Here are the outline and powerpoint for Olchar Lindsann's lecture on Occultism, Politics, and the Romanticist Avant-Garde at the AfterMAF Festival in Roanoke, Virginia, 14 July 2018. Unfortunately, the footage of this part of the presentation was lost so the following materials must suffice. The video is available for Part 2 of the lecture HERE, which carries us from 1850 up to 1900 and the modernist avant-gardes.
This is less concerned with explaining proto-socialist and hermetic concepts themselves (a doomed attempt of hubris in a 90-minute lecture), than with exploring precisely how the social fabric of the Parisian intellectual underground became permeated with hermetic ideas and practices – tracing the avant-occultist practitioners and groups who planted and cultivated the first seeds of what would later blossom as the Rose+Cross, the Golden Dawn, Dada and Surrealism, the Grand-Jeu, Acéphale, Vienna Aktionism, Chaos Magic, the Church of the Sub-Genius, ToPY, etc. etc. –
AT SEVENTY EIGHT…
ReplyDeleteIs getting well ever an art,
Or art a way of getting well?
—Robert Lowell
At seventy eight you begin to believe in magic
Hold your hands out
Not in the crude sense—not that you believe it’s true
Look at them
Or that the heaven stories are waiting for you
They have been yours for so many years
Not that rabbits will appear from hats
Consider your eyes
(Though rabbits do appear from hats
What companions they’ve been
As well as from other rabbits)
Over all this time
It’s that everything seems bizarre and
And your legs, propelling you
Despite theories of causation
From one strange place
Unreasonable. You begin to feel a strangeness
To another.
At the heart of things
At the heart of the universe
Working its way into everything you have experienced
Is a quality we recognize with age
You may call this strangeness magic
The young need to believe
“A category in western culture distinct from science and religion”
In the comforting rationality of things
It interrupts
The old know (or believe they know)
Everything we know
It’s nothing but Tarot
And makes it seem
And the hanged man, the moon, the death card
Unlikely, unfathomable.
May show at any time.
Every second line should be indented. Formatting!
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