theflowinghoney

[theflowinghoney]

Juliana said, “Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?”… …”Sun at the top. Tui at the bottom. Empty in the center.” “Do you know what hexagram that is?” she said. “Without using the chart?” “Yes,” Hawthorne said. “It’s Chung Fu,” Juliana said. “Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.” Raising his head, Hawthorne scrutinized her. He had now an almost savage expression. “It means, does it, that my book is true?” “Yes,” she said. With anger he said, “Germany and Japan lost the war?” “Yes.” Hawthorne, then, closed the two volumes and rose to his feet; he said nothing. “Even you don’t face it,” Juliana said. For a time he considered. His gaze had become empty, Juliana saw. Turned inward, she realized. Preoccupied, by himself… and then his eyes became clear again; he grunted, started. “I’m not sure of anything,” he said. “Believe,” Juliana said. He shook his head no. “Can’t you?” she said. “Are you sure?”…

…”How strange,” Juliana said. “I never would have thought the truth would make you angry.” Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find. I’m lucky. “I thought you’d be as pleased and excited as I am. It’s a misunderstanding, isn’t it?”

The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

[theflowinghoney]

Their view; it is cosmic. Not of man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Gute, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they-these madmen-respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.

The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

[theflowinghoney]

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of the aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality. Art is committed to that perception of the world which alienates individuals from their functional existence and performance in society—it is committed to an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity.”

The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse

A huge part of my artistic ethos it’s to uncover truth through music. Music has a huge potential to catalyze change and liberation, personally, economically/politically, culturally in the way that it allows us to empathize with people whose experience is so different from our own. It helps us formulate the subjective truth of reality and become a truer version of ourselves. 

Sustainable change is created by slowly shifting class consciousness through presenting new viewpoints. By awakening ourselves to the possibilities of truth and refusing to perpetuate consumption cycles that we don’t believe in. That’s what causes change 

The most radical thing we can do is live a changed life ourselves.

[theflowinghoney]

The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.

James Baldwin

[theflowinghoney]

This love is too big for my body, So now I am a poet. Now the dirt under my finger nail is a prayer to the worms, and the damp underbelly of life and the soil I will become, Because I will become the soil - and I'm learning how to love that just as much as I love flesh, and blood, and warm breath, and crooked teeth, and pain... And The roadkill is a reminder of life that precedes death, not just death itself. When I see the fur animated, by the wind of the passing cars my heart seizes with love for what was, what is, and what will never be (mostly what will never be...). And I will write about it all because it is too big for me to carry inside my human body, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry Too big to carry without clogging my arteries and bringing me to my knees; looking skyward for a god To ask "why?..." to. It is too heavy, Too heavy, it has transformed me.

sunlightafterdark

[theflowinghoney]

art doesn't require a gift! art doesn't require skill! art doesn't require talent! art doesn't require special insight! art doesn't require emotional overwhelm! art doesn't require effort! art doesn't require turmoil & pain! art doesn't require planning or forethought! art doesn't require a message! art doesn't require meaning! art doesn't require purity of heart! art doesn't require clarity of vision! art doesn't require training! art doesn't require education! art doesn't require physical material! art doesn't require an audience! art doesn't require practice in the sense you think i mean - it only requires "practice" in the momentary present-tense sense, as in, if you are doing it, you are practicing it, and practicing it is all there really is! there is no "real thing"! art doesn't require completion, nor perfection! art doesn't require striving for completion nor perfection! art doesn't require a reveal. art only requires that you claim it. claim it!

Syoma Flora

[theflowinghoney]

Once there were songs for everything, Songs for planting, for growing, for harvesting, For eating, getting drunk, falling asleep, For sunrise, birth, mind-break, and war. For death (those are the heaviest songs and they Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief). Now all we hear are falling-in-love songs and Falling apart after falling in love songs. The earth is leaning sideways And a song is emerging from the floods And fires. Urgent tendrils lift toward the sun. You must be friends with silence to hear. The songs of the guardians of silence are the most powerful— They are the most rare.

Singing Everything, Joy Harjo

[theflowinghoney]

When you love, knowledge is for others, to help them avoid suffering. When you don't love, "What's the use?" becomes the suffocating, emasculating question. Knowledge without love only leads to hate through a clearer and clearer account of meaninglessness. "Everything done in love is done beyond good and evil." Meaning is borne of love, not knowledge.

Johnathan Chase Brown

[theflowinghoney]

For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure—had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another... ...It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

The Time Machine, H.G. Wells

[theflowinghoney]

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it… Today, time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off. There is nothing to provide time with any hold [Halt]. Time that rushes off is not habitable. Rituals stabilize life. To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space. For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their ‘relative independence from men’. They ‘have the function of stabilizing human life’. Their ‘objectivity lies in the fact that . . . men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table’. In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last [haltbar].

The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, Byung-Chul Han, pg. 2

I'm not sure that true rituals exist anymore. Which I think is Han's point, but it doesn't seem right. True rituals in the sense that the processes are involuntary. It seems like all the things that would be community based activities to draw us together are extremely voluntary and difficult to maintain. But I suppose I only come to that conclusion when I look at my own life. Attending church is a ritual. Celebrating holiday traditions is a ritual. Even book club could be ritual. It seems like many rituals are tied to organized religion or some institution that I am not a part of, which, again, makes sense. I want something for myself outside of that, but it's not really up to me if it doesn't occur involuntarily in my community.

There will always be those personal rituals. Like study, prayer/meditation, preparing meals, creating. It doesn't feel the same. I want to celebrate the seasons of life. Drive a stake in between my years and mark the passing of time with ends and beginnings instead of staying in the constant flow of events. Sometimes they happen on their own, but I want to engage in them with the people I love who are closest to me. I want to implement involuntary systems of celebration and reflection in my life. I want to be-at-home in my days.

[theflowinghoney]

...although no perfect triangle (or circle, or square) exists in nature, the idea of a triangle has as much existence as any physical thing of a triangular shape. What is more, when you or I think of a triangle, it’s not as if we each had our own, subjective triangle lodged in our minds. We both observe mentally the same triangle. And in doing so we each encounter a real, spiritual world. Because for Steiner, the outskirts of the spiritual world, so to speak, begin in our own minds... Steiner recognized that while physical things exist in a physical space outside of us, there is another kind of space, an interior space that we metaphorically say exists “in our heads.” ...it isn’t a physical but a mental, or, as Steiner calls it, a spiritual space... For Steiner, ideas were the “shadows” of spiritual realities; meaning that ideas were realities in themselves... And that, in a nutshell, is the core of Steiner’s philosophy. It is through our own minds and our power of thought that we gain access to the spiritual world.

Chapter 1, Rudolf Steiner: An Introductionto his Life and Work, Gary Lachman

If Steiner is right--that there is an objective spiritual world that can be accessed, observed, and engaged in collectively--what are the implications for artistic communication? A melody (the symbol) can convey the spiritual truth or concept the performer wishes to express. An audience perceiving the same song can hold and observe the real and true spirit of the message in the "inner space". But then how do you explain different interpretations of art based on a listeners lived experience, opinions, tastes, etc? Perhaps intuitive thinking is required to tap into the metaphysical in order to download the meaning in its true and right form. I think it's possible to sonically implant the object of your creation into a listener. It's like a spiritual bluetooth. I'm sure it's real even if I don't understand the mechanics and parameters yet.

In a way, I feel that all artistic creation is downloaded from the spiritual realm. Or maybe there is also works produced by the ego. Maybe that explains why some art feels powerful and inspired and others feel unimportant. Is that subjective?

[theflowinghoney]

And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

Romans 5:2-5 NIV

Hope is a tangible spiritual currency. Engaging in hope creates mindset and reality shifts in our lives. If the "inner space" is as real as the physical one like Steiner suggests, hope gives us power to call on realities that are not yet seen (realities that are perhaps more real than the physical) and makes them physical as we meditate on them. Like manifestation? Hope is gained through a linear process that begins with persevering through pain and ends in peace, power, and confidence through a multitude of circumstances. Hope isn't a feeling or a wish. It is an action with results. Hope changes us and it can change our circumstances. Faith and hope is not reserved only for Christians facing persecution. It is the force that drives society and the world into a positive change instead of a negative dystrophy. Hope is extremely important and powerful.

[theflowinghoney]

Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line. But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over. You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.

Joni Mitchell

It's honestly true that you cannot have love and trust without pain. It is the perseverance through pain that results in trust which furnishes love. To think that I almost gave up the love in my life to find somebody new because of such superficial and narcissistic things. I'm so lucky and blessed to have a partner that indulges in my most deranged thoughts yet somehow still leads me outside of myself. It is the meaning of love and partnership. I thought he wasn't interested in me enough when really I was too busy looking at myself. I don't think I can thank him enough for more chances than I deserve. I have everything I ever wanted now. All I had to do was truly open myself in honesty and grace.

[theflowinghoney]

“We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in; these bees, as our Vergil says,

'pack close the flowing honey And swell their cells with nectar sweet'…

…We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us,—in other words, our natural gifts,—we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.”

"Epistle 84. On Gathering Ideas," Epistles 66-92, Lucius Annaeus Seneca