Pictorial World

Visual arts, music, poetry and other forms of art.
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Nefastos
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Pictorial World

Post by Nefastos »

Kenazis' question in another thread triggered a chain of thoughts in me.
Kenazis wrote: Thu Jan 21, 2021 11:15 pmIs it impossible to do good enough movie or tv-series from the book you love?

Short answer would be No. But, it's somewhat same to think whether one can create a delicate meal out of Van Gogh's Starry Night, or is it possible to remake Bach's Mass in B minor into a poem. While such attempts can be done, and an ingenious artist might make something great with such an effort, the result will be nothing like the original.

I love books, which does not mean – primarily – that I like having some rare editions in my bookshelf; it means that I love how the world speaks to the imaginative unconscious & works its way into conscious thinking by reading good books. Fiction, in a way, is the best of all, since it is more evocative than dry fact. Occultism might even said to be a form of fiction in this regard, since it does not seek to be exhaustive in the same meaning of this word that would be, for example, an encyclopaedia of insects, or political history. We might remember that learning empathy has been connected to reading fiction.

There are different ways of seeing/feeling the world, according to one's temperament. Once again I miss sodalis obnoxion, whose imagination is pictorial (if I've understood right), and who would most likely manage to reconcile my own feelings to the very pictorial world of our modern times. But since he will be absent for some time yet, can any of you give me comfort?

For I admit that I hate how pictorial our time has come. I loved the early internet with its forums – like this one –, I tolerated the later adaptation with Facebook, but I have a very hard time accepting the Instagram internet we nowadays have. Where there is very little interest in actual discussion, or changing evocative thoughts, but just an instant picture, instantly reacted on, instantly dismissed. It feels so cheap that I truly feel like we might be facing another dark age with illiterate masses worshipping pictures on the church walls without knowing what they represent. Gutenberg is dead, the great possibility of illumination it brought is being swiped hastily away.

Pictures are our astral language, and there is nothing wrong with the concept of pictures. There is also nothing wrong in wanting to live and think quickly. There is even nothing wrong about surficiality, when it is just a part of the thing we have, and not the whole life through and though. I am not saying that our time would be worse than the past, per se; rather, that we have created tools which can be used to either ascend or descend more rapidly, and if we do not wake up to that fact, the collective laziness makes the choice for the latter.

No one would nowadays be anguished by burning of a Bible. But sadly it is impossible to burn with gusto a sample Netflix, which would certainly arouse strong feelings.

* * *

Even though I placed this discussion on the section of Art, I would also love to hear your thoughts about the pictorial world at large. For example, I claimed that by the pictorial world, we are instantly talking about astralism also. You might consider pondering & commenting this.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
Kavi
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Kavi »

Wow...
The idea of church's pictorial glass and walls..
Gutenberg indeed seems to be dead and instead we live in pictorial and aural world now. I have been reading that even books are nowadays going to be more in audiobook format.


How is pictorial world more linked with astralism? I for one think that speech and hence text is much stronger channel for imagination. Just shear prosody can trigger these visions and images in my mind.
Or could one think that pictorial world is less purified and mixed with different influences which are not immediately sensed. Or?
Kenazis
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Kenazis »

Kavi wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 12:18 pm How is pictorial world more linked with astralism? I for one think that speech and hence text is much stronger channel for imagination. Just shear prosody can trigger these visions and images in my mind.
Or could one think that pictorial world is less purified and mixed with different influences which are not immediately sensed. Or?
I see that astralism is pictorial for pictures and images are surfaces and the meaning comes from interpretation, as words are more bind to actual meanings. Pictures also raise automatically/easily emotional content than mere words.

I'm more into sounds and words than pictures. And I think more simple and less colourful the pictures are, the more thoughts and emotions they awake.
"We live for the woods and the moon and the night"
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Soror O
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Soror O »

Kenazis wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 1:09 pm I see that astralism is pictorial for pictures and images are surfaces and the meaning comes from interpretation, as words are more bind to actual meanings. Pictures also raise automatically/easily emotional content than mere words.
I think this is well put.

Back in the day, when I was younger, more vain and (maybe) more beautiful I posted more of my pictures into the internet. The likes somehow made me even more lonely, isolated and misantrophic as I felt that they weren't given for my being but rather for the one-sided image that I had created. I kind of despised the people for liking my pictures, but still posted them.

I don't know why, but instagram makes me quite ill. Even the pictures that are relevant for their meaning (to me) get somehow tainted by the demonic genius of that environment. Instgram is satanic. Take a "pure" and "real" thing and post it into Instagram and it becomes empty and generic (maybe it's the filters). The more we want to see something as beatiful, the more horrible it turns. (This was discussed in the aestetics thread, if I remember.... the uncanny valley?).

I feel that posting pictures about things that are important me and feeding them to the genius of instagram would somehow curse these precious things.
If you want to reborn, let yourself die.
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Smaragd
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Smaragd »

I was just recently thinking about how texts work within the human composition. (At its best?) it’s like the deeper world of spirit is pointed towards by the author, by means of beauty recognized in the above world, or the correspondeces of the lower, and mirrored to the web of words. When someone really reads the text with focus, those same ideas are reached towards through the fabric of the readers individual bodies awaken by the web of words, and the bodies disproportion or unbalance creates more or less clear relationship i.e. understanding with the spirits or the archetypal realm. So these fabrics or many different bodies we have, affect how clear an impression we get writing and/or reading a piece of text. And the impressions are partly these pictorial aspects within the many sorts of astral impressions. Some of the bodies the spirit goes through as the picture forms in the imagination and mind, are astral but there’s also quite inevitably, I claim, the archetypal present buried under and also within all those fabrics.*

Thus the very fabrics are bodies of these archetypes, I think, and thus the surface glimmer – the more or less well prepared outer pictorial elements, made by human or non-human entities – is already a gateway whether or not its aesthetic values are tickling ones tastebuds or whether or not there’s sympathetic and well communicated symbolic meaning prepared Artificially. Thus these religious images people are perhaps fancying yet missing the central meaning purveyed in the artwork and its mythological links, might be just the right approach in certain phase. I mean there’s something noble in experiencing a sort of invitation to fancy and wonder of some simple themes, like a flower or a garden in John Waterhouse’s paintings without even diving deeper in to the more or less obvious lore, while this magic could be dealt with much more harmful ways in the usual ignorance prevailing such preliminary phase. I would see the illiteracy of the Instagram age potentially having a birthgiving function, which teaches the masses (I myself partially included in this group) of nuances by aesthetic values, which in turn teaches one to read the depths of art and life in general, even when the surrounding culture would be totally dried dead or in the brink of a Dark Age. One might find out that his tastes in art or fascination towards different areas of the natural world begins to change over time and these fascinations correspond to the inner refinement of the soul. These refinements within such mysteries of the Moon might ofcourse include certain type of Black periods where the "refining" might not be so obvious to someone judging by an outer standard.

After giving a credit for this sort of approach, I must acknowledge there’s many traps to get stuck in purely aesthetic approaches, and I’ve enjoyed aesthetics infinitely more when there’s also those other aspects and approaches from which to draw a more complete point of view. This more surface and minutia approach I find much more easily mirroring the individual inner process than plain knowledge of lore. The former is long and deep process, while coming to the knowledge of lore can be almost like reading a Wikipedia page of some mythological themes, although one step further would be connecting the lore to metaphysical observations and doctrines and then again another step to the personal process. Connecting all of these by the science will cast a light of clarity to the whole, I think.


* Because the process of pictorial emerging happens through the inner bodies of the individuals who are creating or reading something written, writing is beautifully intimate art form. It necessitates the process where the reader in ones imagination becomes the creator, giving a form to the matter at hand with ones astral body (thus when astral is talked about as a blueprint to the more coarser material body, reading a book with this astral element active, breaths the life in to the text and in to the more and more outer levels of human existence, making every book potentially a magic spell of sorts). Thus it is also understandable why it is not easy for everybody living in the fast paced modern world, and the individual challenges within its folds already asking everybody to strech to every direction, to also be creative in their time of leisure where reading is often left for. (I’m personally trying to take reading as part of the work and thus it has become easier to find discipline for ”study emphasized” reading and then balance it with the curiosity of a duty free approach of finding links between texts themes and questions of personal fascinations begging to be answered.)
"Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets”, Numbers 11:29 as echoed by William Blake
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Nefastos
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Nefastos »

Thank you for your thoughts! I feel like it is truly important to discuss these things in earnest.
Kavi wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 12:18 pmWow...
The idea of church's pictorial glass and walls..

Indeed the dark times where a few think for the masses may create some tremendous, cathedral-like art. There is great beauty in gothic darkness, and gothic darkness lives also through the darkness of reason. Yet the price that is being paid is horrible.

Kavi wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 12:18 pmHow is pictorial world more linked with astralism? I for one think that speech and hence text is much stronger channel for imagination.

Metaphysically speaking, I think that the word (logos) is the one evoking, the image is the one evoked. This is the relationship between the mental (manasic) & astral worlds.

Kenazis wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 1:09 pmPictures also raise automatically/easily emotional content than mere words.

Yes; this reactional output is the "secondary astral", which offers possibilities also for fatal misinterpretations, creating a phantasmal world of ultimate self-centeredness.

Ave wrote: Wed Jan 27, 2021 7:20 pmInstagram is satanic. Take a "pure" and "real" thing and post it into Instagram and it becomes empty and generic (maybe it's the filters).

There is something ghost-like in the endless stream of pictures with no beginning, no end, not succession, and no interaction. Since I believe that world is actually made of interaction – that there is no mute & blind matter, but even substance is always entitetical – this creates a horrible feeling of uncanny valley. A ghost-town of thought.

Yet I am resolved to use this tool too.

No no limits, we'll reach for the sky
No valley to deep, no mountain to high
No no limits, won't give up the fight
We do what we want and we do it with pride
Smaragd wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 2:58 amWhen someone really reads the text with focus, those same ideas are reached towards through the fabric of the readers individual bodies awaken by the web of words, and the bodies disproportion or unbalance creates more or less clear relationship i.e. understanding with the spirits or the archetypal realm.

I agree. Here we have the hourglass shape of the macrocosmic (archetypal) world first becoming a Gesture, a pattern, held at the fingertip pointing to the moon; and then, from that magical fingertip, it follows the same triangle shape, now widening, in the beholder. The meeting point between two minds is always abstract, and working using (1) logoi of abstracted ideas & then (2) pictures, and then working their way back through the (receiver's) pictorial ideas back to the web of logoi. For the world itself is one, even though the meeting points between our minds are seemingly points of the narrow hourglass necks. Yet they are not only endlessly narrow, but also endlessly many; and thus there is still hope for actual communication in this unity of being.

Smaragd wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 2:58 amI would see the illiteracy of the Instagram age potentially having a birthgiving function, which teaches the masses (I myself partially included in this group) of nuances by aesthetic values, which in turn teaches one to read the depths of art and life in general, even when the surrounding culture would be totally dried dead or in the brink of a Dark Age. One might find out that his tastes in art or fascination towards different areas of the natural world begins to change over time and these fascinations correspond to the inner refinement of the soul. These refinements within such mysteries of the Moon might ofcourse include certain type of Black periods where the "refining" might not be so obvious to someone judging by an outer standard.

Indeed: the world works in wonderful & fearful spirals. Rather, usually what seems like regression, is a cultural scoping deeper to the collective thought, which actually means amassing of wider thought. These things works in hundreds rather than tens of years though, so it is easy to lose hope in case if our sight falls short from too encompassive development.

Smaragd wrote: Thu Jan 28, 2021 2:58 amwriting is beautifully intimate art form.

Yet all creation is always the work of the whole. I think a greater part of our world's "pictorial nihilism or laziness" stems from our mistaken cultural thought of every man being alone in his separate cosmos, surrounded by lifeless matter.

Like, yolo, man.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Polyhymnia
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Polyhymnia »

To answer the original question:

Simply, yes, for me it's impossible for my favourite works to be turned into something visual and maintain their perfection. That doesn't mean I won't enjoy the visual interpretation. I see it as an extension, just another version, and when executed by someone who loves the source material as much or more than I do, it can still be a very enjoyable experience. Not the same, not as "perfect" as the details in my head, but I can enjoy it from the idea that it's someone else's vision that was most likely a labour of love.

Regarding things like instagram, everything needs to excrete. Vapid things like instagram are a great way to do it. I think the trick is to remember that things like instagram, used en masse, can still be valuable tools for a seeker. I've said it before, but I found the SoA through instagram, and I can't imagine not being here now. I can only speak for myself, but when my thinking becomes too intense, or I'm focusing on things of a serious nature, I need an outlet that is easy and fun. Like my brain is excreting (yeah, enjoy that visual) to continue making room for all the serious things.
I'll spare you all the details of the various things I have done to "let off steam", but suffice it to say a lot of it has been released into the world via superficial channels for noone's amusement but my own.

Also. there is potential in superficiality for it to become something meaningful. Will and connection are needed for this transformation to occur, but I do believe it is there.
"Limited love asks for possession of the beloved, but the unlimited asks only for itself." -Kahlil Gibran
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Nefastos
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Nefastos »

Polyhymnia wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 5:34 amRegarding things like instagram, everything needs to excrete.

Like one of my closest friends says, "everyone has an arse and an opinion". I take it as an elegant way of saying that even though everyone is entitled to state things publicly, much of it should be taken with the zero (or even negative) value that it indeed has. Every human being may be equal, but not every unbased & biased, easily aired opinion.

Heh. Our time is indeed in interesting paradox concerning what can & should be said. So many people are rabid to speak their mind about everyone else, and ghastly taken back in case something is said about themselves. This is a nasty way to power-struggle. It was just in the Finnish news that a couple of policemen were taken in to the court because they had stated (to other officials, not to outsiders) that people who were going to rent lot from the city were part of a criminal gang. Now, when it is legal by the Finnish law to belong in a criminal gang (!), it is illegal to give information about other people. (Finnish news article here) The situation is extremely bizarre, and quite likely both laws & ideas of individual freedom & publicity have to change into a completely different angle, soon.

Polyhymnia wrote: Mon Feb 01, 2021 5:34 amVapid things like instagram are a great way to do it. I think the trick is to remember that things like instagram, used en masse, can still be valuable tools for a seeker.

I think that there are very little of any tools that are bad in themselves. Even the things that I criticize the most can be used for good. Instagrams do not kill people, people do. But as long as we are so incredibly primitive as a species that we now are, there must exist some regulations and recommendations, to protect people from people. But that just opens another problem, the one about watching the watchers. For example, there are many, many people who are so unhappy with regular regulations that they welcome with open arms with any third party or a black horse who promises to change the current policy drastically, and what happens with this, is almost always for the worse. Here we have raw & beating the fundamental need of Azazelian compromise of the opposites, and the bleeding problem of dualism, whose poles only strengthen each other's crudest attitudes. The current culture of discussion has been regressed badly, all over the globe it seems, and I think it cannot be healed by memes or cat videos, but more deep discussion, using the level of the soul & not the one of confrontations.
Faust: "Lo contempla. / Ei muove in tortuosa spire / e s'avvicina lento alla nostra volta. / Oh! se non erro, / orme di foco imprime al suol!"
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Benemal
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Benemal »

My advice to anyone, get out of social media. Insanity is contagious. Funny, I used to believe the opposite, until pretty recently. Knowledge of history is a part of it, not just modern nonsense, because modern is the same as the old, with new faster means of spreading the contagion.
Kavi
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Re: Pictorial World

Post by Kavi »

I think Instagram has both beneficial and counterproductive sides. Once I came with the thought that each social media platform corresponds with some cardinal sin. Albeit their is more to Instagram but one I thought was envy. There's been talk and articles about how "perfect life" posts etc influence negatively in people's lives.

But I personally tend to find zoomer memes hilarious, some "influencers" might have great book suggestions too.
In some countries shopkeepers use Instagram as their primary method to inform customers about their products.

I listened today evangelical Christians years and years old sermon about demonic influence of tattoos and their function as a gate for evil and I thought immediately about this thread for some reason. Demonization of tattoos is not right but I started to think if the preacher was in some sense correct of it's connection to astral, which would be the same reason why I don't like "poem/text tattoos" as a good idea. It's difficult topic to discuss especially because I don't have one.
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