Date With Destiny Pt.1
French Philosophers, Cryptic Journalling, and Loving Libraries
Hello friends! Please excuse my brief absence over the past few weeks, time has had me utterly consumed in the best possible way.
This image captures one facet of my last month of traveling, studying, and working abroad. Romania > Budapest > Arles > Hydra. Any one of these places would have been more than enough cultural, creative, and catalyzing inputs to fill my well substantially. Needless to say, it feels important to acknowledge both the gift that has just been offered to me through these experiences, as well as the honest assessment that I am writing you from a place of immense personal fulfillment and creative overflow…. Here, I shall attempt to organize and piece together a few beautiful moments from this fertile time & space.
The photograph featured above showcases a few symbolic items: my art practice seen in my journal, a book that I am deciphering one sentence at a time I kid you not (it’s in French, and I do not speak French… yet), my “golden egg” (the first solid bronze cast stone I made almost a year ago, and part of a larger series of 108 commissioned pieces), and a surrealist manifesto I picked up in Budapest.
More on Budapest in the coming weeks. . .
When I sat down to write, to reflect on everything that has transpired over the last month, initially I drew a huge blank. Unsure of where exactly might be a good starting point, and thus I chose to deconstruct this image. By the time I reach the end of whatever I am here to share with you today, I hope I shall begin to understand why I chose it.
Let’s work backward, shall we? Piece by piece, starting with the book, a French copy of “L'eau Et Les Rêves” (1942) (Water and Dreams, 1983).
This book was introduced a little over four months ago, by a new friend & collaborator who just so happens to be French. I have no idea how it has taken me so long to learn of this particular philosopher & his ideas on how water serves as a powerful element that stimulates the imagination, bridging the conscious and unconscious realms — but you know what they say, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears”.
If only it felt that simple…
Upon learning of Gaston Bachelard and our very specific shared approach to water & dreams, I immediately sought out his work in English. I found copies of his books, however they were unexpectedly very expensive. Over a few hundred dollars per copy. Although I was very pulled to the matter of his philosophical perspective, I was saving up for a big month of work travel and ultimately decided I would reassess upon my return.
Fast forward, a few weeks passed and I arrived in Arles. Arles is an ancient Roman city located on the western edges of Provence. Everything about this place is enchanted, the stone walls, the swooping swallows, and the weekly markets. One balmy afternoon, I was strolling to the post office to buy more stamps, sending anonymous postcards to friends is a fun game I like to play. . . and I passed by the brocant (French term for antique market). I paused in the shaded stall of a book dealer, my hand fell towards the table beginning to thumb through the exotic foreign titles. As I focused on the names of these tomes, one caught my eye, “L'eau Et Les Rêves”.
On a good day, I can say three maybe four phrases in French: avec pleasure (my favorite, meaning "with pleasure,”)bonjour, and merci / au revoir.
As I pulled the book fully into view, I realized that my hand gravitated to “Water & Dreams” by Gaston Bachelard. The only thing I can bring myself to speak about this experience is the simple yet profound reminder of the power of unseen forces, the invisible hands that guide our happenings. Despite being able to recount details, I am still utterly speechless. Unlike us humans, these mythic forces are not bound by the confines of language.
My journal: If you have ever joined one of my Sēfari workshops you would have heard me share about my affinity for school supplies. I have a deep love bordering on obsession with really tasteful academic ephemera, including all the tools one uses to study, reflect, write, etc. Usually, admiration for these types of products leads me to Japanese paper stores, saddle-stitched notebooks, or the perfect .5mm Muji pen. In this case, I deviated from my typical go-to supplies and decided to make a significant upgrade.
It’s official, the best notebook that I have found and used to date is made by La Compagnie Du Kraft. Founded in Paris in 1930, their motto is “Good words, ideas, thoughts, confidences, confessions, unfunny jokes, private jokes, punch recipes, punchlines, sketches or works of art... Anything that inspires you deserves to stay in a notebook that reflects you” really hit home.
While in Paris, I had the opportunity to visit their shop and personalize via embossing a leather-bound folio, equipped with light brown grid vellum paper. If heaven existed in a journal, I have officially arrived at the paper-filled gates of possibility.
A few words about the script you glimpse lining the pages
This script has been emerging over this last year, but was creatively seeded four years ago — the first time I visited Greece. Each morning, I complete one page of this automatic writing practice and over time, my process reveals itself layer by layer. Without going into the depths of this body of work, which I am not yet ready to share, what I find fascinating is how the text slightly differs depending on what tools I use to explore and express its essence.
A little note to self, “the message is the medium, and the medium is the message”. I plan to write many a post dedicated to this practice and what it has revealed to me and through me, but for now, I just invite you to enjoy and wonder.
My connection to the Hungarian surrealist manifesto still has me feeling a bit unclear. Maybe I would say, it was the spiral that lured me in… as spirals do. Graphically speaking, it was visually representing what I was sensing at that moment.
Have you ever had the experience of being hyper-aware that the moment you are in, is one in which your life is changing forever, like a cataclysmic temporal tipping point? One moment where the path falls into perfect alignment, as if the stars are singing and you are dancing to their song? This whole five weeks has felt like that for me, and in particular, my time spent in Bucharest & Budapest. To take that one step further, I would add being aware of the importance of a moment,while also sensing the nature of the possibility it welcomes can cause one’s heart to flood with joy.
It is this space that interests me, to inhabit it even for a fraction of a second. This is the space that calls to me in my work, in my art, in my body. Space beyond time, beyond language, space that is so vitally electric, expressing itself as the underlying force of all there is, was, and ever will be. This is the place where dreams become memories and memories become dreams — the center of the center.
How can I find this space, again and again and again?
Well, I know that I find it in water. I find it in the hours between sleeping and waking. I find it in caves. I find it in music. I find it in sex. I find it outside of, or maybe I should say absent of time. I know I am experiencing this space through a slow and intentional zooming in on a depth of sensation, to the point where I become absent-minded. To name this space is only to ever speak around it, to circumambulate the matter of it. As Alan says, “We never get at it”.
Excerpted from: Alan Watts Teaches “Meditation”
“. . . When you come to see that you can do nothing, that the play of thought or feeling just goes on by itself as a happening, then you are in a state that we will call mediation. And slowly without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence. That is to say, all the verbal symbolic chatter going on in the skull — don’t try and get rid of it because that will again produce the illusion that there’s a controller. It just goes on and goes on and goes on and finally gets tired of itself, gets bored, and stops. And so then there’s a silence. And this is a deeper level of meditation. And in that silence, you suddenly begin to see the world as it is.
And you don’t see any past, and you don’t see any future. You don’t see any difference between yourself and the rest of it. That’s just an idea. You can’t put your hand on the difference between myself and you. You can’t blow it, you can’tbounce it, you can’t pull it. It’s just an idea. You can’t find any material body because a material body is an idea. So is the spiritual body. It’s somebody’s philosophical notion. See reality isn’t material. That’s an idea. Reality isn’t spiritual. That’s an idea. Reality is . . .
So we find if I’ve got to put it back into words, that we live in an eternal now. You’ve got all the time in the world because you have all the time that there is — which is now. And you are this universe.”
So, the list of what is in my chosen image prompting further inquiry: cryptic journals, Hungarian surrealist manifestos, philosophical texts on water & dreams, a golden bronze stone egg … offers me a glimpse of the beautiful complexity I seem to be swimming with at this moment. This also feels like the right opportunity to name the delicious gift of embarking on an inner safari, led by the illuminative forces of one’s curiosity.
The final image I shall close with was taken on film at The Temple Of Diana, in Nîmes. Not much is known about the origins of this structure, from what I could source:
“a 1st-century ancient Roman building in Nîmes, Gard, built under Augustus. It is located near the gushing spring of "La Fontaine", around which was an Augusteum, a sanctuary devoted to the cult of the emperor and his family, centered on a nymphaeum. {A nymphaeum or nymphaion (Ancient Greek: νυμφαῖον), in ancient Greece and Rome, was a monument consecrated to the nymphs, especially those of springs.} The building may have been a library. Its facade was rebuilt during the 2nd century and in the medieval era it housed a monastery, ensuring its survival.”
Source: Jules Canonge, Térentia, ou Le temple de Diane et les bains romains de Nîmes sous les empereurs, Giraud, 1843, 36 p.
*******
Libraries! That’s it.
That is what I was meant to see, or shall I say recollect and remember.
I was meant to return to the halls of a library, an ancient place dedicated to the preservation of memory. The ancient libraries are responsible for the continuous fertilization of our intellects and imaginations. They are sacred spaces filled with sacred texts. Matter(s) of the highest order.
Memories, our / the wealth with(in).
To be continued…
xj.
