#ashrowan

[capitolpersona]

“Ash! You have been reaped, once again for the Games. Now when we last spoke, I told you just how much we would love to see you here again, tell us. Just how do you feel about being back here?”

@ash-rowan

[lumenelementa]

[lumenelementa]

"abandoned ... to the delectation of the shadows" from Andre Breton's 1928 essay, Surrealism and Painting. Image from a work in progress... a still from The Rainbow.

[lumenelementa]

Stan Brakhage: "Really, I mean it's wonderful to live. And what worries me the most is that so much of the time I don't want to live, and then I try to figure out why. Why not?" (from a 1974 interview, Remarks Following a Screening of The Text of Light)

[lumenelementa]

(nostalgia) 1971, Hollis Frampton

"I take some comfort that my entire physical body has been replaced more than once since it made this portrait of its face." From (nostalgia) 1971 by Hollis Frampton. In this film Frampton incinerates his own photographs, one by one, over a hotplate. The personal biographical narration (written by Frampton but narrated by filmmaker Michael Snow) for each photograph relates to the next photograph in the sequence, rather than the one in view. He did not incinerate these photographs with the contagion of a match, but with a hotplate, a slow heat as if rising from the depths of the earth, forcing combustion, decay, dissolution into vapour and carbon. It is one of the most existentially melancholic films I have seen.

[lumenelementa]

The Pirate & The Crystal Ball - The Incredible String Band (circa 1970) - a sequence from their film "Be Glad For the Song Has No Ending" directed by Peter Neal. I fear there are few who will truly appreciate the complete genius of this film. It fills me with a strange kind of longing, something quite beyond nostalgia. See the film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjql6I4ecu0 And here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG2ld15o12w

[lumenelementa]

Three film stills from Fathomless (1964) by Jim Davis, an astonishing display of coloured light in movement. Davis worked in special kind of way - an alchemical experimentation with light - his films are edited from filmed sequences of light refracted and reflected through coloured plastic sculptural installations. Davis would focus light from the sun using a mirror (or sometimes lights), projecting the light through various translucent coloured sculpture mobiles. He would then film the light refractions as they played themselves out on a screen.  

But Davis considered light to be actually substantial - he felt his films were not really psychologically abstract or physically immaterial, but were reflections of fundamental natural forces, they were, in his words "suggestive of the causal properties of nature".

Davis also felt that there was "something sacred, secret, that no human should know or see" in these forms, which hints toward a metaphysical intuition. This connects us to ideas of the 'light of creation', the alchemical/cabbalistic notion of light being a primary emanation of the divine, an intermediary substance between spirit and matter. That matter, without being impregnated with celestial light, could not in fact exist. And perhaps this is what Davis intuits - light as the primal form, pre-material.

Maybe this is, indeed, fathomless.    

Note: the amazing films of Jim Davis are not available online, but can be got on DVD through the BFI or RE:Voir.

[lumenelementa]

Moon, Sun, Elements, Fire. John Dee (1527–1608) describes a line as a point that flows... "Consequently, everything, properly, began from the point and the monad." (II) and "a LINE is produced from the FLOWING OF A POINT. And using this same principle, we point out that this is also the case in our mechanical magic, because the lines indicating our elements are produced by the continuous fall of DROPS (which are like physical points) [moving] as though they are FLOWING." (VII) 

These passages are from Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica (1563), a work in which Dee provides an exegesis of his famous Monad symbol, which seems to operate not just symbolically, but as an alchemical geometric cypher containing a kind of magical agency in its own right.    

The translated sections (parts of Theorem II and Theorem VII) are from Nancy Turner and Teresa Burnes. The images are composited together from microfilm scans (by Bill Heidrick) from a copy held at UCBerkeley.