These books are having an interesting conversation re: creative imagination. They are research for my fiction novel, but there's always interesting overlaps into other areas of my creative practice. I'm exploring imagery of spirals and meanders relating to writing, but I suspect it will bleed into my visual art soon enough. ![[Cover-Meandering-Jung-Alchemical-Imagination.jpeg]] [[Meandering]] by Sofia Lemon & [[Jung and Alchemical Imagination]] by Jeffrey Raff. ![[Cover-Meandering-Illustration.jpeg]] This illustration is by [Eduardo Navarro](https://www.navarroeduardo.art) . > Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, _Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics_, edited by Sofia Lemos, unfolds the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways, reflecting the vitality of water, from source to sea. A diverse group of artists and writers set out to trace river systems from the sierras and forests of southern Spain, to the heartlands of the Americas and the undersurface of the Mediterranean, proposing new routes for collaborative research and knowledge-production. Read more about the provenance of Meandering [here](https://tba21.org/Cat_Meandering). --- On the Practices and Poetics of the Creative Imagination SOFIA LEMOS > We are bereft in our culture of an adequate psychology and philosophy of the heart, and therefore also of the imagination. If we would recover the imaginal, we must first recover its organ, the heart, and its kind of philosophy? James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World (Connecticut: Spring Publications, (1992] 2021) p. 13 > Action and imagination are intimately tied. In recent years, it has emerged with ever greater clarity that transformative social and environmental change requires the ability to imagine a world otherwise. > > The work of undoing the decaying remnants of the modern colonial world-system necessitates not only engaging with the legal, political, economic, and symbolic narratives that perpetuate the conditions of its reproduction, but also, vitally, includes building the capacities and resources to inspire and catalyze conscious engagement with our creative imagination. > > As, in part, a technology of contemplation, art helps us to perceive the nature of reality with fuller depth and perspective; it enables a state in which we can "see through" rather than "look at." Over the centuries, we have discovered in art an array of engaged and poetic tools for awakening to the vitality of life; to its fundamental impermanence and interdependence. Because of its capacious nature, art facilitates insights into how humans participate in worldmaking-how our words, thoughts, and actions impact us, as well as how we shape and are shaped by our environments. p. 14 > Meandering was born from the conviction that an important dimension of its practice is oriented toward not only experiences of inner transformation, but to generating the conditions of possibility for cultural regeneration and social change. That in artistic research we can find the skillful means to reorient hope and reimagine possibility. > In this sense, Meandering contributed a discourse and praxis of artistic research that aimed to renew our trust in art's capacity to unveil and strengthen our collective symbolic agency, while engaging processes that replenish our shared belonging to life and our ability to remain open to its fullness. Crucially, it offered this within the wider context of world-systemic conditions that are endangering planetary life. Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire eco-systems, Meandering unfolded the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways, reflecting the vitality of water, from source to sea. By developing critical-creative insight into the interconnectedness of land and coastal waters, freshwater, and the ocean system, the program and this publication realize a subtle yet active proposition toward what I am calling live research. > This framework led Meandering towards an ethos of regenerative cultural practice-to leave more than is taken. > Live research expands these efforts and calls for an experiential and experimental approach to acknowledging the interdependence between theory and creativity as tools of scholarly, sensorial, and spiritual resilience. Moreover, it asks for skillful means to acknow.-edge the challenges, difficulties, and injustices of our everyday, phenomenal realities with hope, which is itself a desire for change. > > Ultimately, as we learn to listen deeply, taking up new perspectives and acknowledging the liveness in and around us, we open ourselves to restoring agency to ecosystems long perceived as separate from us, as well as to ourselves, as extensions of the world. p. 15 > Instead, live research centers the joyful effort that arises from connecting bodies, movements, and ideas the liveliness at the core of research-alongside the reverberant quality of life immanent in all artworks. Unlike how institutions traditionally program (often reproducing the same extractive logics they set out to criticize), live research rethinks how long-term engagement with collaborative and co-creative forms of commissioning and knowledge production can contribute to reconciling the long-standing oppositions through which art has instituted itself. > > Live research, then, attempts to delineate a mode of art-making emerging dynamically through processes that embrace non-duality, impermanence, and the vitality of life itself. Artistic research, as it engages with questions of framing our shared humanity, needs therefore to become a methodologically grounded, transformative practice, working not only to remake particular "visions" of the world, but to create new stories, myths, and rituals that expand what it means to be human as both a co-constituted life-force and a co-creative practice.3 > Working in public space and outside of the museum-aiming also at those who might be first encountering contemporary art-helped us explore how we are all capable of transforming our inner and outer realities. By committing to longer research trajectories and working processes, and making them public through convenings at the intersection of contemporary art and decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist practices, live research aimed to generate a transnational network of cultural, environmental, and social changemakers. p. 16 > Through our imagination, we shape this remnant of reality into one of the infinite forms that reality can take.' Federico Campagna, The Foundations of the Sea (unpublished manuscript, 2023). > The dissolution of the wet and dry divide, shown in the pervasiveness of extreme drought and severe flooding across national borders due to climate breakdown, has long been a motif of mythological thinking. > For the historian Peter Frankopan, the availability and use of water, the expansion of food production, and the geographic challenges and opportunities of local and long-distance trade are not just important factors, but fundamental conditions shaping the broad sweep of history. See Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story (London: Bloomsbury, 2023). p. 17 > Myth is key to understanding rivers as intermediaries between ecosystems in the watershed, and their entanglement with people through time. > Ecology and belief are deeply interconnected. p. 18 > World-making is fundamentally an act of storytelling, in which our attempt to understand reality needs to be as imaginative and capacious as possible in order to hold space for everyone within it to thrive. - > The fall of a civilisation not only involves the shattering of its social fabric, together with its political, economic, and technological infra-structures, but it also affects that fundamental common sense about the nature of the world, which is the necessary bedrock of any attempt to lead a meaningful existence." Campagna, The Foundations of the Sea, 5. > To contribute to a world where everyone's needs matter, we need myths that help us see beyond our historical dimension and experience an "oceanic feeling"; ecomythologies capable of unsettling human exceptionalism and undoing the noxious cosmology of global capitalism. p. 19 > A philosophical canon becomes indispensable in the formation of historical and symbolic consciousness, providing a shared ground, like language, that connects across terrestrial, material, psychic, and spiritual realities. Acknowledging what such a canon makes speakable and, conversely, what it leaves unspoken in our supposedly post-met-aphysical age, necessitates a "collective rewriting of knowledge" as we know it. Indeed, conventional knowledge-making practices have led to capital's oppressively racializing, denominational, and egotistical extractive mythology, deeply rooted in unexercised fears and limiting beliefs. Within the fantasy of linear progress, the experience of the world is narrowly indexed in the immutable, empirical, and stable categories that laid the foundations for colonial modernity and racial capitalism. In response to this confining state of "unreality," we must actively re-examine the common tendency to research and represent the world through time as a universal absolute, as forward-moving, and made up of spatial successions. p. 23 > inevitably tied to the limits we impose on our action and imagination. Recreation is the matter of cosmology, in this case by drawing boundaries around ourselves. These imagined borders define what or who belongs, who is kept out and, ultimately, which bodies deserve our empathy and compassion. This seems to us a natural assumption, especially given that what most of us call human is implicitly imagined to be in opposition to, or split off from, other beings and lifeforms. p. 22 > We are unable to act differently, or to think and imagine differently, because of the absence, within the present system of unreality, of the basic requirements to implement any alternative course of action and imagination. Campagna, Technic and Magic, 88. p. 33 > Acknowledging the creative imagination as an energy to be continuously preserved and engaged with-against competing extractive imaginaries-requires our commitment to an expansive departure from harmful capitalist beliefs and origin stories. As noted by philosopher Astrida Neimanis-who coined the term hydrofeminism to describe a set of ethical propositions which learn from bodies of water, including ourselves-an aqueous imaginary requires grace, concern, and curiosity to keep negotiating and proposing realities anew.58 This commitment to a state of continuously renewed perception is perhaps the wisdom that rivers and the riparian communities on their banks can offer in an ecologically damaged world. Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 175-176. p. 34 > "There are 60,000 miles of waterways in our bodies-veins and arteries-the red lines of our own lives," writes Mojave poet Natalie Diaz in "exhibits from the American Water Museum."59 Part of the 2020 collection Postcolonial Love Poem, this poem, alongside "The First Water Is the Body," expresses the inseparability of the human body from freshwater ecosystems. Diaz writes, "How can I translate-not in words but in belief-that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?" Drawing out from within her the wisdom of her Mojave ancestors, her discursive poetic mode is interspersed with meditations on our fundamental interconnectedness with rivers: > 'Aha Makav is the true name of our people, given to us by our Creator who loosed the river from the earth and built it into our living bodies. > > Translated into English, 'Aha Makav means the river runs through the middle of our body, the same way it runs through the middle of our land, 60 From "The First Water Is the Body," in Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem, 46. > Abused and exhausted, "even a river will die of thirst," Diaz warns us. And, "as we die of drought," so does our capacity to thrive in and with the world. p. 35 > Rivers have always been guides for their own regeneration. Rivers are flowing and forgiving. > In the river's flux, "there is no post- or pre-version of history that is not linear or teleological but rather moves in cycles and spirals and sets out on a course without neglecting to return to the same point."63 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch'ixinakax utxiwa: On Decolonising Practices and Discourses (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 48. > Similarly to myth and mythology-whose structures, as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested, are dynamic, and by their nature synthesize the synchronic and diachronic aspects of language-rivers reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable tensions of a forward-moving narrative. Instead of a linear history, the cosmologies of river valley communities and civilizations like Ibn 'Arabi's barzakh or Wynter's mythopoesis, meander and whirl. In their intertwined origin stories, past and future are nestled into one another and contained within the present in overlapping time frames. # In their intertwined origin stories, past and future are nestled into one another and contained within the present in overlapping time frames. p. 36 > WHAT CAN RIVERS TELL US ABOUT OUR ROOTS AND ROUTES? I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921] 2002). Hughes dedicated the poem to W.E.B. Du Bois, author of the seminal The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in his first poetry collection, The Weary Blues (1926). > Over centuries and across the world, rivers have been artificially diverted, narrowed, shortened, widened, and alted, straightened, dredged, deepened, dammed, embanked, and altered by human action in countless ways. Despite this, rivers cannot be entirely contained. Far from being stable, fixed entities, rivers overflow and become barren, waxing and waning along their course. They are fully present with their surroundings in a continuous flux that is recreated every passing moment. Their flow, much like Ibn 'Arabi's creative imagination, is one of "continual change in every state and manifestation in every form."s p. 38 > Around the tenth and eleventh centuries, and synchronous with a reinvigorated importance of myth in Sufism, a new way of relating to the watershed formed in Andalusia. What has been dubbed the "Arab Green Revolution of the Middle Ages" centered the river through agronomical expertise and botany, as well as related studies in medicine and phar-macology. These show how the spiritual ecology of the region "took into account soil health, water management, seed saving, the development of new cultivars, companion planting, composting, pest control, and plenty more in a circular flow that continuously returned fertility to the soil."69 Medina Tenour Whiteman, "Listening for God in the Garden: The Spiritual Ecologies of Al-Andalus," https://ocean-archive.org/view/3535. > As landscapes are molded and altered through erosion, encounter, and contamination, or created anew through deposition, navigation, and flood-farming, waterways continue to lay down the sediment layers of our civilizational narratives. p. 44 > To repair reason, we need to adopt a nonlinear approach to history and, by extension, to our experience of time. We need to create methods and knowledge-making practices that reckon with how cosmological experiments in civilization-making are passed down as origin stories within our historical dimension of time, space, and form; and how, while these stories are woven through art, poetry, prophecy, and song, they are not exclusive to them. In order to expand our political horizons as a planetary species, we must acknowledge how we engage in cosmological experimentation on a day-to-day basis. We can simultaneously recognize a realm beyond the historical dimension, where our imaginations of the world precede reality as it "is" and where we can reconcile with the realities we wish to create. > As we have seen, the ideas-images we collectively build play a fundamental, cosmological role in ordering the building blocks of our societies. Following both Wynter and Ibn 'Arabi, they can be understood as the founding acts by which human communities give themselves a social order. In this sense, our collective symbolic agency can not only establish a decolonial continuity between so-called "pre-modern" and modern forms of world-making, but can also effect an epistemological and experiential shift that recovers alternatives from the colonial grip. This recovery importantly recognizes the efforts of the bearers, visionaries, mystics, sages, artists, scholars, and activists who have made significant strides in bringing these to the fore. p. 45-46 Conference of the Birds mythology I’ve ordered this copy. (ISBN 1566569354 ![[Cover-Conference-of-Birds.jpeg]] p. 51 > Meandering makes a case for the role of artistic research and public programs in reading anew and creating ecomythologies; offering spiritual-scientific entanglements and non-dualistic philosophies that might seed a more encompassing sense of self, a richer experience of community, and an expanded View of time. With this book, I invite readers to widen our imagination toward becoming oceanic, to deepen our souls as rivers, and to connect-with conscious creative engagement-the many tributaries of our shared humanity. p. 54 > ecomythologies > ways of life that enrich rather than deplete the planet p. 74 > (Eduardo) Navarro became interested in working with children, whose ability to perceive dimensions beyond conventional definition, or apparent substance, accompanied their unbounded creative imagination. "I suppose that ultimately childhood is not a stage of life but a way of seeing the world, of asking for magical and impossible things," he hypothesized.* https://www.navarroeduardo.art/ p. 22 ![[Cover-Meandering-Illustration.jpeg]] p. 99 > Celestial coils, curves, and cosmic spiral forms cycle through these relations as well as the devotional and ecstatic practices of ancient, and Indigenous societies. For instance, Lithuanian archeologist Marija Gimbutas noted the importance of snake, spiral, and meander forms in the cult of goddesses in the river valley civilizations of "Old Europe."? According to her findings, the double meander motif that is common to many cultural groups must have originated as two opposing lines-like two snakes with their heads meeting-that were subsequently elaborated into the meandering designs that appear incised on figurines, masks, cult vessels, and altars. As Gimbutas notes: > "Old Europe" is a term coined by Gimbutas to describe pre-Indo-European Neolithic and Copper Age culture or civilization in Southeast Europe, centered in the Lower Danube Valley circa 7,000-3,000 cE, which spread westwards and northwards into Central and Eastern Europe. Using evidence from pottery and sculpture, and combining the tools of archaeology, comparative mythology, and linguistics, Gimbutas studied the Neolithic period to understand cultural developments in the region, which she characterized as peaceful, matrilineal, and centered around a goddess religion. In contrast, she characterizes the later Indo-European influences as warlike, nomadic, and patrilineal. Gimbutas includes the Iberians and the Basques as descendants of earlier Old European cultures. p. 100 > The snake and its abstracted derivative, the spiral, are the dominant motifs of the art of Old Europe, and their imaginative use in spiral-form design throughout the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods remained unsurpassed by any subsequent decorative style until the Minoan civilization, the sole inheritor of Old European lavishness. This art reached its peak of unified symbolic and aesthetic expression c. 5,000 вс.3 > Art critic and scholar Thomas McEvilley also drew a connection between the ser-pents, meanders, and spirals that have acted as cosmological symbols across the Mediterranean, and traced the diffusion of the caduceus lore from India to Greece, and back to a period, around the late-sixth and early-fifth centuries BCE, when northwest India and eastern Greece were part of the Persian Empire. > The Persian Empire's influence in Ancient Greece was notably expressed in metaphysical and medical treaties from Democedes and Empedocles to Philistion and Plato. See McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought, 209-213. p. 101 Sofia Lemos on Isabel Lewis inspiration > spiral flow of river sediments > In Lewis's choreographic works,"attunement" is an embodied, collective practice that requires an active commitment to listening, working collaboratively, and developing continuities between the senses. Very interesting as I’ve been considering attunement for my magic system. p. 103 > Describing this perfor-mance, Lewis noted: > I am looking for formats of presentation that allow other access points to dance as lived, social mediation, an alternative form of sociality between humans and beyond. Here I tried to find a connection to the river as a site of consideration, of learning, and of methodology. What struck me the most, gazing upon the Guadalquivir, were the sediments, the suspended particles that move through it, the slowness of its pace in this part of its flow, its color, its thickness ... it was a question of how could my bodily materiality find resonance with the river and, therefore, maybe find a relation with it. So the mineral sediments became especially resonant in relation to bone and blood as well as imagining the entire human body as a sedimentary particle suspended and pulled along in flows of time. 12 p. 141 > Drawing on the tradition of what Sicilian philosopher Federico Campagna has called "true magic"-a blend of Western and Eastern theosophy and theology spanning the period from antiquity to the Renaissance-Sifre's interest in alchemy and magic can be considered a form of therapy, and an antidote to the capitalist exploitation of the body. > > Magic, according to Campagna, goes beyond popular notions of supernatural abilities or mere illusion, and is concerned with personal transformation and the reenchantment of the world. To read: Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).