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Part one of a two-part conversation with Flat Woods, on Garbanzo’s materialization skills, a vision of Hell, how the desire for heaven creates hell, a traumatogenic agency, when trauma is stored in the body, the banality of good, neurons in the gut, the poison containment process & stomach ulcers, ancestral wounds, a will to trauma, alien abduction screen memories, Munchausen by proxy, memories of trauma, Mysterious Skin, discovering Communion at age 11, childhood therapy, seeking certainty, flying saucers and dissociation, a liminal lake, the difference between memory and imagination, seeking a historical context, external agencies, old mind control info, what informs spiritual development, the replicant’s quest, the impossibility of seeing our parents, a Savile-flavored question mark, trapped inside a false narrative, identity deconstruction, the wrong lava, how the unconscious becomes conscious, the option of suffering, waking as dying, navigating the past, a chosen stress, being surrounded by people you can’t talk to, what’s new to yew, a life of body suffering, being divorced from the body, fat vs. skinny, reigning in hell, signals from the ancestors, the voice of the body, responding to the body, healing the split through conversation, body image vs. body enjoyment, David Byrne’s body language, the body’s transmission.
Songs: “The Kommema and his Religion” by SunWalker; “Solitude” by Entertainment for the Braindead; “Time Lines” by Pete Lund.
Just wanted to write how much i can relate to this podcast and how important i think these discussions are to adults who are alienated by the standard DSM clinical paradigms.When looking at the whole of our culture it is obvious that these orthodox diagnostic and therapeutic practices are failing more people than they help. The unaccounted survivors far outnumber those who know and or those seeking help in healing. listening to these recent episodes has reawakened an unanswered question of the possible depth of my own childhood trauma but with a positive side,that being tools and concepts beyond the 101 standards . Having others express their own experiences in an intelligent and articulate manner humanizes these dark issues. Sometimes i wish that the subject matter here would return to esoteric culture and conspiracy. Although when i actually compare them to the issues being addressed surrounding trauma there seems to be so many more ideas being asked and revealed that are relevant to our collective past as well as future existence.
Out of curiosity i was wondering what your viewpoint is on the role of art in ones life?Therapy,sublimation,catharsis,and many other possibilities seem fitting.
I always think about David Lynch retelling the one time he talked to a therapist and decided against ever having therapy as there was a possibility that it could effect his creative life.
For myself it is the one thing that outright belongs to me and so far is the only thing besides loving another person that has had sustained meaning from childhood on.
I often wonder why it plays such a central role in my being as well as others who have emotional scars .
I’m sure i could find any number of answers to this question but since i have enjoyed your insight on other ideas i thought i might ask.
Thank you for the rare work that you do.
I just posted about the question of art at Faceborg: “In a perfect world, there’d be no art. Discuss.”
Maybe we can discuss for a podcast?
I think Lynch’s latest output amply demonstrates how confining “being an artist” is and how poor a substitute it is for real self-exploration and discovery. If art isn’t therapy (Blue Velvet) then it eventually becomes the opposite of therapy (Twin Peaks).
Well like with a lot of things I’ll amiably disagree with Jasun. I can’t respond directly to Jasun’s post because it’s behind a wall for me but (hopefully near topic) I’ll never feel like it’s purely a Life of the Mind.
I absolutely experience entrancing practice rythms or Csikszentmihalyi “flow” that almost eradicates the conscious thought process for me. I also harvest my materials in away that’s very physically strenuous and requires hours of sustained focus. Maybe I’m the odd man out here but I feel like art (making it especially but also consuming it) is the go to way to leave the mind and enter the body.
Creating art is the most successfull and fulfilling component to my spiritual practice as well, for whatever that’s worth.
Thanks for the kind fellowship words G.L. I’m not a busy man if you ever feel like trying to shoot the shit on these topics. I empathize with the importance of partnership entirely- I would be a crazier, terrible person if I hadn’t found it as early as I did.
Hi Jasun,is it possible to read “In a perfect world, there’d be no art. Discuss,” somewhere other than Spookbook?If not ill do the legwork to reach you there.I’m like to take the approach that art serves multi purposes and one of the big ones for me is through a marxist lens, being that it provides a panacea to the self alienation that exist in most of our mediated forms of living .In a very basic way it is a concrete antithesis to the abstraction of modern life and gives a person a form of self actualization.
Again its just one among many possible roles.
Yes i think we could possibly discuss this if i can get past my trepidation and anxiety caused by being self critical.
To Flatwoods,it interesting to read that its a component of your spiritual process.I have never really thought of my creative process as spiritual but just consider it in just as serious light.
The main fulfilling aspect of being creative for myself sounds akin to what you said. Nothing is as satisfying as when working on a piece and reaching a state where its no longer myself consciously forcing my hands to move while thinking about what they are suppose to do but instead when it feels like i’m so within the process that i am watching it develop on it’s own like i am 3rd person or on autopilot.It feels like a natural state of being to me.
As a latch key kid i spent enormous amounts of time alone and the one thing that acted positively as a babysitter was being giving art supplies.This became so integral to who i am that it continues till this day.In fact if i go without a certain allotment of solitude coupled with creative freedom i end up feeling like some thing is wrong/off. Using that as a litmus test i can also tell that when i stop wanting to create it means that there is something serious going on within me that needs to be addressed.
From the podcast it sounds like both you(Flatoods) and I have some similar childhood experiences like
having a single mom and surrogate fathers who were damaging.
I would like to listen to the 2nd part of this episode but am open to conversing after that if its ok.
Thinking about why these liminalist podcast standout so much,is that in hearing these conversations
i don’t feel like there is a pathologizing but instead an underling concept that life’s experiences effects us in subjective ways and there is no normal reaction/effect.
Hearing others here who don’t subscribe to the concensus reality is in itself comforting/affirming since most of what we call culture/society is so alienating…
hi GL
there isn’t much to read at that thread to be honest, about a dozen comments, reproduced here:
Hi Jasun
Thank you for the Fakebook post to which I do not have an account.
Interesting synchronicities. I have been lifted by your work into considering trauma – how the memory is held in the body – how it erupts into the here and now without the mind hardly being aware of associated behaviours and decisions. At the crossroads of every moment what is one going to do? Perhaps that is subject to the body memory of that moment. I also have a metaphor for time and the past (the future also?) that it is not behind the present as something outside of one’s self, it is deeply held within and below as a font that swells up to saturate the here and now. Does the future rain down? But that’s another thought for another day.
I have just finished reading the biography by Dilworth of Anglo/Welsh artist and poet – David Jones 1895-1974 and subsequently have gone into David Jones’ own writings and am currently reading Epoch and Artist.
First world war survivor, he was well talented before his enlistment, but his subsequent trauma and damage led him to become genius in the extreme as well as trying to find solace which at that time he found in the beauty of ritual and sacrament of Roman Catholicism; God knows what he experienced through those particularly wicked years of warfare – a total waste of human souls. He was looking for answers to all sorts of questions including the reasoning behind the motivation towards communication through art and in one passage of his work he talks of the goddess Providentia and of Ars.
I am so uneducated that I can’t go any further with these ideas unfortunately as his knowledge goes way beyond that which I can integrate as a whole so I am on a course of re-educating myself so apologies if I am a little off on explanation for my post.
Seems like it is way off topic, but his work seems to hold certain keys.
Thank you very much again
I just had my own comment vaporized!
it was a response to this: “the motivation towards communication through art”
i wrote something like “what is art besides communication?” and that does this then imply that in a perfect world there would be no such thing as a “failure to communicate” hence no need for art besides the purely utilitarian sort?
this podcast is an attempt to reduce art to pure communication, and to restore the art of communication, maybe?
“…had my own comment vaporized”…yes I do seem to have done that – how interesting – my stream of consciousness arriving at the crossroads and acting without awareness. My first thought was to assume I had done something wrong and felt foolish. Then I contemplated on it and wonder whether my vapourisation was purely because I lack information about what you mean by the words “perfect” “world” and “art”
If it is true in the images below that – Everyone Stands Under His (or Her) Own Dome of Heaven
https://ixquick-proxy.com/do/spg/show_picture.pl?l=english_uk&rais=1&oiu=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.metmuseum.org%2Ftoah%2Fimages%2Fhb%2Fhb_1995.14.4.jpg&sp=29be47b63aa5b707d75af25e6c1fbce2
https://ixquick-proxy.com/do/spg/show_picture.pl?l=english_uk&rais=1&oiu=http%3A%2F%2Fsaulsteinbergfoundation.org%2Fwp-content%2Fthemes%2Fsaul%2Fimg%2Fsaul-steinberg_self-portrait.png&sp=0432f617945c086df8f586c2e283af2e
is it not also true that the only “world” that has any chance of being “perfected” (whatever that means to the person) is one’s internal world and this leads to a whole load of questions, not least, of personal intent.
Also would you not agree – perhaps you wouldn’t – that “failure” also implies “trying” to do something better…or worse and that there may not be human endeavour without failure.
Just some of my own thoughts and thank you for raising the bar, even though I misinterpreted your discussion point, often it takes me a while to assimilate another’s thoughts – it is impossible for me to have these conversations anywhere else.
i throw questions like lines out to see what sort of bites i get. I don’t necessarily believe anything i write, which isn’t to say I am pranking either. As Charles Fort said “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject- matter for beliefs.”
Great conversation thank you.
I just wanted to add that your sensory experience of Garbanzo jumping on the bed etc. that you described in the beginning is something I’ve also experienced multiple times years ago after my family’s cat died. The same jumping onto bed, feeling the sheets depressed, the pressing of feed as she gets comfortable, the sense of the cat’s essence, the whole thing, knowing that the cat was no longer alive but being in this sort of peculiar half-awake state that it felt totally fine and I didn’t really question it. I didn’t get any chiding vibe from her, just the feeling that she was doing her old rounds and paying a visit as she was only comfortable around my dad and I and would move between our bedrooms. This was in high school before I left for college.