistically [the moon's eye view of earth if you will] to the extent possible and gauge how it affects both our own well-being and that of its context. For just like a skin disease, certain words or phrases with specific connotation can infect and change interaction and instigate fear, prejudice, and violence, while appearing both rational and natural. It is in this sense that Maximalism [2] has come to rule our lives.

We are bombarded by seemingly sensible yet contradictory messages each and every day leading us towards disenchantment, even dysfunction. We have become much like Pavlov's dogs, which after being trained to salivate at a tone eventually became numb to all stimuli, Pavlov called this experimental neurosis. It happens when the senses are overloaded and, for lack of a better term, short out. In a world informed by what Chris Hedges calls "the many screens of our lives," we are not only being conditioned to specific types of stimuli, but are simultaneously saturated and overwrought by them. Our minds are forced to try to go numerous and often opposing directions at once in attempting to take in and process it all. Is the epidemic of ADD and ADHD, or the growing need for antidepressionary aids among our youth a surprise to anyone? I would be amazed by someone who was unaffected by such an onslaught of stimuli. So what of our feeling of worth let alone ability to be still, silent, and open to connection?

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We live, for the most part, through our diets and in our cities, as seasonless, continually "saved" from the binding to attitude or necessity that comes along with their changing. Though in recent years, that denial has begun to cost us in as much as climate change has begun effecting increasingly drastic weather and upredictable in not soon entirely unmanageable growing conditions.

We have also expanded the present in hopes of somehow getting more out of our own convention, subsuming both the past and future. Yet there never seem to be enough hours in the day or days in the week. We have forgotten the proper standing of both the past and future as well as the traditional engaging methods of story-craft in which to convey them. Instead we hide our elderly in homes and put enormous pressure on our youth to have their entire lives planned out at increasingly younger and younger ages. We ask even while all this is happening, is nothing sacred?

But to get to the heart of this is to know where we get our notion and thus our language of both the sublime and its progeny the sacred.

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S acer and the Sublime,

an Integrated History:

In Roman antiquity, when Longinus first coined the term "sublime," he did so to describe poetry that invoked a feeling of "lofty or great things." To depict the sublime was to invoke a feeling of limitlessness and humility naturally followed. It was used as a tool to invoke in us first the infinite and a subsequent reminder of our place in it. Much of antiquity was devoted to this understanding that all things had a proper place. The sublime was often studied in relation to the beautiful, though as time progressed, beauty was representative of well-formed things whereas the sublime became a symbol not just of the infinite but anything both compelling and terrifying.

For instance, Emmanuelle Kant, who followed Edmond Burke in creating formalized division between them, laid out tedious examples of the differences. Day was beautiful but night sublime, "low hedges trimmed into figures" were beautiful whereas "tall oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred grove" sublime. The beautiful day invokes feelings of fervor and gaiety, whereas the lonely night a disdain for the world and eternity. Beauty moves whereas the sublime charms, the sublime too was associated with magic and uncertainty, helping to reinforce it as something directly ascocated with peril, not to be trusted.

There were whole chapters dedicated to these comparisons, however the most famous example has become Casper David Friedrich's painting of a man looking out across the Swiss Alps surrounded by the "Sea of Fog." Burke, in his "Inquiry on the sublime and the beautiful" moved it from an ontological understanding of object to an epistemological study of subject. In short, it was no longer the object that held intrinsic meaning or caused experience, but the subject who first created and then projected it. The sublime was no longer in nature, but in man, and to understand sublimity was to examine the processes in the rational mind that engendered it. If we looked at the mountain it no longer possessed majesty in its own right but we who gave it through cognition. It was our response to an object that determined its value.

Taking cue from Burke, Kant took this framework and expounded it into an entire modality of study. He is often likened to having done for the mind what Aristotle did for the natural sciences. Kant, in his second "Critique of Judgment" defines aesthetics as an end into itself through pure beauty. This is where we get our idea of the purposeless purpose, or judgments that are made free of good or pleasurable ends. Kant needed a framework in which all judgment and reason could be reduced to something simultaneously subjective and universal. In other words, though I am having an individual experience, my judgment and reason are subject to the same free faculties as others and can be equated as universal. It was his attempt to create the foundation across cognitive models [though he would not have used this word] for his deontological categorical imperative [3], in which our actions were not determined by ulterior motives but governed and informed by universal laws like Saussure's game of chess.

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In looking at the sublime and the beautiful, he distinguished beauty as the "harmony of imagination and understanding" while sublimity was a "disharmony between imagination and reason." When we felt that gaity of the day it was our imagination taking in the sunlight and rearranging into conceptions that we could understand. But when we felt the disdain of the sublime night it was a result of the limit of our imagination, reaching a point at which it failed to comprehend a given experience. Kant divided the sublime into the mathematical and the dynamic or the infinite and the might/majesty of nature invoking a terror in the observer. When man experienced the sublime his imagination would first try to comprehend and explain the phenomena but would fall short, thus falling to reason to compensate.

Then something very important happened, which later would be called Kant's victory over nature. When reason was brought to bear it first caused a displeasure yet quickly turned to pleasure when the revelation of this surrender was understood.

For Kant, our experience of the sublime revealed reason as supreme over sensation and therefore proved humans to be "suprasenstitive" creatures not tied through sensation to the earth only to our rational minds themselves. Thus, there is a faculty in us that is greater than both the might and majesty of nature. In this our destiny moves beyond that of both the earthly and the animal to something "spiritual." Not only did this turn humility into dominion, but also connection to separation.

We can see from the very outset that we've have become the forbears of Cartesian legacy [4]. The sublime began in poetry, and through our growing interactions with the aesthetic turned from a study of beauty and how it differed to something that spanned across our experiences with the natural world. Yet it is only a strictly reductionist ethic that needs them to be separate at all. There is as much sublimity in the beautiful as there is beauty in the sublime. They are twin poles to one magnet [5], and we must begin to not only merge them once again but to see past the terror that lends itself to separation and accept that the infinite is only understood in relation to the finite. Man as an animal and thus mortal is the defining factor in understanding the sublime itself. Let us not forget Carl Sagan's reminder that our atoms are only borrowed: they came from "star stuff," and to star stuff they will inevitably return.

And what of the sacred, those experiences that pull from sublimity through space and time and create ritual and taboo? Sacred comes from the oldest Latin inscription we have. It was found written on a black stone called the Lapis Niger. This was a marker sanctioning off a grove of trees around the great Roman forum in the Comitium for the goddess Dianna. This was first thought to be the burial place of Romulus, from whom Rome took its name. The inscription warns that anyone who moves this boundary or passes improperly through its liminal border, "he and his cattle will be sacer." To be sacer in this sense is to be thrust outside of communitas.

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To understand the implications of this we need to have a better understanding of the transition from Greek beliefs to those adopted by the Romans.

In his book "Searching for Oneness" Ori Z. Soltes, describes the opening scene from Virgil's "Aenied," captured by the Renaissance painter Federico Barocci, where Aeneas flees a burning Troy with his son by the hand and his father on his back, who in turn carries the penates or household Gods. He leads the future while preserving the past; he does so in pietas [piety]. This is the essential nature of Roman life, to be bound in religio [spiritual practice] by pietas [piety] and to be bound in communitas by rex [law].

This was highly opposed to Greek culture, which, though it reined in excessive individualism, still promoted the glory of the individual. Communitas was to admit that together the Romans could do things impossible of the individual. Soltes, describes Roman life as defined by being part of communitas, the root meaning wall, not in defense but strength. To be thrust outside it was unthinkable, paramount to being alone, weak, and abandoned. Sacer, in this sense was a curse. It was the realm of the Gods and thus not of man. This was doubly important because to be cursed, just as to be blessed, was not brought to bear on the individual alone but the community as a whole.

Thus, we derive sacer opposite profanus, from where we get our word profane. It means: to be within the community, to be intolerant of supersticio [superstition]. And how does one make sure they are not falling prey to superstition, that they are within cultural norms and performing proper ritual? They do so by consulting a sacer-dos or "giver of the sacer." This created an entire class of intercessors between god and man who inform him of the proper way to worship. The entire point of life was to be profanus and to follow rex through piatas as dictated by the growing class of priests that would soon be taken over and replaced by the church. Though throughout history there have been priests, Christianity and then the Catholic Church via the papacy created for the first time a stopgap between man and other. Not only did one consult these priests for a proper understanding of ritual, but now they were dependent for guidance on how their experiences and actions stood against scriptural or ultimate truth.

Not only did supersticio or "standing over" begin to blanket older chthonic religion, it laid the foundation for the new struggle between Christianity and what it would term "paganism" [6]. The origins of what we consider sacred are essentially separate and in all probability hostile to us. And so it was that superstition and magic were considered separate and hostile as well, unless of course it was church sanctioned magic. So before we transition into the present we must do one last gloss on the past, which comes from our interaction with magic in general and witchcraft in particular.

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A rt, Magic, and the Glory:

Classical anthropology and psychology paint magic as primitive science or faulty reasoning respectively, as the attempt of man without civilization to somehow become safe and efficacious in a chaotic world. The modern studies often battle between its role as individual or societal, yet it is the phenomenological description I find most useful for our purposes. We each have emotional investment in people close to us, the things we have made and those we have come to own. When those things are damaged or destroyed we often feel that destruction directly translated to ourselves and our lives. Those same connections are important to those who love and hate us. Regardless of what magic is or is not we very much feel those objects are imbued with power. Thus how we act in specific relationships or in relation to specific objects and places is highly determined by those feelings.

We can define magic then as the emotional exchange between an individual, his or her intended actions, and the environment in which they operate. This is most easily understood through ritual: for instance, the "primitive" farmer performs a fertility ritual before planting his crop for the spring. We assume that he irrationally believes that the ritual causes the seed to grow thus mistaking it with the actual planting and germination. We know from history that many supposed "primitive" cultures had deep knowledge of practical sciences. The farmer would no sooner plant the seed without saying the ritual than vice versa, but why? The issue here isn't with the man; it's with our framing of the question. Remember Longboat's explanation of indigenous imagination as encompassing all perception? We need to exclude magic from the realm of reality, but indigenous man doesn't, because he is privy to the missing link, a direct tie to sublimity I will call the glory. A great way to frame the glory comes from James Jones' novel: "A Thin Red Line." In it, a soldier trying to make sense of how different cultures and people react to war muses: "One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there's nothing but unanswered pain. That death's got the final word, it's laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird, feels the glory, feels something smiling through it." This properly describes "primitive" man's worldview: life is never separate from what is supernatural because there is no prefix, there is only natural, only THIS place. Each moment was bound to all things before and after it, all that it could ever be or not be.

To put this in practical terms, R. J. Collingwood, in his work on aesthetics and magic, explains that when we in modernity use a tool we also perform magic. The tool, when well used, often feels like an extension of the body. It feels as if it's alive and we feel a sense of power in preforming an action, taking the energy from it and expending it for our own ends. The difference is that the "primitive" man performs the ritual because he understands that the source of the tool's power isn't simply man, but man drawing from the glory [all things and man together] and so he gives thanks. He understands that the action is a reciprocal process between tool and user.

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We call this animism but he has no need for such terms. He would in fact be just as astounded that we don't find the glory in an automobile or electric light bulb, and by our lack of joy in each of our daily toils. In this way there doesn't need to be distinction between the result of the ritual and the growing of food, they are simply two aspects of one action which is properly described as a cycle. It is the interplay between action and imagination that gives the ritual its power. To true practitioners, magic without action is perversion; real magic is a reminder of balance. Yet so too can the magical action be of corrupt intention, and it is here we find our most common associations of magic in the form of witchcraft.

Witchcraft often mixes not only the individual's intention with societal function but others perception of it and of those thought to be practitioners. There isn't a culture that we know of without some form of witchcraft, or ways in which to properly mediate the misuse of it. Yet across Europe and into America from the middle of the fifteenth century [and for 300 years after] between 80,000 and 100,000 people, mostly elderly women, were tortured and usually executed by pyre for alleged witchcraft. It stands in history as one of the only socially accepted genocides known to mankind. We can easily see the reformation and subsequent wars between Protestantism and Catholicism as the primary catalyst for this phenomenon.

Both felt it absolutely necessary to rigidly define and punish deviation from orthodoxy [7]. Throughout history, religious opposition has led to conflict and war; this, however, was something quite different. We cannot mistake the connection here from a general fear to the systematic hysteria [paradox intended] of removing those that were believed to posses an unnatural ability to access the other. Though witches were defined by communion with the devil, let us be clear, the devil of the old testament was an ambivalent contradictory agent and God was plenty vicious enough.

Our conception of the devil as evil incarnate and the source of man's corruption, in art, literature and myth was created during the middle ages. There was only one legitimate intercessor and that was the sacer-dos: the Catholic priest or Protestant pastor. In the church's eyes for a person outside the religious tradition, let alone a rural woman, to have the ability to access supernatural forces for evil or good was beyond abhorrent.

We also find these times of great transition in which enclosure, creation of the bourgeoisie, usury, upward mobility, and the loss of the Ptolemaic worldview through the Copernican revolution caused great rifts and unease across Europe. It cannot be ignored either [the professional fallacies of Robert Graves aside [8] that witchcraft echoed parts of chthonic belief systems often opposed to the androcentric Christian cannon. Yet it is not witchcraft in of itself that holds my interest here, but instead how we as a culture have chosen to deal with it. With the rise of the enlightenment and subsequent scientific revolution, the West realized that persecution of witchcraft was an acknowledgement that we believed in witches. Thus as the secularization of knowledge and our methods to acquire it took hold so too did our dealings with the "magical" or "occult."

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We now believe witchcraft to be an absurdity, scoffed off at during dinner parties and popularized in horror movies. Fanciful creatures, witchcraft, and magic don't just exist outside of the accepted belief system and its governing laws, they supersede them. We need these laws because we believe that if we know them, they can lead to a utilitarian wish fulfillment. When something comes along that can act arbitrarily among cultural and spiritual convention we need to make it sensible and inadvertently diminish its power. This is how we turn sublimity into fear or sacred into curse. Again and again in life, anytime we deal with that which is greater than ourselves, we attempt to fall back to the instinctual flight or fight mode. When something comes across that can inspire greatness we either try to escape, accept or conquer it. Magic or the supersticio can access or invoke something outside of authority or conventional belief and so we first sought to destroy it, but as time progressed new means were sought to make it illegitimate and thus harmless.

The logical step in moving from persecution to debasement is satire. Across the history of entertainment one can see the fascination with and yet disarmament of the esoteric. The magical becomes "the Sorcerer's Apprentice," witchcraft becomes "Hocus Pocus," lore becomes pulp, and all strong emotion follows.

We are bombarded in a world where shock and awe are so orchestrated when we see violence now the distinction between fiction and reality is nearly nonexistent.

There is no catharsis under which our true values emerge, but in its stead a medicated soup in which those values are replaced with the stale and manufactured idealogy of consumerism and natinoalism. History turns from a quest for meaning into the daily struggle of the wage slave to find respite in escape. We have in many ways become a meta-culture living through the critique of the fabricated reality of television and Internet programming. How can sublimity compete? And why would we want it too, who needs an epiphanal reminder of our insignificance when we can get affirmed minute by minute on Facebook? This is the result of a history with the sublime as fear and the sacred as separate, and the double-edged sword of a world without the lasting or sustained glory or enchantment.

Magic, ritual and folklore are the natural components of science, technology, and the dialectic. They are the locus of interchange between who we are, what we're doing here, and how we should proceed while being emotionally and spirituality invested in THIS place. What is enchantment if not the longevity of that emotional investment? If we are not enchanted in our relationships, objects, or landbase why would we see them as anything but economic devices? The reductionist final solution would have us steward through ownership and privatization, but where are we to find ourselves if not in places uninhabited and common to all? As science became the new dominant religion it not only began to reassess how we interacted with space and each other but it also divested itself of all ties to spirituality and even philosophy as it thrust off the final cause. We need only remember Ernest Mach in his positivist attack on anything outside what could be secularly quantified to paint an accurate picture of this [9]. I'm not arguing for a world where we accept delusion over reality, but one in which we redefine our aims in that reality and thus the faculties and investments in those aims.

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What I am arguing for is what Wes Jackson calls a "homecoming" [10], but like all journeymen or pilgrims [from the old English perigrine: to wander, via per-agre: to farm], we must find direction, a north with which to orient ourselves. What I hope we can learn is that a north point isn't simply external but internal as well. There is a Lakota phrase: "Cokata Hiyudo," it means: come to the center. The center of a circle, the circle that is a nest. The nest that is an extension of the body, made with the heart. By knowing oneself in place, through story, a home grows from within. We must come to understand like the indigenous peoples that we carry our homes with us, whether they be the Black Hills, Jerusalem, or, just as importantly, our own neighborhoods.

In short we must become nest-builders, able to make our perception congruent with reality. We must live that paradox by emplacing ourselves through the creation of local mythos, while simultaneously valuing others equally and recognizing that they contain their own, just like the root structure of the great Aspen groves of Utah create form through balance with its non-arbitrary limitations. We realize that home isn't a place to get back to, it's THIS place, it's ALL places, and as an extension of body it's consistently subject to vision. We can come to understand the world as linked by all points being eternally pregnant with sublimity, with the glory. A world where Dionysian and Apollonian, sacer and profanus, are understood to exist not as binaries but Koestler's holons both part and whole in simultaneous emergence [11].

But how does art differentiate from magic? Collingwood, in his essays on "The Philosophy of Enchantment," examines the two in this way by differentiating the type of resolution achieved. Art and magic can just as easily depict emotional catharsis as convulsion; buttress the good as much as the bad. They are personal, emotional investments in both creation and interpretation. Whereas magic moves towards a practical end, art is a form of magic that's intended, actual, and observed result can be ambiguous at best. Neither artist nor observer has to recognize that investment, and can in fact openly deny or dispute it.

This is why our definition of art is equated to the alchemy of projected emotion into built form, and thus art is the praxis of cultural creation. It is a form of magic that we have separated from its origins as it evolved from capturing time and essence to creating them. The environmental anthropologist David Abram describes the "spell of language" as indigenous cultures saw it when interacting with cultures that had letters bearing no connection to anything but the sounds of themselves.

They thought it a spell creating the essence of a thing wholly independent of the world around it. Many oral cultures lived in a world where spirituality was horizontal and equilateral, as opposed to vertical and hierarchical.

To indigenous peoples, the rocks and earth took just as much part in the language as did actual speech and worked through them to connect to a collective memory that reached across the vast expanses of time itself.

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The beauty of this isn't just nostalgia or ethnocentric rhetoric, it's that our language, as art, can both recall its magical ancestry and do just the opposite. We can remind ourselves of our north point, one that isn't reaching outward towards expansion but inward towards a center in which we move through Ortiz's collaboration of becoming. Whether conveyed through dialog or action.

These experiences create a sense of deep and momentous time, a time, as described earlier, as pregnant with the possibility of vision. The Greeks described this as kairos, a time in between cronos or linear time. These are the moments when special things happen, when we are moved to sublimity or reverie. In doing this, art can become much like the Native North American vision quest, where the senses are heightened, and perspectives are liminally flipped on their heads. To better understand this idea we will make the last bit of our journey and find ourselves in the present, looking at two contemporary nest-builders. The first in space through a blending of science and art and the second in time through art as experience.

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N est-Builders: Contemporary

Examples [Star Axis]

As we proceed let us keep in mind our earlier definition of art as emotional investment in a cultural action. 100 miles outside of Sante Fe, in the desert surrounding Las Vegas, New Mexico, the artist Charles Ross has spent the better part of 40 years constructing a monumental sculpture entitled "Star Axis." Ross, has cut a huge slit into the cliff face of one of the mesas there and built a naked eye observatory that focuses on the procession of our current north star: Polaris. It is a work of celestial measurements, precise angles and the perfect example of sensuous science at work. Star axis is built to convey the wobbling effect of the earth's spin as it moves through space It is this wobbling that causes our north star to rotate between four stars over a 26,000 year cycle: Thuban, Polaris, Alpha Cephi, and Vega. The structure itself consists of four component parts: the Equatorial Chamber, Star Tunnel, Solar Pyramid, and the Hour Chamber. The Equatorial Chamber acts as the entrance for the process of engaging the piece and rests at the bottom of two giant curved retaining walls that lead your eye to its triangular opening. If you were to lean against the angled wall on either side of the Star Tunnel you would be leaning at the exact angle of the equator as well as the alignment of the summer solstice. Moving upward from a perfect right angle, the Star Tunnel is built on the earth's axis point so that at anytime you look up through the circular aperture framing your view of the sky the north star is centered. If you were to watch the entire process through the night you would see Polaris move in a circle about the size of a dime at the center of the aperture. As the years advance this circle will get larger until it moves out of view and is eventually replaced by Cephi.

Each of the 26 steps of the Star Chamber takes you through 1000 years of the procession until you reach the top where the Solar Pyramid opens and you can sit upon a bench, again built against a wall that is level to the equator. If you make your way down to the opposite side, you enter the Hour Chamber. Here you can view Polaris in the apex of its triangle with each other star taking exactly an hour to get from the west to east points of the opening. Yet these details do nothing to get you to the heart of the piece, to the definition of Star Axis as emotional investment. And indeed, if any piece of art on the planet can be defined as such, this one can.

When you meet and talk with Ross, he won't budge an inch, the piece itself will not be open for several years but he allows small-guided tours. In preparing this work, I met with him and his wife for one such tour. One only need do a little research to uncover the deep fire and resolve it took to undergo its creation. From the vivid dream in 1964 that lead to his first prism and "solar burn" [12], he has moved through the years working towards the completion of this one vision. He and his wife take some months each summer to work towards that goal, though when asked about timelines he just replies, "It will get done when it wants to."

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One might think this sarcasm, but when you consider how he found the site after months of searching by fortuitously meeting a cowboy with a business card you might reconsider. The cowboy's father, after driving him around the 80,000 acres, sold him the land in the middle of an operational cattle ranch in exchange for a bridge over a four ft. ditch, but he keeps all this separate. For Ross, Star Axis, [as a process aside] is a tabula rasa on which each person will take and give whatever meaning they so choose. There are in fact two architectures within the work, the first is the process, and the second the space itself. As you engage with the piece, you project your identity, your culture unto it and through collaboration with it forge a neutral space in which to examine who you are in relation to the cosmos.

Ross, like Sagan, knows that we are "star stuff," and as long as we have lived the stars have guided our journeys, inspired our religions and are quite literally us across time. He was reminded of our age-old fixation when acquiring the measurements to begin construction, the only place he could find them was the naval academy. Until computerization, all of their navigational processes were based on charts dating back 5000 years to observations of the axial procession. When he asked how they stood up to those done with modern technology they told him the ancient measurements were precise to within a hair's breadth of accuracy. Few facts are as humbling to me as this one: indigenous peoples, using the same methods as Ross himself [the naked eye], were able to orient themselves on a planet spinning in space by simply paying attention. Let us try to visualize a world without electricity, a sky not just filled with stars but brilliantly alive with the fires of legend, brimming over with the stories and axioms of peoples across the world.

When you see Star Axis itself it's impossible not to form the word temple in your mind, not because you think church but because being in its presence alone instills kairos. This is not simply a meeting place of man and stars but an exemplary reference of the Apollonian and Dionysian merging through sublimity. Though surrounded by the endless mesa, everything seems to point to the semicircle opening; you feel a deep need to get inside it. And when you finally start walking up those steps you have to grab for the wall because of the deep feeling of reverse vertigo even in broad daylight. You're quite literally in a slipstream of focused attention, carried by the energy moving from Axis to Polaris. You become the intermediary between earth and sky. This is art made possible by using science working towards transcendence. For each right angle, each precise measurement helps reinforce the memory of where you come from, yet forces you to leave behind who you were there and be faced not with the promise but the possibility of becoming something new.

I have chosen to cite Star Axis because it instills this experience mutually to all, and thus promotes commonality across bias. We all see the same North Star, we all live on the same planet, we are bound by its thresholds, and only together will we find a way to live within them functionally.

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N est-Builders: Contemporary

Examples [ Bl ac k L an te rn S y ne rg y ]

The second and final example I'd like to explore takes the form of a collective called "Black Lantern Synergy." The name comes as an homage to Buckminster Fuller's book: "No More Secondhand God." He described the black lantern as a seemingly cold and dark object yet when a flame is introduced it paradoxically emits a shocking, beautiful, and multicolored light. They gather round this black lantern to study and portray synergy, which we might parallel to our definition of congruence from earlier. Fuller explains that we need only look around to see the myriad examples of integration among species and kingdoms, describing how we take for granted the synergistic behaviors in chemistry and biology all around us. They, like Fuller, search for understanding amidst the paradox of a darkness that when closely examined reveals brilliant and light altering truths.

The story of BLS began during the undergrad days of founding members Troy Payne and Jeffrey Johnson. Playing in their own bands and at times each other's, they had found what all young men look for: a tribe. In modernity, the only real right of passage we have to tell a child from an adult is how big a loan they can get, and thus how much debt they can accrue. We look first to our elders and then more profoundly to our peers for understanding and affirmation. They had found this through music; it was what led them to the first inklings of Fuller's synergy. From the very beginning they saw art as dialog [13] in which to convey and interact with transcendence through commonality. It wasn't simply the collaborative creation of art but the forming of bonds bound by shared values that laid the foundation for what followed. First sporadically, then compulsively, they began trekking out into the forests of rural Missouri. Gathering around fires, dwarfed by fields of shimmering stars, getting to know the smell, touch and taste of the humus that binds us all, they found a language far older than words. It was most vibrantly fluent at night, because our convention ties our fear to the dark, and moving past this fear they discovered a truth: The world never stops speaking in that unknown tongue. It is a dialect of creaking trees, cool winds, hooting owls, of cyclical relationships moving through cyclical time that is as translatable as you are willing to shed that fear. Thus these interactions planted seeds within them. The world seemed different upon their return, forming some kind of structure - not quite a dogma, more like a subtle reminder. They knew that those bonds were no longer just between friends, but included the night itself. They called it Darkanism.

Troy eventually moved to Portland to study environmental law, finding himself emerged in a history of thought that often felt contrary to the truths he had found in the wilderness, so he started researching and writing a paper. This was how the first incarnation of "Cartesian Eco Fem-Darkanism" was born.

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Half playful jab at philosophy, and half serious discussion of our environmental conundrum. The paper looked at our heritage of dualism, and called for a rethinking of our notions of culture, economy, law, logic, and humility.

The work draws from both traditional sources, like Aldo Leopold's land ethic and Wendell Berry's relation to agriculture, as well as inventive uses of everything from Heidegger to Yoda.

From the get go Troy wanted to find a way to build upon the under-girding that this work had set forth. So he and Jeffrey again found cause to join forces as a matter of chance. In 2009, they were approached by a local gallery about doing a performance based on the article. It was a chance to truly use art as a vehicle to examine public and sacred space, and the type of emotional response we each feel in our interactions with the natural world. Hundreds of hours of work went into turning the paper into what can only be called a lectumentary [14]. Rethinking text meant for a law publication into prose that would connect with an audience. They scoured for the right photographs, video and audio clips that would enhance the spoken word while a close friend wrote an acoustic soundtrack for the show. The event was an utter success, and they began almost before the performance itself to plan and evolve successive events.

Based on audience feedback, gut instinct, and intense scrutiny they created narrative based animation, downsized to one projector and began looking into other venues. This brought new collaboration and intensive planning for the future. They began dual efforts booking shows and starting a project called "radix," based on the etymology of the word radical, meaning: to have roots. It consisted of six photographs chosen for their visual and emotional resonance to the lecturmentary and was then taken by Charles Vega, of Lion Architecture, who used text and image and turned them into something entirely new. These pieces would be presented at the culmination of their efforts when they preformed it live at the University of California, Berkeley on Earth Day, 2011, for their annual Earth Week event.

Yet a biographical description won't give you BLS, nor will it give you Darkanism. What BLS calls "an hour in the dark" is a sobering and heartfelt invitation to join them in surrendering oneself to the mystery that truly engenders enchantment, to be mindful of individual ego and cultural form but not held down by them. This is never more evident than in the radix series, each photograph is overlaid with text. Neither the image nor the text is given precedence, as they move into and out of each other as one.

They truly articulate the interplay and struggle of constructed form placed atop the physical world. These works also remind us that language, as the Saussurean web of dependent meaning, can just as easily affect positive change as reinforce negative stigma. It is through the critique of our form as non arbitrary that we can visualize and then construct methods to align the built with its finite provenance.

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To accept synergy is to accept continuity. By exploring logical syllogisms [such as: grass dies, men die, therefore men are grass], subtle but powerful truths emerge. "I breathe what grass exhales and vice versa: not only are we star stuff but earth stuff." These concepts are bolstered by awe-inspiring images of their travels across uninhabited and deeply wild places. It is art as vision quest, to take yourself out of context, out of time and to liminally reorder boundaries via the experience itself. Yet they do an excellent job of juggling those border while still remaining aware of our often fragile "I's."

Through the process of Darkanism, BLS shows us how to build nests [reorient our center] with an emphasis in time just as Star Axis does so in space. For this is our central question, and one that BLS tackles well: How do we get there? The modern dilemma is that how has replaced should; for example, how is indicative of questions like "Is it logistically possible?" as opposed to questions such as "Is it morally sound?"

So, instead of asking if pollution should be allowed we simply permit its creation.

We looked at this earlier when discussing Aristotle's telos or purpose. The final cause was abandoned by the same motivation as Mach's positivism with the rise of secular science. Yet should and how can be seen synergistically, for, if we agree that we should/should not, then and only then can we figure out how to accomplish our task.

It means looking at our current problems as Fuller would have, by creating systems that make older ones obsolete instead of fighting the same historically binary fight where one side wins and subsequently becomes the oppressor it vanquished. The how's we need are ones rooted mutually in purpose and enchantment; this is why these works have any value at all. A change in perception will inevitably engender inspiration for changes in systemic behavior. Both of these works, just like the individuals behind them, are deeply committed in their own ways to creating art that is deeply indebted to its magical roots. Creating an art that reminds us again and again that all points are eternally pregnant with the possibility of both sublimity and vision. Our homes, and thus the connection we have to THIS place are forged in every moment we draw breath. Thus, all places across all times are indescribably valuable. These works remind us that subject and object are not so distinct, that observed and observer are reciprocal. From them we must begin to relearn how to take that dialog and carry it into the unfolding journey of our daily lives, to re-enchant ourselves with our daily lives.

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Spring [Rubedo] [O y a si n T e lo s ]

* "All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else."

-Gautama Siddharta

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H euri stics and

Functional Fixedness:

If we're going to achieve a re-enchantment, we must rethink the way we think, and examine our value of value. To study history isn't enough, we need to begin asking the fundamental questions about the forms we've constructed. Why we're in a hurry, to get where, to what end, and most importantly at what cost? Why should growth be equated with progress? Why do we allow form that gives us only the illusion of security, happiness and fulfillment while often causing the opposite? A form that creates unrest and disparity across the world producing factories the size of cities, taking workers away from their familie? So we can import products for a little cheaper? So they in turn can achieve the form's goal and get to where we are at the cost of our very existence? Paul Sheppard said it best when he described this as madness [15]. Yet it isn't simply a madness of people, but of systems that have grown outside of them. It's the feedback from forms we have placed upon the environment that tell us who we are. If you remove one corrupt CEO another will take his place, but change the way he thinks and the system follows suit.

A better way to understand it might be to call the form an aggregate of heuristics or rules of thumb for what we know to be true. With the birth of science we began to understand that cognition wasn't simply a refinement of perception but a substitution for and an idealization of it. You create a heuristic or an algorithm so that you get the answer right even when you don't have specific data. But this can be problematic: for instance, we have a habit of applying what works for one instance and using it willy-nilly for others. In psychology this is called functional fixedness, we get stuck in old frames of mind and have a difficult time moving past them. A stock example is the matchstick experiment, in which a subject is given a box of matches and told to create a design tangentially. Even the smartest of subjects will often spread them across a surface, looking for hours from every angle until they realize you can't accomplish it in two dimensions but have to build in three.

You must move past the fear of leaving convention and into the truth of innovation, while mainting the integrity of the past. These heuristics aren't simply those developed individually, but learned culturally, because the way we interact with something is most often determined by how we use it. Someone taught from childhood that a spoon is a knife, or, more traditionally, to work their years away feverishly for the fanciest spoons will duly follow suit. It is the same with our conception of nature as object. The most famous example of how our convention falls short and is often flawed is Rene Magritte's painting of a pipe with the caption written across the bottom, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" [This is not a pipe]. It is this same method that allows us to become aware of our fixed models and to change them, to begin thinking in three dimensions. It isn't easy, and begets a path of constant doubt and struggle, but let us remember a nest is built with repeated pressure upon the heart, often causing palpitation and even trauma.

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O yasin Telos:

Towards a Synthesis

During the summer of 2011, I attended a conference in Albuquerque, entitled "The Language of Spirit," based on dialogs between western scholars and indigenous leaders. We were tasked with understanding the links and disconnects between creativity, science and technology. While there, a Navajo woman, Woman Stands Shining, recounted how the diaspora between indigenous life and the modern technological world has come at a great cost to many of the Dine people. In tears, she described the poverty, addiction, and the loss of traditional knowledge that her people had been dealing with over the years and the fatal result this had on many of their youth. This woman who had more cause than I or nearly anyone I know to be seething with anger, to be wrapped up in it, wholly consumed by it, towards a culture who had committed repeated violence against her community, religion and way of life, didn't offer up hostility or condemnation but instead dedication.

She described how hard it was to find her own beauty and to connect with the traditions that reminded her of it, how hard it was to seek joy instead of strife, and yet fully acknowledged that it didn't matter who's fault it was, it was her responsibility to act as a model for the next generation. This beautiful and honest woman who fought to protect what was most dear, who had more right to confidence and affirmation than most people I've met struggled day in and day out simply to accept her own worth. How many of us do the same?

I would venture to say all.

Therein lies our commonality, our endeavor towards truth regardless of how distracted we've gotten. It is the delta of the rivers kin; she says "Oaysin," I say "Telos," we say together, "Oyasin Telos" [Related through purpose]. All of us in our lives are by and large simply trying to understand our role, our purpose, and to find that north point. Yet how can we know what it is? Though I'll be the first to admit we can't ever truly know one singular purpose, we can make some pretty informed guesses.

Humanity finds itself amidst and integrated within a vast and intricate living system, an economy with no waste, no unbridled ego or corrupt morality. Only a fool would see the world around him and not understand that it can inform us about our role in it.

Our purpose is to flourish, which we achieve by equating progress not with growth but balance. We're only now starting to realize how much we can learn. Fields of study like bio-mimicry, and permaculture have taught us that the natural world has its own culture, personality and idiosyncrasies that are expressed in countless and often exotic ways across the vegetable, mineral and animal kingdoms.

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This is the path towards sustainable enchantment, for in each moment that we draw breath is the chance to emotionally invest in open collaboration with that culture and therefore the world upon which it's placed. To construct non-arbitrary form based on a panatomic foundation and tempered with vantage point opens us up to the possibility of sustained vision and sublimity. To not be affected by a collection of inert objects but as Thomas Berry says, "to interact within a community of subjects" reminds us that we are indeed, NOT ALONE. We can become membranes for the language of the animate landscape and make our own language congruent with it. To truly say what we mean and are begets like actions.

I'm not opting for primitivism or the take down of civilization, in fact just the opposite: think about technologies made in harmony with the natural world based on a science dedicated to transcending its own limitations by allowing for and encouraging the unquantifiable [16]. Over half of all people now live in cities. We can't all live on Walden pond or take long treks into the wilderness for a renewal of that child-like wonder [though I still think we should try in as much as we're able]; the point of this work and by extension of those I've referenced is to realize that we don't have to. By grounding experience in time and space, by forging nests through truly seeing our surroundings and invoking them, we level that experience. We create a place in which all are immigrants, a place we enter equally. We accept that home is both within us and all around us, and as such nothing is profane because we are in Ortiz's collaboration of becoming [17]. We realize that doorknob you'll use to leave the room isn't man made at all, just as all synthetic molecules are only possible from organic ones. Imagine a world in which in which we looked with wonder and gratitude at the many supposedly menial objects that fill our lives, we can move past our tacit infrastructure and see the glory. It isn't a world opposed to responsibility or even consequence but a world in which we live in congruence with the type of beings we are. A world in which animal is a claim to our roots, not a denial of them.

It is in this vein that as our journey comes to a close the point becomes simple: We must ask ourselves: "Who am I?" Remember those bundles of neurons, just as any of the things we've looked at, can often be lost to the actual, pragmatic experiences and choices we make every day. To really know how we feel about these notions we must first ask of the many selves that we offer to our friends and family, to co-workers, and when alone, which one, if any are we really?

We must see that they are all part of our "I" and thus to find the axis point between them, and in so doing the person we want to be. We MYST ask ourselves, when our golden years are gone from us, when those young look to us for insight, what will be left...what will be our residue? A life lived through manifest destiny or humble gratitude?

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Remember Gluck's character from the beginning of this journey? She faces death and realizes that being human is all she knows, a world in which her horse is simply a horse, and the mountain a mountain. Yet by drawing us to these observations, Gluck guides us towards the possibility for another world - a world where we can indeed start "thinking like a mountain." That retooling of conception reifies an imagination that isn't limited to only what has been proven true "up til now." With the right kind of eyes, the world is full of magic and mystery. Where all points are pregnant with a sublimity, not full of fear but much more akin to Kant's conception of beauty. These realizations are the path towards not only joy but duty, for to love something is also to protect it.

Yet we often think that we can't affect real change, wondering how to be heroic in such a confusing world. But recall those models around which we've built our ideas of the heroic: if the Greek heroes, and really all heroes of antiquity, were anything, they were fallible, animal, subject to fate. We must remind ourselves that perfection is a fallacy. Lorenzo Valla and the Renaissance humanists, in posing the question, "Would you rather be a man or an angel?" explained that an angel is perfect and cannot change whereas a man can always improve. We, as fallible and often contradictory creatures are gifted that ability in every moment.

And as such the world will be made in each thought you entertain, each conversation you have, each stand you make or dream you forge into reality. We must be our own role models, our own heroes. And being heroic doesn't mean being larger than life, only that you chose integrity over convenience. The question is not who will save us, but when, through accountability and self-acceptance, we will save ourselves.

In the end, if there is anything I do know it's that we need to get outside with our children and start talking to rocks and insects. We need to start playing again, to free imagination from its assumed limitations and accepted venues of expression.

It's time to not be limited by what is possible, but unlimited by what isn't. It's time to start living like villages again, to tell stories with the landscape, not about it. If humanity is to have a future, it will come from those not bound by the categories that separate the seeker from the expert, but from those without fear who seek balance, those who love and fiercely, without pause or hesitation. In the end if you ask me what an enchanted world looks like, I'd tell you to close your eyes again and remember that deep sense of awe and reverie when all things were alive to you: those whispers that bubbled up from the rushing waters bearing all the secrets of the universe, those fleeting images in the shadows that followed just out of sight. I'd ask you to remember who you were in those moments and what you believed.

Then just maybe, you can tell me.

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Notes:

[That Wh ic h is So u g h t E x t e rna l] Winter [Citrinitas]: 1.

Eliade, uses this term in his work on the sacred and the profane to distinguish between modern and archaic man. He believed that archaic man was ahistorical, and thus iterating the dialectic between present tense based connection vs. believing in a historical culmination. Yet in the end he resolves the two by asserting the claim that all of humanity from prehistory to present find themselves searching for a meaning beyond themselves e.g. homo-religiosus.

For further description see Ellwoods' "The Politics of Myth." In his book, "Empire of Illusion" Hedges, speaks in depth about modern man measuring the value of his life by both the information and feedback he gets from his email, text messages, interactive television programs, etc. The end result being that instead of looking out into the world for tangible interaction he looks to the screens to define his reality.

2.

Maximalism, as coined by Michael Cadieux, is defined as the end result of Post Modernism. This is where work simply becomes re-contextualization ad-infinitum. A time when the artist is able to place random source material together and then uses the viewer's supposed lack of understanding as a tribute to his own ability.

3.

Deontological Ethics judges the morality of an action based on the action's adherence to a rule or rules. For Kant, each action was judged against the categorical imperative. This meant that one should only act if that action could be so right that it would be liable universally against all contexts and instances.

4.

Descartes in his famously misunderstood phrase: "I think, therefore I am," wasn't questioning reality but laying the foundation on which doubt acted as a crucible towards a purity of the known. One knows that to doubt is to be aware of doubting, and in this way the possibility of any concept necessitates existence.

Thus, Descartes gives us the ultimately rational though highly unsound proof for the existence of God. For after being certain we exist, what else can? What about something infinite? For Descartes, the ability to conceptualize the infinite meant that it must exist, for how else could we conceive of it. This is what lead him both to God and the external world. He had to believe that the Christian God who authored man's dominion was its source thus Burke and Kant's sublimity through the superiority of reason was in fact our reminder of it.

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5.

In his article "Beauty lies in the eye," Steven Shapiro, examines Kantian sublimity and beauty not as opposing but inexorably connected. He claims we have abandoned beauty in favor of the sublime, and need to recall how Kant synthesized each so that we might be able to mend the rift between subject and object in the present.

6.

From the Latin root: paganus, the word pagan was used as a derogatory term for all non-Abrahamic religions. With the rise of Christianity, it was Constantine who would later create the Byzantine Empire, who began mass persecution by ordering pagan temples torn down and replacing all the mystery religions with Christianity as the official religion of Rome.

7.

Because of the reformation, both Protestantism and Catholicism were exceedingly determined to uphold orthodoxy or rigid church dogma. Each of these was eager to punish any deviance. Many villages in rural Europe often found "witches" in anyone who did anything outside of this orthodoxy.

Often enough villages of mixed faiths would find them in the opposing religions' ranks.

8.

Graves is most famously knows for his contravention work "The White Goddess," he posited that all works depicting a Goddess in the Mediterranean, and many sites across Europe were of the same diety. He believed that the crucial ties proving this were destroyed by the rise of androcentric religion.

9.

Ernest Mach was one of the largest proponents of positivism, his rigid stance, particularly in physics, lead to a long denial of the existence of atoms and heavy but unfounded criticism of Newtonian theories on space and time.

10. Jackson argues for an end to the trend of constant upward mobility, and for a mental shift in the way we view land and our physical, social, and spiritual ties as well as our subsequent responsibilities to them.

11. In his cult classic "The Ghost in the Machine" Koestler writes a polemic against the notion that any kind of ghost or spirit exists. Instead he defines this as a series of feed backs and forwards that result from the interaction of many different parts that mistake themselves as autonomous. Yet it is not Koestler's idea of a part and whole simultaneously that I hope to convey but that later critiques and adaptations of his work, IE that that ghost is in fact what drives those loops themselves.

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12. Toward the end of 1964, Ross had a dream, in which he made something similar to the work he was doing at the time. When he sat down to draw out the image he sketched a prism. When he first tried to construct the image based on his dream, Ross consulted a friend of his for structural integrity. His friend told him there was flaws and helped to fix them. After making the suggestions advised the finished piece exploded. Ross then went back to square one and constructed the prism as he had seen it in his dream, this was what led him to his most famous series of on-going work: "the solar burns."

13. Dialog here, isn't simply eluding to spoken language or even one solely based on convention. In an excerpt from "Cartesian Eco Fem-Darkanism," Troy discusses the bond between the group as forged through the dialog resulting from the work itself. Musing on their days in the band he said, "I didn't just offer my part as a whole that had to be integrated. I offered my inspired element up to a process of total collectivity, as did Nate, and Wes. In other words, I was open to my part being rejected entirely and to the possibility of heading in a new direction on a song based on our collective desires and inspiration. Regardless, this process of open and inspired push yielded better songs and more powerful art, and when we took a stage, the celebration of these honest friendships, and the resulting collaboration, was free to ignite all of us and the audience into a single flame."

-http://blacklanternsynergy.com/black-lantern-origins/ 14. Because of the multifaceted nature of BLS' performance it's a hard thing to articulate. A former K-State ecological architecture student, summarized it like this: "Troy, Jeff, and Matt, the dynamic hearts behind Black Lantern Synergy, are presenting a philosophy that reexamines the human relationship with nature, suggesting a progression that synergizes scientific, philosophical, and technical advances with our very oldest, most ingrained, and quietest instincts. More eloquently, it is as they say, not just (re)thinking the environmental conundrum, but (re)feeling it by creating an interactive lectumentary blending academic research, philosophic inquiry, poetic verse, natural imagery, and back country experience." -http://blacklanternsynergy.com/ruzicka-review/

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Spring [Rubedo]: 15. In his groundbreaking work "Nature and Madness," Shepard describes the denial that human action in the form of industrial civilization is destroying the earth's ability to self regulate as a form of madness. He asserts that unless a cultural shift takes hold, our species will simply cease to exist.

16. There are a great many efforts underway to find the unifying factor between progress and equilibrium, one of the best examples is the work of the Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut, who creates not simply buildings but systems that interact with and steward the environment they're in, while achieving both aesthetic beauty and comfort. However the main success they achieve is a sense of wonderment and a reverential reconnection with space.

17. In describing an experience he had with his granddaughter and a pueblo version of coyote, Simon Ortiz puts emphasis, not simply on the relationship itself, but in the power of nomos or namesake. Simon is only grandfather because of his granddaughter, they are in collaboration together and yet still evolving. He calls this the process of "becoming," and makes it clear that all living and non-living things take part in it.

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Bibliography: Winter [Citrinitas]: Blessed Unrest. Penguin. Hawken, P The Politics of Myth. State University Press of New York. Ellwood, R Writings in General Linguistics. Oxford University Press. Saussure, F Jamesian pragmatism and its Warrants Review of Metaphysics. Robinson, D A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology. Elsevier Science Publishers. Weckowicz, T Longinus on the Sublime. Cambridge University Press.

Beauty Lies in the Eye. Symploke Volume 6. Shaviro, S The Ghost in the Machine. Pan Piper. Koestler, A The Philosophy of Enchantment. Oxford Cambridge University Press.

Collingwood, R. G. The Sublime Now. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. White, L and Pajaczkowska Critique of Judgment. Oxford University Press [Translation]. Kant, E Religion and the Decline of Magic. Scribners. Thomas, K The End of Magic. Oxford University Press. Glucklich, A Imaginary Landscapes. St Martin's Press. Thompson, I The Rites of Passage. The University of Chicago Press. Van Gannep, A The Thin Red Line. Dell Publishing. Jones, J Shamanism in the Religious Experiences of Contemporary Artists in North America. University of Ottawa. Korp, E Cartesian Eco-FemDarkanism: She Comes from the Earth, Therefor We Are. Environment Law. Payne, T

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2008 1999 2006 2003 1990 1967 1998 1967 2005 2009 1952 1971 1997 1998 1960 1962 1991 2007

Spring [Rubedo]: 1998 1995 2009 1948

The Mind: An Oxford Reader. Oxford University Press. Robinson, D Ecopyschology Chapter 1 Theoretical Examples. Sierra Club Books.

Shephard, P The Sacred Universe. Columbia University Press. Berry. T The Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Dialogue on Free Will.

Chicago University Press [Translation]. Valla, L

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Image Index From Who se H a nd s H a v e [ *Cover photograph “Shaman,” as well as the following illustration detail “Feline Truths,” co-design of the Medicine Wheel diagram in the preface and closing image “Encounter” by Emily Lodigensky. Beach Image accompanying BLS in Winter: “Void” by Ryan Lynch. All other imagry courtesy of Janet Simpson.

In order of apperance by section:

Shaman

Feline Truths - Detail Muted Untitled

Disentegrating Daisy

Medicine Wheel

Nest 1

Sunny Day Stain/Leaf Puddle

Nest 4 Void

19 21 25 29 35 39

Bird Lightbulb Surface

43 45 47

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Containment - Body Waste

Encounter

56 1

2/3 3/48/9 8/9 11 13 15

58/59

].

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1

1