Tribe of Selves

[s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s]

JAVELIN is out today. Thank you for listening. I love you.

This album is dedicated to the light of my life, my beloved partner and best friend Evans Richardson, who passed away in April. He was an absolute gem of a person, full of life, love, laughter, curiosity, integrity, and joy. He was one of those rare and beautiful ones you find only once in a lifetime—precious, impeccable, and absolutely exceptional in every way.

I know relationships can be very difficult sometimes, but it’s always worth it to put in the hard work and care for the ones you love, especially the beautiful ones, who are few and far between. If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close, hold it tight, savor it, tend to it, and give it everything you’ve got, especially in times of trouble. Be kind, be strong, be patient, be forgiving, be vigorous, be wise, and be yourself. Live every day as if it is your last, with fullness and grace, with reverence and love, with gratitude and joy. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Thank you. I love you.  XOS

Sufjan Stevens - Javelin

Listen to Javelin by Sufjan Stevens.

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He who in those days said and who heard flæschama 'flesh-raiment', ban-hus 'bone-house', hreðer-loca 'heart-prison', thought of the soul shut in the body, as the frail body itself is trammelled in armour, or as a bird in a narrow cage, or steam pent in a cauldron. There it seethed and struggled in the wylmas, the boiling surges beloved of the old poets, until its passion was released and it fled away on ellor-sið, a journey to other places 'which none can report with truth, not lords in their halls nor mighty men beneath the sky'. The poet who spoke these words saw in his thought the brave men of old walking under the vault of heaven upon the island earth beleaguered by the Shoreless Seas and the outer darkness, enduring with stern courage the brief days of life, until the hour of fate when all things should perish, leoht and lif samod. But he did not say all this fully or explicitly. And therein lies the unrecapturable magic of ancient English verse for those who have ears to hear: profound feeling, and poignant vision, filled with the beauty and mortality of the world, are aroused by brief phrases, light touches, short words resounding like harp-strings sharply plucked.

J.R.R. Tolkien, On Translating Beowulf

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Tacheles

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… the lie of Western psychology is that something is stable—God’s nature, the equinoxial points—something lasts. Because of this lie, we are perpetually in a state of anxiety because the truth of our experience is nothing lasts, and yet the truth that our culture tells us is, you know, save your immortal soul, make a contribution, preserve, protect, conserve, stabilize, retain; it’s pointless. And so the central truth of being is the felt presence of immediate reality; that’s all you will ever have.

Terence McKenna, Plants, Consciousness, and Transformation (1995)

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You see, what is happening, and why the psychedelic experience is so important, is because information is loose on planet three. Some kind of very strange thing is going on; the world is not made of quarks or electromagnetic wave packets or the thoughts of God. The world is made of language, and language is replicating itself in DNA which, at its culmination, is creating societies of civilized and intelligent beings which possess languages, which possess cybernetics, which possess machines which use languages, so that standing off a light-year or two from this system, what seems to be happening, what is unusual about Earth, is that language literally has become alive. It has infested matter. It is replicating and defining and building itself, and it is in us, my voice speaking, is a monkey’s mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agreed-upon meaning, and it is the meaning—without the meaning, you only have little mouth noises. The meaning is a crude form of telepathy, because as you listen to my voice, my thoughts become your thoughts and we compare them and there is what’s called communication, understanding.

Terence McKenna, The Definitive UFO Tape (Mil Valley, California, April 1983)