prima materia

building up, tearing down, building up

[primateria]

"… their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness."

[primateria]

“There is a Muslim prayer that says, ‘Lord, increase my bewilderment,’ and this prayer belongs both to me and to the strange Whoever who goes under the name ‘I’ in my poems—and under multiple names in my fiction—where error, errancy and bewilderment are the main forces that signal a story.”

—Fanny Howe, The Wedding Dress

[primateria]

"'You must learn to accept that whatever you need will turn up for you,' he continued. 'Even if you never produce anything of social value, your relationship with the collective unconscious will justify your reason for being on the face of this earth.'

"He said more than once, 'Please remember, it is what you are that heals, not what you know. In the beginning of my career I knew nothing, actually less than nothing. But still it worked. And do you know why? It was because of who I was.'

"'[In the dream] when you make a circle with your arm, the snake begins to talk with you,' he said. 'Do you see this? It is a mandala, a magic circle. This means that you can survive an otherwise overwhelming experience if you will give it form. Do you see? You must focus on containing these energies, or they will destroy you.'

"When the fourth function arises, Dr. Jung said, the other three aspects of the personality often collapse into the unconscious (which is where the transformation takes place). This makes such transformation highly dangerous. It is experienced as if all one’s usual competencies for dealing with the world have suddenly fallen apart.

"The fourth function in me—the least developed aspect of my personality—was my thinking capacity.

"He found a variety of ways to say the same thing over and over—that I belonged to the inner world. 'If you never amount to anything in ordinary cultural terms, it doesn’t matter,' he told me. 'Simply to have taken part in this event of the collective unconscious is your contribution.'"

—Robert Johnson on his encounter with C.G. Jung

[primateria]

[primateria]

“But I was no longer the man I had been, for a strange being grew through me. This was a laughing being of the forest, a leaf green daimon, a forest goblin and prankster, who lived alone in the forest and was itself a greening tree being, who loved nothing but greening and growing, who was neither disposed nor indisposed toward men, full of mood and chance, obeying an invisible law and greening and wilting with the trees, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor bad, merely living, primordially old and yet completely young, naked and yet naturally clothed, not man but nature, frightened, laughable, powerful, childish, weak, deceiving and deceived, utterly inconstant and superficial, and yet reaching deep down, down to the kernel of the world.”

—C.G. Jung, The Red Book

[primateria]

crab grass, st. john’s wort, callery pear

[primateria]

wild radish, spotted knapweed, common soapwort

[primateria]

MHL. (Margaret Howell) A/W 2023

[wovi]

*

g. k. chesterton, saint francis of assisi

[anajikia00]

[primateria]

[anajikia00]

2021

[pneumaturgo]

Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia, 1983

[primateria]

I used to live and nest in clouds and shrouds of words. But words cannot be trusted, especially in their abundance. Poetry, precious words, the means; beauty even, which was the end, this all was only ever a mask. When longing is given over to words, it lies.

[primateria]

Two kinds of work

[primateria]

[primateria]

purple loosestrife, tall anemone, field daisy