The root of all health is in the brain. The trunk of it is in emotion. The branches and leaves are in the body. The flower of health blooms when all parts work together...
...after reading that, and much else, of some ancient Kurdish exercises i decide to begin by walking... in such a manner...
14:27 ...i was feeling weak until i departed from my randomly chosen course by turning to walk as connectedly as i can towards the highest point and to look again at the distant view across London... and now i'm there i feel stronger...
(i see that one plank of the seat has been stolen... )
...a terrific cloudscape is moving south-west (the opposite direction to the prevailing wind)... layer behind layer of grey and purplish clouds are moving quite quickly towards the Atlantic... and the wind is cold... i feel it in my fingers as i write... it comes from Norway or from the arctic part of Russia...
...i passed 4 or 5 more broken trees... some with snapped trunks, some with broken roots... this morning's snowfall (1 to 2 cm) has almost melted... there are still small pieces of snow in the shadows of trees or of tufts of grass... i end the walk there and return by bus - i'm going to a lecture this evening...
...at the Camden Arts Centre, Karen Russo is lecturing on 'alchemy and art'...
...she begins with '10 ways of looking at alchemy' - i am attracted to only one of them:
meditative exploration of the human soul through undertaking allegorical journeys
...the lecture consists mostly of video projections of traditional alchemical diagrams... these repell me (at first)... as do the images on Tarot cards and that of a snake eating its tail... for much of the lecture i am put off by what seems to me the unintelligent nature of these images... why are they so symmetrical, so authoritarian, so lacking in formal beauty and why so over-interpreted and superstitious... ... to me they embody what is wrong with industrial living... they seem to exclude and to diminish life, in all its variety
...now we hear about opposites, this is more interesting... it raised the possibility of transcending rigid categories, eg hermaphrodites, goodevil (or godevil), the integration of mind and body, thought and action...
...then i remember the reason for this lecture - it accompanies the exhibition of the works of Victor Grippo ... and i remember that his alchemy, eg of technology and nature in his electric batteries made of two metals put into a potato... to me that is alchemy, or art, free of superstition...
...and then i remember Isaac Newton, Paracelsus (as described by Robert Browning), J W vonGoethe, Jacob Boehme, William Blake, even Marcel Duchamp, even Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, C G Jung, and others who seem to have explored the connections between mind and body without talking nonsense!... and i think of art, most art, as being a more modest and better way of exploring life connectively, not in fixed or imaginary categories... i feel strongly about this... i prefer the potato!...
second thoughts:
and now more balanced thoughts arrive, a wider and less irritating version of alchemy (perhaps that is not the best name for it - does it need a name?)... yes i now see all these things as existing at the frontier of bodymind, if not within the boundaries of alchemy as it was:
colours, coins, postage stamps, words, alphabets, numerals, languages. mathematics, yes even science, fashions, churches, religions, libraries, occupations, laws, what else???...
and now i remember a course i was once asked to give on 'occult sciences' (the name was later changed to 'inexact sciences' so as not to annoy the university)... i can't remember what i said or what we did but i do remember hating it at first and then enjoying the subject, once i began to widen it... (laughter!)
...yes, yes, there is surely something new to be done with regard to this ancient and disreputable subject, it's probably concealing the right way to proceed in all we do, in what i call industrial living... that's it!... hold on to the connectiveness...
...and since then i've been reading again some of the poetry of W B Yeats, surely one of the best artists of bodymind, or of the subtleties of thought and reality, more as poems and stories than as ghosts or fantasies or unbelieveable theories... yet he denied nothing full stop
...and now a chance-selected line from W B Yeats, The Poems edited by Daniel Albright, J M Dent, London 1990, randomly-selected page 235, line 4 (and the line before it):
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
...not destructive anarchy, WB, but anarkia!
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