Kyle > Recent Status Updates

One is tempted to quote Baudrillard (or the Matrix's Morpheus) "desert of the real" but I think Scott was going in a different Google-mapped route, boarding on the mystic or ascetic. Of course, it may be the actual reality of our disregard for the environment that our planet becomes another Mars, just in time for us to colonize some of the Trappist exoplanets and make the same hurlyburly historical mistakes.

Carl lets the cat out of the bag, early in the third part of his book, that for all the mystical writing and Herculean effort put into their experiments, no alchemist ever literally changed a lump of lead (or what have you) into gold. The real transformation happens inside the psyche and the method which he outlines briefly was to find projection in a dream-like trance. Also has a great tip on recognizing good books.

Glad to see Sinclair & Harris wrap up the Education section with a word or two about arts-based research and virtual worlds before the text moved into the all-too-human reality of Health. Gray & Mitchell find an evocative way of demonstrating how hospital staff barely listens to each other, risking their patients' life and limbs; Myers & Schneider double-down on actors portraying HCAs and dementia sufferers.

Near the end of the Transfigured lightshow, and happy to soak up much of the geometrical Gnosticism. Fludd goes against his surname by choosing rays of light over hylian water as the anima mundi, based upon Synesius of Cyrene's universal signatures. Dr. M's book has surprising connections to ideas like String Theory based upon Fludd's Harrow but is still far from being a Book of Cagliostro.

Coleman attempts to clear the uncertainty of The Devil's Law-Case in the Webster canon by claiming how scholars and critics are slowly warming up to its insights (seems like Coleman could have looked at Goldberg's (1987) chapter). At least his analysis of recent productions of the Big Two: White Devil and Duchess of Malfi place Webster as one of our contemporaries for in-your-face violence.

There is method in't, as Polonius would say, with examples from educational researchers applying art-based research to research-based theatre. So far there are moments of Lea's hermeneutic account of his mother's teaching in Kenya, Okello's exploration of African Ink Murderers and Conrad's projections of alternative endings for the prison escape storyline. The introduction's compound of genre becomes more of a crash.

The outrage and outrageousness of Artaud's ideas get a more complete translation (compared to the abbreviated 1970 and 2001 editions) with the important Alchemical Theater chapter to underline the mysterious doubling of reality. Those editions left out a few archaic terms that don't translate nicely from the French: the Preface's bad-smelling "N-word" baby gets thrown out with la réalité virtuelle bathwater.

The outrage and outrageousness of Artaud's ideas get a more complete translation (compared to the abbreviated 1970 and 2001 editions) with the important Alchemical Theater chapter to underline the mysterious doubling of reality. Those editions left out a few archaic terms that don't translate nicely from the French: the Preface's bad-smelling "N-word" baby gets thrown out with la réalité virtuelle bathwater.

Goldberg examines two of the less talked-about plays here to demonstrate how Webster hadn't given up all hope that justice could save lives and be a positive force for society. Appius' Rome and Devil's Law Case's Romelio are not without their problems, yet tragedy is averted when citizens get behind the higher power of justice, like Virginius. All of his plays point to the end of the Stuart's reign.

So this is what I am doing, legitimately, as my research method – as much as I have enjoyed learning about poetic inquiry, I found my interests leaning more towards the narratively sustained dialogue than a more playful amuse-bouche of words. All is one in the smörgâsbord of art-based research, but O'Toole and Ackroyd put forth in their Foreward why this new methodology is a Quintessence of academic writing.

The geometries of the infinite, God and everything remain in the realm of the mysterious, yet this chapter explains why we perceive it as a mystery. It goes beyond conditioning into the upper limits of cognition, the tree-like branching of neurons inside. We can only observe in three dimensions and sets of seven because it is who we are as opposed to octopi (or the Arrival's heptapods) computing inky clouds.

At peace with himself in the remaining years of his life, Jung still questioningly looked for a connection to God, perhaps knowing all along that the divine has many names and can be found within rather than without. What surprises me is how he turns this thinking on his contribution to the field of psychology, how a Chinese text had similar claims on the collective unconscious, both validates and nullifies his work.

Adam McLean gives a thoughtful interpretation of mystical events of the Chemical Wedding, much of it structured along a sevenfold parabolic transformational path. Strange that the appendixed Parabola of H. M. Theosophus barely featured anything greater than three, but the conjunction of these two magical numbers, I discovered at an early age, make everything. Having seven in three became my alchemy.

As Cleopatra claims "You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams" (A&C, V.ii, 74) yet Jung takes all serious scientific precautions to extract meaning from the unknown scientist (could it possibly be a young Wolfgang Pauli?) to reveal the alchemical secrets of the blue flower. Many noteworthy observations are put down in these page, yet more personal reflections unknown, as the mandala focuses self into a lattice.

Fourth-dimensional Scott gets more and more timely with the movie references, comparing our collective fears of being on the grid to three films from 2014 that shove society off it (even naming the chapter to the Joss Whedonest of them all). We must beware smartphones and the Dark Net, but the real killer app is not knowing how bad things are. Perhaps by book's end he will have a pithy Age of Ultron analogy?

Very peculiar turn of events in the last couple of days, where the spiritual journey of Christian Rosenkreutz becomes more like a PG-13 summer farce from the 1980's with guys spying on naked Venus and pranks being played on other Golden Fleece Knights (perhaps the jockish in-crowd to Christian's earnest nerd). The bird-slaughtering may have disturbed test audiences, hence the missing happy ending with vixen-y Virgin.

Starting to manifesto himself on the cruelty theatre should have, it is unclear to me whether what Artaud writes is a set of instructions for fellow theatre artists, or against them. One obvious target was cinema, which may have been a little too Lumière for his tastes. I appreciate the ritualistic magic he attempts to infuse into his craft. Was there an auteur's attempt at The Conquest of Mexico as a movie.

I suspect that the Commentary at the end of the book will reveal the spiritual significance of the narrator's stay at the Virgin's castle; I believe that he and she will be getting hitched. Must be careful about the foolish judgments that only focus on the surface and avoid seeing the deeper meaning, but there seems to be a lot more immodest pranks and entertainment between the two. Just add a chemical Cupid's arrow.

Receiving an invitation, as heavenly as was sent, is not enough to show up at a wedding, but one has to make the journey and then prove oneself worthy to be part of the ceremony. If the story so far is an allegory for living the life of knowledge, there is a surprising amount of unworthies already there who soon are sent home either sad, stripped naked or branded, apart from others who are executed. Caveat argutator!

Duly warned by the brief introduction not to interpret too glibly the deep meaning of this book, I shall be as objective as I can with each day for the narrator. It is a difficult task, however, as so much of what is written is subjective, especially the Dream of escape from the tower, not unlike my favourite Akutagawa fables The Spider's Thread. The journey to the wedding will be a sincere self-improvement.

A chapter devoted to the "org" part of the previous chapter's cyborg, Dr. M explores a whole range of body-centric philosophies of Ancient Greek pneuma, the proton soma, and More's fourth-dimensional spissitude before concluding with Harraway's posthuman critical theories. Really touching to see how Zen Buddhist practice of zazen (aka diamond-thunder position!) sets up the vertigral chakras related to Bell's theorem.

"May 1933" - that's all?!? Wonder how much this modern translation skims over the surface of the deep understanding Artaud has of cruel theatre. He certainly knows how to turn on his contempt for Sophocles, Shakespeare and Racine's supposed pandering to theatre-going elites, still favouring the Eastern artists. Was there an equally angry Asian author writing with disdain for conventionally nonliterary Balinese dance?

As the years begin to add upon him, two of Jung's loves were taken away, Toni and Emma, that leaves him older, lonelier and admittedly not any wiser; irony as Dunne sees his greatest, "deepest" work, Mysterium Coniunctio, about the chemical wedding of souls. His silent retreat in Bollinger allowed him to add to the Reflections part of his upcoming biography while significantly cheating at solitaire.

For the impending sea-change about to take place in Jung's professional mind, he writes defensively over psychoanalysis, probably a result of many people at the time he wrote Part I believing him to be of the losing side of European history. Yet his handling of Christian archetypes in addition to other cultures' alchemical roots demonstrate that he has already met his shadow, perhaps book-burning National Socialists?

My research into the specifics of alchemy begins, on this auspicious ides, as Jung gives what I have seen so far as the fullest account of Hermetic ideas from his psychological perspective. Perhaps this inquiry won't be such an onerous task since every other page is an illustration! Yet Jung mentions in his Swiss foreword how alchemists "compressed into [their] images" (p. x) an intelligible language; how multimodal.

The uncanny valley of social media resembles the Gothic novels and a couple late-twentieth century's films like Scream and Fight Club, where everyone on-line can be seen yet nobody seems to know who is really there. Ghosts and zombies take our place in seemingly everyday interaction, and it is mystery how Scott missed alluding to the predigital shapeshifter, Count Dracula, siphoning time like blood.

The contrariness of this avant-garde poet and playwright Artaud is subdued, at first, by his eloquent exploration of the plague. Only by the end of the opening chapter is the double nature of theatre presented as disease. By the time he rips through metaphysical pretension and advocates the authentically pure theatre of the Balinese performers, he decimates the Westerners' philosophically safe sense of entertainment.

The narrative so far seems to be an odd series of social visits by Esther and occasionally by her guardian Jarndyce: each visit reveals a darker side of humanity caused by the gap between rich and poor. Hard to tell what is going to happen to whom, other than one of these denizens of the Dickeniverse spontaneously combusting (thanks to the Introduction's uncertain reveal). Not sure who but my money is on Tulkinghorn.

Borrowing a page, more like the entire chapter 2, from Scott's Four-Dimensional Human, Dr. Marvell centres his exploration of artificial intelligence around the beehive (even though neither author has cited the other, yet). The argument here is equally fascinating that there is a negentropic universe mirrored as unconscious underside of this one, somehow related to Kepler and Jung's interpretations of mundi.

The White Devil holds the Goldberg's attention as "Webster's most purely iconoclastic play" (p. 64) even as she shifts discussion in the next couple chapters into the more familiar Duchess of Malfi. The puritanical Tea Party that seems to have gained ground during King James' reign were forerunners a cultural revolution not dissimilar to where we are now, but Webster's heroines are of another world.