It is through the portal of our solar plexus, the Lion’s Gate, and our true heart center, that we traverse the dimensions from spirit to matter, from unity consciousness to individuated consciousness and back again. This is the ‘Hero’s Journey’ that is likened to the path of the Sun across the sky.
For more explaining this wonderfully green Osiris cut by Seth into 24 pieces please click here
Joan Armatrading, by Andrew Catlin, 27 April 1988. National Portrait Gallery, UK.
Today, was Break Up The Catatonic State Day thanks to kimberlylane’s post on integrity with her prime example in Captain Beefheart. I almost felt resteeming that post was the best thing I could by way of posting anything today and leaving it at that. What more can I add to illustrate the vibe for integrity we so direly need? Dire: for aren’t we in danger of falling under a perilous hypnosis of reproduction and homogenuity. Even our milk is homogenised (if it isn’t bio-dynamic).
Coincidentally, or as all good things come in pairs, or as things good as pears come at all (told you it was a Beefheart day), I listened to a Radio BBC 4 programme: Desert Island discs, from 1990, with Joan Armatrading. That is another musician who was strongly present in the household of my wife and I. Captain Beefheart, b.t.w. is pivotal in the life of my former Portuguese friend (besotted with Zappa - until Anthony Kedis bewitched her; by the by: the stories I could tell about that voodoo dude and his crazed following - at one stage I kept on meeting women who had become identically and dangerously delusional after one or other of his concerts - all the while I knew nothing about the Red Hot Chili Peppers except that they sometimes chose to wear little more than one sock).
Captain Beefheart = Don van Vliet: Musician turned painter - see documentary
Don van Vliet (Captain Beefheart), rural, natural-world, peaceful, landscape artist, according to curator David Breuer. (in photo)
Anyway,
... oooffff, can’t quite recall where I dug up the following thought from. It’s all piling up a little too much at the moment. Usually means something has got to give, so that promises to be exciting.
It returns to the begining, repeating the first tone, but in a different pitch. The tonal spectrum has come full circle.
The most mind-boggling question they could always ask, at the Veil-Painting Therapy course was this one: when you come from in front of the light , from magenta and red and yellow and have gone through the light (at the viridian) into the blues to finally reach the last colour behind the light (violet), and then you turn around to face the light again, what colour do you stand in? What colour do you see?
Is it even a trick-question? Are we still in a relative world once we veil paint?
I get the same brain warp looking at water under the bridge.
What lives in this 2D world? Is anything more real in a 3D world?
I read yesterday a description of the Other World in a book I accidentally (yeah, right, chance would be a fine thing!) got when looking for Laura Riding Jackson: a book by Laura Lynne Jackson, "The Light Between Us": you could imagine the Other Side or Higher Worlds, or the post-mortal state as a non-place, 2 dimensional reality, on the other side of a thin sheet of rice paper. No massive stretches of time or space to cross, just reach out an touch. I found the idea scintillating.
When the solid crust falls away and all that is man-made with it, and you are left only with what you have been able to carry over into the spiritual, where are you? How can you navigate without the trees and the stars and the paths in between? What is there for milestones and the ticking of time?
Those who have read me attentively before, know I am not going to go “ta-da!” next, with the answer to all our questions. In fact, the question is the staff and rod which comforts me, so finding answers is hard labour without just rewards. You do it because it pays. It meets demands. But I'd rather do it no more.
In Veil Paining Therapy we discover the colour behind every illness or dis-ease by standing in each of the pure tones, magenta, carmine, scarlet and her sister vermillion, orange, yellow in her many darker and lighter variations, viridian, turquoise (blue-green), cobalt, indigo, violet (mauve). We find cobalt violet amongst the reds in front of the light along with purple magenta and mauve as a violet behind the light.
These colours are entities, which I never found an easy concept to grasp.
Maybe, finally, I am getting there. In any case, I'm becoming a bit amazed at the discipline I've shown (for a Gemini!) at sticking with it for so long, stumbling in the dark (15yrs at least).
Eventhough, Liane Collot d’Herbois has left us a few descriptions to study, she herself is an artist first and foremost and doesn't (spiritually) scientifically analyse in depth. I studied all she did have to say about colours as entities very critically. I most easily could “feel” her diagnoses even when her visions of the Higher Worlds remained little more than open-minded possibilities for me.
At times I had to keep my mind that far open, I feared my brains might fall out, but as long as I found similar notions to the ones I had already independently drawn for and by myself I stuck at it. I resonated instantly with her description of Autism and still think it is the most accurate and all-inclusive one to be had. I believe there will be more (congenital) disorders and illnessess or epidemics that can only be understood in terms of colour properly (and usefully). Healing, in my view, is a matter of fixing that which is off-colour. It’s getting your paint brush out and keeping the future light and airy, not acrylic but translucent, not glossy but luminous. It is about understanding that the other side (the Higher World) exists in transparent veils, eternally, but every changing, weaving, dancing, interpenetrating.
I wondered long and hard why each colour had to correspond to an evolutionary stage of time, or how the World Soul travels through the phases of incarnation, beginning before the light in a womb-like magenta state, feeling its way into the physical (through the yellow of the nervous system), and passing through the green of the face of Osiris, as the embodiment of pure intelligence, visible only to the Egyptian priests until the Cretans discovered it in the sky. I could see the story - imaginatively, artistically; but was it true?
Boudin, The Beach at Sunset, 1865.
The kind of green-yellow sky - to reach for an ideosyncratically anachronistic comparison - a Cretan (of the Knossos-Minotaur era) might have seen, according to the clairvoyant sight of Collot.
It is tricky to scan and develop a Boudin reproduction: his works are some of the most variably reproduced to be found on the internet. I have consulted two books and eventually took this scan above, editing it to match the photographic copy in that book (I think early 50’s). I may have used my own (limited and distant) recollection of the coast of North-West France, besides, which is no guarantee that it would better approximate Boudin’s actual representation.
It is the bane of any art-history lover how current uploaders either use fakes i.e. re-painted versions or enhanced reproductions with colours to suit modern taste (way too cobalt skies, if you ask me); then again the wide variety in screen callibrations may come into play here too.
Conclusion of the day from this little musing: how can we store true memory? Can it ever become a collective affair? Scrap democracy and power to the people: let art give power back to each and every individual. But how to document every I? They say the Akashic Record takes care of that - others trust God doesn't miss a hair (on a head, in a brush...).
