Qabbalah and problems regarding spatial metaphors

The following is something I jotted up to a friend as an explanation about something I said in passing on the phone with him about spatial metaphors and the Kabbalah. I assume it'll expand and work its way into the Immanence of Myth. I also have more to say about the first point, some of which was inspired by an article of Mimi Lobell's that John Lobell sent to me recently. Perhaps some of you will find it useful or interesting, if not this'll serve as a reminder to myself. Any conversations that spin off of it are always welcome- questions and conversations in many ways are helping to direct the expansion of this project.

We constantly make our metaphors spatial, often when we are not actually referring to a spatial relation. This could even be the crux of the metaphor. For instance, we commonly say something like "I'm feeling pretty up" or "I'm feeling pretty down." There's a sense that we immediately understand from these metaphors that bears no relationship with reality. In other words, even though it shouldn't make sense, it makes perfect sense. This is the nature of a metaphor, we don't say "she ran like a deer," we say "she was a deer." There's a sense in which something that is logically untrue is true in another sense; the conjoining of these two or more ideas tells us something about its nature, even though the actual statement is false.

(This is an element of mythological thought that has caused no amount of trouble in religion, clearly, but that's not what I want to get at.)

The Qabbalah is in many ways a spatial as well as numerological metaphor created to deal with metaphysical ideas that could not possibly be dealt with in such subtlety in any other way. So a structure was built that allows us to relate these very abstract ideas with one another in a way that is very concrete and intuitive to us: a spatial "map," the tree of life.

Further, it was well recognized by priests and scholars alike at the point of the birth of Kabbalah (anywhere between the 4th and 12th century), that the divine could not exist separate from anything. That is to say, the divine cannot itself have qualities, for to have a quality is to acknowledge the absence of a quality, (if God is light then does darkness exist without God? How can anything exist outside of the absolute/infinite/etc.) Yet if it is without qualities, then how can it be said to exist at all? They worked around this issue with the tree, by saying that all of these seemingly distinct elements are essentially the result of an element outpouring to the next- they are not only linked but actually inseparable.

This "tree" is broken up into what are essentially layers of reality, called Sephiroth (סְפִירָה, "eminations"), from the tangible and material (Malkuth) to the completely meta-physical (Keter). These are connected by paths which correspond to the psychological states apparent in the transition from one of these layers to the next, and as such though there are dense correspondences associated with the Sephiroth, the associations for the paths are more narrative. This is most clearly seen in the association of the Major Arcana cards of the Tarot - or the archetypes they represent - with those paths. (FN The Major Arcana are distinct from the other cards, in that they represent archetypical personas that can also be seen as "journey states," such as the Fool and the Magus. There's a lot in the Book of Thoth on these two, not to mention the Golden Bough, Arthurian legend especially the legend of Parcival, or even Apocalypse Now for that matter.)

The usefulness and meaning of these "associations" is possibly best understood not only psychologically but also anthropologically. This quotation from Claude Levi-Strauss is strangely appropriate: "The customs of a community, taken as a whole,
always have a particular style and are reducible to systems... the number of systems is not unlimited and... in their games, dreams, or wild imaginings... human societies, like individuals, never create absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repetior... By making an inventory of all recorded customs, of all those imagined in myths or suggested in childrens and adult games, or
in the dreams of healthy or sick individuals or in psycho-pathological behavior, one could arrive at a sort of table, like that of the chemical elements, in which all actual or hypothetical customs would be grouped into families, so that one could see at a glance which customs a particular society had in fact adopted."

Though this is not the intention of the 'original' Kabbalah we see in the Sefer Yetzirah or Zohar, it is nevertheless what it evolved into, through the practices of Christian and Jewish mystics alike, taking on its penultimate form - in this regard - in the so-called magical orders of the Victorian age. And although much of the analysis and charts of associations produced by these groups may arguably be flawed or at the least culturally biased themselves, and though they are to some extent subjective in any case, it is nevertheless an analytical as well as creative tool too useful to be simply overlooked. These charts, and an explaination thereof, is best found in works like Israel Regardie's Garden of Pomegranates, Dion Fortune's Mystical Kabbalah, or a great deal of Aleister Crowley's work, most particularly the Book of Thoth, Magick In Theory and Practice, 777, and Book 4. (At the same time, all of these should be approached with some degree of skepticism.)

However, in bifurcating the divine, an inherent heirarchy is created within the tree of life so long as you think of that spatial metaphor as literal, that Keter is "above" Chesed or Netzach, that one "ascends" to "travel" from Malkuth to Yesod, etc. None of these are the case- they are metaphysical and psychological realities which have no spatial reality. They are only said to have that as a way of thinking of them, as otherwise we simply can't wrap our head around it. It's a small lie to avoid a larger one. The only truth to the tree of life is actually Ein Sof, the unmanifest which all of the sephiroth eminate from, and even then, in an oddly Hegellian realization, the rabbis later created the idea of Ein Sof Aur, the boundless possibility to pair against the unmanifest, almost Sunyata like-ness of Ein Sof. Sunyata is the Buddhist void which is also the ground of being, both are essentially the same concept, or in this case, category, since Sunyata and Ein Sof both represent the true
monad which simply cannot be conceived, nor thought of as anything other than a quality-less void containing in potentia all possible qualities. (The idea of Sunyata may be argued to contain both Ein Sof (the negative aspect) and Ein Sof Aur (the positive) within it, but this is irrelevant to the point.)

You can see in the duality of ideas such as Ein Sof and Ein Sof Aur that we are actually incapable of creating a truly monistic concept without at least implying a duality behind it, (and often a trinity behind that). It is difficult to say if this is simply a barrier of our own nervous system or an inherent quality of the universe beyond perception- when thinking of any single thing we must "frame" it within an area that is not that thing. It is an odd pre-requisite of thought. To think of a thing outside of which there exist nothing but that thing is mind-boggling, at best we think of it ever expanding, but what would it have to expand into? This is the ground that Kabbalah and other similar metaphysical systems attempt to strike at, through some of the conceptual tricks already discussed.

Join My Cult audiobook iTunes & more

The psychedelic prologue to Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning, Join My Cult! has been rewiring drug-addled brains for the past five years. Now, here, for the first time (because we never bothered to get around to it before), is an installment of the book in audio form.

Rather than post individual episodes on this blog, you can go here to get episodes as they run, or sign up via iTunes, Odeo or the reader of your choice:

Join My Cult! feedburner, episodes past and present.

The Visionary Movie: A Manifesto

This essay caught my attention on a number of levels, but most particularly that of engaging with film as a mythic medium.

"Over the past forty years the dominant art form in America has shifted from the novel to the movie. Yet for the most part, the movie–and the popular movie, in particular–is not addressed with the same level of critical analysis as the novel. The purpose of this site is to remedy that lack.

As the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin noted, the novel is the youngest of all literary media, the only literary form, in fact, that has arisen within the context of literate civilization, for all the others–the epic, the lyric and the dramatic–are pre-literate in origin. If we take a moment to survey the evolution of Western literature, it becomes evident that each of its literary media have evolved through a three-phase cycle of formative, dominant and climactic stages. Pausing here to survey this overall evolution will give us a larger sense of perspective within which to characterize the place of cinema as a medium that has evolved out of the Western literary tradition."

Join My Cult! audiobook episode 1

The psychedelic prologue to Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning, Join My Cult! has been rewiring drug-addled brains for the past five years. Now, here, for the first time (because we never bothered to get around to it before), is an installment of the book in audio form. LISTEN (mp3)
Want to read it instead? :
Join My Cult! eBook (PDF)

Add this to your iTunes or check out all the episodes as they run


Episode 2 is also now live. Check back here soon for more.

Falcon, Falcon, Burning Bright

Joseph Matheny talks to Nick Thacher and Linda Miller about Falcon Press and why there appears to be two Falcon's selling virtually the same catalogs since the death of Dr. Hyatt.

Also in this episode:

A new In Your Ear with Psuke, and a special bonus track at the end: James Curcio presents the first installment of the Join My Cult audiobook, and releases Join My Cult as a Creative Commons PDF that you may download at Original Falcon. Also, as a side note, we were contacted after this show was recorded by an organization calling itself the New EII. Keep an eye open for an interview with them in the future.

Check it out!

Pornocalypse Now (adbusters)

Hopefully I'll have time to comment on this later, but for the time being, I direct your eyes to a surprisingly to the point & thoughtful article about porn in Adbusters:

Second, unlike women, men have largely failed to re-evaluate their sense of purpose in the 21st century. Feminism as a social revolution resulted in the emancipation of the female and the displacement of traditional male roles. Rather than making a conscious effort to resituate “the masculine” in the context of rising gender equality, heterosexual men have in many ways fallen into a subconscious, anti-feminine counterrevolution.

And this takes us back to our imaginary Orwell. Picture him sitting on a couch, in his underwear, at 2:00 a.m. His naked profile lit by the warm glow of a laptop screen. He’s surfing the net, reading about how Hitler invented the first sex doll, which prompts him to play a quick round of Call of Duty. He’s tossing grenades and sniping Nazis, but then he gets bored so he pops in a bukkake DVD and tosses off to the image of a female performer being submerged in seminal fluid. He’s satiated and disconnected but in the virtual world he’s still a dominant, violent, virulent alpha male.

The porn industry, now bigger than Hollywood and pro sports combined, has facilitated the transformation of sex into a liquid consumer good. There is nothing left to separate the individual from the market and the industry’s success has also produced a feedback loop that results in its own intensification. In order to compete with porn, the mainstream media appropriates the pornographic, which in turn forces porn producers and websites to create more vicious and chaotic content. The mainstream becomes porn and porn gradually edges closer to snuff.

Of course very little of this sexual media reflects reality in any way. When watching hard-core porn, one is struck by the message it so desperately attempts to communicate: sex is boring. And the more violent the porn, it seems, the more anti-sex its message. But could anything be further from the truth? Isn’t having sex with another living, human being the one thing that provides the most intense connection with the present moment?

(Read article)

Fallen Nation eBook downloads

Out of curiosity I recently looked into the download figures on the Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning eBook. The tally is a bit over 55,000, with some possibility that it could be more as the metrics on one of those hosts started several months after I posted it. (There are versions on a couple different hosts.)

Though it's hard to know how many people downloaded the book and never read it, that still seems like a considerable number to me. I actually made the decision to release the novel as a free eBook, along with the print version on Amazon, after getting stonewalled by the press time and again.

Well, the press is still stonewalling me on this title because I released it print on demand- though I'd love if that changes as this number keeps going up. (Any takers?) In the meantime, I'm happy it's getting out there. And I will keep moving forward...

This is what happens when you let the designer write copy.

(Ignoring the fact that I have been a "professional" writer in the past.) As is often the case at work, today I am fueled by caffeine and snarkiness. As we work on a massive overhaul of the TLA website, I have been doing a lot of mockups lately. And by a lot, I mean A LOT.

To keep myself entertained, sometimes instead of using lorem ipsem, I wrote fake copy. Here is a small piece from the mockup today: "What the hell is going on? This copy will explain that. It might also entice you to buy something. Don’t act so surprised. That’s why they call it “ad copy.” Well, the “ad” part anyway. I don’t remember why it’s called “copy” anymore.

It may go on slightly longer than this but hopefully not too much more or else it’ll throw off the balance of everything, and designers will cry pixel tears. And just because they are pixelated (and restricted to 256 web colors) does not mean they are not real. Oh no."

Somehow, I doubt this will make it to the live site.

Terra Extremitas: Light to Darkness Darkness To Light

As promised, following the release of the 2nd "Fear & Loathing On The Internet" installment, here is the full res (.wav) version of the installment of the audio installation I prepared for Foolish People's Terra Extremitas' event in Amsterdam. 

This is an acoustic journey into the Bardo, linking the narratives of my 2nd, mythically inspired novel, Fallen Nation Babylon Burning, and the upcoming film, Y. 

" First played with accompanying theatrics at the Foolish People's Terra Extremitasevent in Amsterdam, August 08. Includes original music by Scott Landes (Collide, Mankind is Obsolete), Jon Siren (Mankind is Obsolete, Hate Dept), James Curcio (Babalon, subQtaneous), andPeter Emerson Williams (Choronzon, Veil of Thorns)."

Listen or download now

Part two of the three part series Fear and Loathing on the Internet: Redux (Part one here) GPod Radio host Joseph Matheny moderates a roundtable discussion on the subject of Myth on the Modern World, with guests: Wes Unruh, James Curcio, John Harrigan, Lucy Allin, P. Emerson Williams and Anna Young. (Note: When I recorded the intros to part one and two, I forgot to mention Wes as a participant in the roundtable. He is however introduced in the actual roundtable piece and is a major contributor to the conversation. My omission was simply due to being overworked with too little time. Hopefully he will not hate me for this oversight. ) Also, the first installment of In Your Ear, some tidbits about the Y project and some ranting and raging in response to the mailbag. In part three we will introduce another regular segment to the GSpot, A Concise Guide To Setting Yourself On Fire with Kara Rae Garland. Part Three coming in about 2 weeks. 

Enjoy!

DPRGRM, PILOTLITE, MYTHOS MEDIA & FOOLISHPEOPLE PRESENT Y

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

DPRGRM, PILOTLITE, MYTHOS MEDIA & FOOLISHPEOPLE PRESENT

"Y"

In a post-apocalyptic world, Y is a documentary-style reality show where the grand prize is the future of our species on planet Earth.

Mythos Media and FoolishPeople will join with DPRGRM/Pilotlite to create 'Y', a feature film that starts shooting in Los Angeles July 2009.

LOS ANGELES, CA 02/27/09 – DPRGRM/Plotlite announced a project today that forges a new path in independent cinema by bringing together real world experience and film in a unique way. 'Y' brings an audience inside the creation of a modern myth. The audience will become actual cast members, and be immersed in the story in real time. The film crew will also be part of the story as well as part of the cast, therefore creating a total immersive experience that bridges the traditional proscenium of audience/performer.

The ambitious staging and shooting technique is enhanced by the premise that in the future, government facilities, such the as one depicted in this film, will have to turn to unorthodox means of funding, such as contracting the facility out as the subject of a reality based TV show. The actual crew will be made up of news, reality and documentary style cinematographers and the production will be filmed entirely in the Cinma vrit style.

Written by John Harrigan and James Curcio, and directed by Joseph Matheny, Y is a unique production fusing characters from Curcios second published novel, Fallen Nation: Babylon Burning and Harrigans screenplay GraveLand, currently in pre production.

DPRGRM will finance and distribute the film, working alongside online media corporation Pilotlite, a joint venture between Joseph Matheny and Michael Mailer Films.

Joseph Matheny, founder of DPRGRM and Pilotlite co-founder says: We will be employing cutting edge production, post production and distribution techniques that have been gestating for several years while the technology caught up to the vision. We chose this project and this team specifically because the project lends itself to the medium and the people can keep up.

James Curcio, Creative Director of Mythos Media, says: Mythos Media was founded specifically to work on projects like this, and modern myths have been my life passion. I am eager to dive in and create this world, both as production designer and producer of the soundtrack. However, even more, I am eager to collaborate with all of the creatives that are already lining up to become a part of this truly one-of-a-kind project.

John Harrigan, Artistic Director of FoolishPeople comments: Members of FP and I are extremely excited to be working on a project with such a talented and unique team. 'Y' will redefine what is possible in film production and I'm looking forward to taking on the role of Performance Director.

About Y:

Civilization has fallen. In the rubble, we at the Y Corporation have developed the ultimate solution to save society: the Y Show.

We encourage all good citizens to sign up for the Show. You will be housed within a wonderful Haze Treatment Facility and undergo unique psychological treatment, which will clear away the illness of individuality. This reprogramming will be broadcast to the eyes and ears of Citizens in our New World, populated with previous contestants and patients. This is a reality show unlike any other!

There is a secret that haunts Haze01, the original treatment facility. Two patients, locked deep within its walls, contain archetypes that reject all reprogramming. They channel portents and omens of another future, a world where myth and divinity remake reality, manifesting a planet fit for Gods.

In this season of the Y show, the doctors of the facility make their final attempt to process these two patients, before they break free and unleash total anarchy. Tune in.

###

Notes to editors:

About DPRGRM/Pilotlite: DPRGRM was founded by auteur Joseph Matheny to meet the new age of media convergence head-on with cutting edge media projects like Y and Pilotlite, which Matheny co-founded with Michael Mailer of Michael Mailer Films. For more information visit:jmatheny.wordpress.com

About Mythos Media: Mythos Media was founded by James Curcio, Peter Emerson Williams, Michael Szul and Tovarich Pizor in 2006 to produce modern myths. In the past, these have taken the form of comics, novels, and albums. For more information, please visit: HYPERLINK "http://www.mythosmedia.net/"www.mythosmedia.net

About FoolishPeople: FoolishPeople was founded by John Harrigan in 1989, taking its name from one of the major arcana of the tarot, card 0: The Fool. FoolishPeople create weaponized art, ritual theatre, collaborative events, books & film to raise a numinous experience within the witness. FP engineer immersive, open source experiences that become a catalyst for positive change. For more information, please visit: HYPERLINK "http://www.foolishpeople.org/"www.foolishpeople.org

Press Contact:

Joseph Matheny

DPRGRM

jmatheny@dprgrm.com

310.928.6959

http://citizen-y.com

The life of an independent director is not an easy one.

Micio will be making Join My Cult! into a movie- that is if he can raise the funds as he claims. I have no idea how a novel, which occurs primarily inside the head of a variety of narrators, all re-presented by a meta-narrator to his psychologists, could possibly make a decent movie. But then again, Naked Lunch came out alright. He might just be crazy enough to pull it off.
---

"The life of an independent director is not an easy one. You can be led astray by the glitz and glam fantasy, thinking your pot of gold is just one more blowjob or can of tuna away. Even when it is, chances are you'll be so fucked out of your gourd you won't even realize it. The truth is generally pretty disgusting, and not in the way that'll likely get you hard. (Well, except for Stanko.)

Case in point: Slash would often get so drunk that he'd piss himself in his sleep. When he'd pass out, they'd often drag him into the garage and toss him on a mattress that was to be used for this express purpose. (I wonder if that mattress ever got sold on eBay?) There are also legends of him puking mid solo during the Appetite sessions. Think that's cool? You're not the one who had to clean off his Les Paul afterwards. You see my point: the myth often outstrips the reality, even if reality is far too weird to have been invented.

Let me share just a couple of the unpleasant and simply weird experiences that I've endured during my spectacular ascent to complete debauchery and general obscurity: READ ARTICLE ON POPPORN.COM.

JamesCurcio.com updates

Whew. Organizing content for this site has been much more time consuming than coding it was.

Enjoy.

Equinox Festival

Equinox Festival
equinoxfestival.org

Dates and Lineup announced!

June 12-14th London

More artists and speakers will be announced in the coming weeks!

ALL NEW WEBSITE with media links, artists/speaker bios, and ticket info.

The Equinox Festival, a 3 day media arts festival dedicated to
spiritual discovery and mystical tradition, will take place in London
June 12-14.

We are pleased to announce the following confirmed artists for this
years festival. Stay tuned for further development and surprise guests.



Music performance:

John Zorn
Æthenor A
di Newton's T.A.G.C
Z'EV
Dieter Muh
Pietro Riparbelli- K11
Pestrepeller
Hati
Kinit Her

MORE TO COME IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS

Ritual Performance:

Arktau Eos
Barry William Hale's NOKO
Raymond Salvatore Harmon



Lecture/Presentations:

Ralph Metzner
Erik Davis
David Beth
Edwin Pouncey
Paola Igliori
Masamba Fall
James Curcio
Carl Abrahamsson
Kendall Geers
Philip Farber
Aaron Gach
Matt Wiley

MORE TO COME IN THE FOLLOWING WEEKS

Films -

Paola Igliori
American Magus & The Seed of Joy

Craig Baldwin
Mock Up On Mu

Harry Smith
Heaven and Earth Magic

Alejandro Jodorowsky
The Holy Mountain

Maya Deren
Ritual in Transfigured Time & Divine Horsemen: The Living
Gods of Haiti

Raymond Salvatore Harmon
YHVH & Tree of Knowledge/Tree of Life

MORE ARTISTS TO COME! SURPRISE GUESTS!

Tickets go on Sale March 20th via Wegottickets.com

JamesCurcio dot Net Live!

On weeknights when I'm not working on freelance client work, or the script for the sekret project I keep alluding to, or when I'm not being (pleasantly) accosted by cute naked women and convinced (I put up such a fight) to dye my body hair purple-- I'm working on my portfolio website.

Well, it isn't done yet but it is now far enough along that I feel comfortable pointing you towards the URL. It is now live at http://www.jamescurcio.net ... I'll post large updates as they happen. This is all hand-coded (I've been using notepad, just because), and uses all of the things I've been learning about semantic code and presentation managed entirely in CSS. I know I did a huge no-no by using the italic tag in one or two places, which I'll get back to, but otherwise I'm pretty happy with how damn clean it is working this way. (And now, looking at nested tables or messy code makes me- and baby Jesus- cry. Tears of blood.)

Over the next couple weeks I will be filling out the music, podcast and design areas, and hopefully setting up a flash player for media and a lightbox app of some sort to present images. Setting up styles that denote the type of file associated with a link, and other nifty things like that. For now, it's a good start.

I hope you like.