Beginning Words

The problem of swords

Years ago I started a project, every day can be defined by the conscious decision to further it or wait to further it. A life can be framed this way. The enthusiasm before the act began has to be consciously reinhabited through work, it is annoyingly not enough to dream up unfulfilled concepts. In my case enthusiasm quickly fades (really quickly! tbh I’m probably not a natural artist.) I’m always forgetting and then remembering that I can only rekindle the enthusiasm by working on its fruit, I forget because the experience of generating the enthusiasm takes work, Labour is painful. And at my fingertips is a technology that allows me experience enthusiasms by passively consuming the creativity of others whenever I want. It takes work to build a fire, but I have an electric blanket!

I have been born into a period where freedom has never been so readily realised, but this fact is always forgotten by the immediacy of conveniences that produce a shadow of freedom by easing the chores required for living. Confusing the positive ‘freedom to' with its negative, ‘freedom from’. Here I am on top of the Mountain of human history, closer than ever to the Sky. But I envy those before me! There is that funny illusion of hindsight that seems to make obvious the narrative of their striving. I am paralysed over where to start with my own.

Start Again! Years ago I started a project: I have been reimagining and reconfiguring archetypal image maps from the tarot for my own contemplative development. I thought it would take a few months, it has been three years and I have not finished the third suit of cards. Swords are painful, difficult to spend a year contemplating. my naive rush to redeem the pain, to reframe it as pleasure, was not successful. The whole project became laborious and contractions of activity were few and far between. However! alongside my work with The Philosophy of Freedom I have realised there is redemption of pain, to reframe it as essential: It Is a Beginning…

The tarot project involves searching for and rearranging images from magazines to map something archetypal, as a gesture of what it is to form Understanding out of the Multiplicity in the world. You can can look at and read about the collages of Cups and Wands here: https://www.instagram.com/ta77777rot/

Studying The Philosophy of Freedom involved working in group conversation every week with volunteering people across the world, as a gesture of what it is to form Understanding from Multiple points of view. You can watch these conversations here: https://www.youtube.com/@urphanomen

It is a happy fact that there are 14 chapters in this book by Rudolf Steiner, and 14 cards in the suit of Swords. So they can be coupled together in a series of posts to follow. 4 lots of 7. lovely.

So Re Beginning this blog for purpose, a new purpose, which has an end, no not an end but a completion. I have written before on how finishing is a small death, and I am scared of it. But here I am, Not scattering seeds, scattering unfruitful enthusiasms, but cultivating one thought plant with the expectation of its fruiting.