Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

Heterogeneous Spectacles

Ecumenica: Performance and Religion.

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
Werner Herzog

I’ve shot a thousand bodies contorted in a thousand supposed acts of transcendence, and most of it’s performative horseshit, people pretending to feel something because they’ve read the right books and know the right poses. But then you see something that kicks you in the throat, something real, and you remember why you picked up a fucking camera in the first place.

Getting your frame on the cover of Ecumenica: Performance and Religion isn’t some vanity metric, some notch on your belt next to the local arts weekly garbage. This journal actually gives a damn about where the body meets the divine, where sweat and spirit collide in ways that make comfortable academics squirm. They’re not interested in your polite gallery openings or your safe, sanctioned rituals. They want the raw nerve, the genuine article, the places where creativity and faith get tangled up and dangerous.

And Raegan Truax’s Citation, Christ, there it is. The cover shot captures something that most photographers spend their entire lives chasing: that moment when the performer stops performing and becomes a conduit for something bigger, something that makes your hands shake on the shutter release. Truax moves through this durational piece with a grace that’s almost unbearable to witness, her body simultaneously fragile and absolutely indestructible. The beauty isn’t in some conventional aesthetic, it’s in the commitment, the willingness to be completely present and utterly exposed for hours. That kind of endurance isn’t just physical; it’s spiritual warfare, and she executes it with a dignity that’ll haunt your contact sheets forever.

A peer-reviewed journal, Ecumenica regards performance and religion as overlapping and often mutually-constituting categories, preferring no particular form of creative expression, and privileging no particular religious tradition. The journal’s very aim is to consider the variety of modes in which creative and religious impulses might be realized.

Ecumenica’s interdisciplinary premise welcomes all critical approaches to such topics as performance art, theatre, ritual, contemplative and devotional practices, and expressions of community. The journal expects that performance and religion scholarship can add many more topics to this list.

Jun 12, 2020 | Categories: Absolute Solipsism | Tags: Performance Art Photography / Documentation | Leave A Comment »

Grave 4 x 6 Open Edition

A 4″ x 6″ open edition of the complete Grave set to date (26 images total). Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.

Jun 06, 2020 | Categories: | Comments Off on Grave 4 x 6 Open Edition

Site Specific Theater Bibliography

Here’s what this thing is actually trying to do, and why it matters:

I’m not talking about phenomenology as some pristine moment of pure experience, that whole “unmediated presence” thing is academic horseshit and we all know it. This is about phenomenology as a verb, as something you do: you tune yourself to what’s actually happening, you orient yourself in space that’s already rigged, already political, already fucked in specific ways, and you let it change you. Or at least I try to.

The texts are organized to show how performance doesn’t represent reality, it reorganizes it. It messes with your perception, your body, your attention span. Theatre happens in real space and real time between real people, sure, but that space isn’t neutral. It’s produced. Contested. The everyday isn’t some innocent backdrop, it’s structured by systems that have already decided who gets to move where and how fast.

Site-specific or site-responsive or site-integrated and environmental work gets treated here as a practice, not a concept. Not “what does it mean?” but “what does it do?” Duration. Movement. The way sound hits you before you understand it. The sensory assault that interrupts your nice clean interpretation.

The political stuff, the participatory frameworks, they’re here not as solutions but as tests. Because performance can redistribute what’s visible and sayable, but that doesn’t automatically empower anyone. You don’t get to assume the work is doing good just because bodies are moving together in space.

And documentation? That’s not where performance lives. That’s its ghost. Its unresolved afterlife. Stop trying to make it the real thing.

Bottom line: site-specific theatre doesn’t ask you to figure it out. It asks you to transmit it, to stage it, to be altered by it. Comprehension is a luxury. Alteration is the point.

I. Phenomenology, Presence, and Event

(Foundational methodological axis: experience as alteration, not meaning)

Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.

———. To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. Routledge, 1992.

Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Routledge, 2008.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford UP, 2004.

Halling, Steen. Intimacy, Transcendence, and Psychology: Closeness and Openness in Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Serres, Michel, and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. U of Michigan P, 1995.

States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater. U of California P, 1985.

———. “Performance as Metaphor.” Theatre Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, 1996, pp. 1–16.

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge, 1993.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003.

II. Space, Place, and Orientation

(Phenomenology of site without symbolic essentialism)

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Penguin Books, 2014.

Casey, Edward S. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Indiana UP, 1993.

Relph, Edward. Place and Placelessness. Pion, 1976.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.

Chaudhuri, Una. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. U of Michigan P, 1995.

III. Spatial Production, Rhythm, and Everyday Practice

(Counter-pressure to naïve phenomenology; space as produced, lived, and contested)

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall, U of California P, 1984.

Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006, pp. 50–54.

———. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, 1994.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991.

———. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore, Continuum, 2004.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2, edited by James D. Faubion, New Press, 1997, pp. 175–185.

IV. Movement, Walking, and Mobility

(Site as event produced through movement and duration)

Heddon, Dee, and Cathy Turner. Walking Women: Interviews with Artists on the Move. Triarchy Press, 2022.

Hunter, Victoria. Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance. Routledge, 2015.

Mock, Roberta, editor. Walking, Writing and Performance. Intellect, 2009.

Pearson, Mike. “Special Worlds, Secret Maps: A Poetics of Performance.” Staging Wales, edited by Anna-Marie Taylor, U of Wales P, 1997, pp. 95–106.

Wilkie, Fiona. Performance, Transport and Mobility: Making Passage. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

V. Site-Specific and Environmental Performance Practice

(Theatre as attunement, exposure, and spatial interference)

Birch, Anna, and Joanne Tompkins. Performing Site-Specific Theatre: Politics, Place, Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Hill, Leslie, and Helen Paris. Performance and Place. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Houston, Andrew. Environmental and Site-Specific Theatre. Playwrights Canada Press, 2007.

Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. Routledge, 2000.

Pearson, Mike. Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Pearson, Mike, and Michael Shanks. Theatre/Archaeology. Routledge, 2001.

VI. Sound, Sensation, and the Sensorium

(Phenomenology with material consequence)

Banes, Sally, and André Lepecki, editors. The Senses in Performance. Routledge, 2007.

Brown, Ross. Sound: A Reader in Theatre Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan UP, 1961.

Kendrick, Lynne, and David Roesner, editors. Theatre Noise: The Sound of Performance. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.

Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books, 1994.

Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication. Ablex, 2001.

VII. Genealogies of Event-Based and Environmental Art

(Historical ballast, not ontological grounding)

Halprin, Lawrence, et al. Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space. Spacemaker Press, 2009.

Kaprow, Allan. Assemblages, Environments, Happenings. Abrams, 1965.

———. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Edited by Jeff Kelley, U of California P, 1993.

Smithson, Robert. The Collected Writings. Edited by Jack D. Flam, U of California P, 1996.

VIII. Politics, Participation, and the Distribution of the Sensible

(Politics as reorientation, not pedagogy)

Berlant, Lauren. Intimacy. U of Chicago P, 2000.

Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Routledge, 1992.

———. Theatre of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, Pluto Press, 2013.

Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2009.

———. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2004.

IX. Mediation, Documentation, and Afterlives

(Acknowledged, constrained, unresolved)

Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2008.

Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, editors. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Intellect, 2012.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke UP, 2003.

May 11, 2020 | Categories: FalseArt | Tags: Guy Debord, Notes | Leave A Comment »

Solipsism on dreary beaches… grown almost ugly

So this is what it comes to: you, the mirror, and the slow-motion shipwreck of your own face disappearing under a forest of hair that screams “I HAVE GIVEN UP” in fourteen different dialects. Robinson Crusoe, sure, if Crusoe had Netflix, bottomless carbs, and a growing suspicion that Friday was never coming because there was no Friday anymore, just an endless Tuesday that tasted like despair.

The beard wasn’t a choice, not really. It was surrender with a capital S, man. It was waking up one morning in month three, or was it seven?, and realizing the razor had become some artifact from a civilization you used to belong to, like ties or punctuality or giving a shit about what your jawline looked like. The beard grew because everything else stopped. Time. Ambition. The illusion that any of this mattered.

The thing nobody tells you about isolation is how it turns you feral and boring simultaneously. You’re Crusoe without the survival skills, the Protestant work ethic, or the eventual rescue. Just you and your increasingly questionable facial hair, contemplating the dreary beach of your own face, that “immutable low horizon” of days bleeding into each other, and thinking: at least the beard is epic, even if everything else has gone to hell.

Jamie Lyons, Santa Cruz, Marcel Proust, Dreary Beaches, grown almost ugly

When she was like this, when no smile filled her eyes or opened up her face, I cannot describe the devastating monotony that stamped her melancholy eyes and sullen features. Her face, grown almost ugly, reminded me then of those dreary beaches where the sea, ebbing far out, wearies one with its faint shimmering, everywhere the same, encircled by an immutable low horizon.
Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

May 02, 2020 | Categories: Absolute Solipsism | Tags: Photographic Portraits, Santa Cruz | Leave A Comment »

Quarantine Blues on Santa Cruz’s Westside…

Here’s the thing about paradise during the apocalypse: it makes me feel like an asshole for even having the thought that I might be suffering.

The Westside’s giving you everything, that relentless California sunshine hammering down like some kind of cosmic joke, the Pacific doing its eternal churn six blocks away, and I’m sitting there in my Craftsman Bungalow with the peeling paint and the landlord who hasn’t fixed anything since 1987 (me BTW) , wondering if this is enlightenment or just another form of solitary confinement with better production values.

Every morning the surfers are out there, these wetsuited prophets bobbing in the lineup like they’ve figured out something the rest of you missed. Maybe they have. Maybe the answer to everything was always just paddling out past the break, waiting for the next set, keeping my distance because that’s what the water demands anyway. Social distancing as spiritual practice. The ocean’s been teaching that lesson forever, respect the space, read the current, don’t be a kook.

La vida loca to the accompaniment of the Stars Wars theme. Steamers Lane, Santa Cruz

The music’s different now. I’m spinning records alone, or streaming some DJ set from Berlin or Brooklyn or wherever, and everyone’s in their own little bunker doing the same thing, this weird synchronized isolation where we’re all listening but nobody’s dancing together. It’s like punk rock without the pit, like rock and roll without the sweaty communion of bodies pressed against the stage. All the transcendence, none of the transmission.

And the weather, Christ, the weather won’t quit. Day after day of this Chamber of Commerce perfection while the world’s falling apart elsewhere. Lindsey, Sharka and I take our socially-distanced walk through the neighborhood, past the bungalows and the overgrown gardens, and everywhere there’s this cognitive dissonance between the golden light and the dread in your gut.

Paradise has always been suspect. Paradise with nowhere to go, nobody to see, nothing but time and beauty and anxiety? That’s a special kind of purgatory the brochures never mentioned.

Mar 26, 2020 | Categories: Individualism | Tags: Music, Santa Cruz, surfing | Leave A Comment »

Euripides The Man Who Knows

At 5:40Am. on March 23rd, 2020 the world’s falling apart, and I’m standing in front of a bronze surfer on Santa Cruz‘s Westside, taping up PPE to enact a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy that nobody’s read in its entirety because, and here’s the beautiful, fucked-up part, it’s lost. Gone. Euripides wrote it, and then history ate it, leaving us with these weird little textual breadcrumbs.

We’re wiping down our groceries with Clorox wipes like they’re contaminated evidence. Toilet paper has become a luxury item, a currency more valuable than cash.

The piece? I’m calling it The Man Who Knows. Which is either pretentious as hell or exactly the kind of cosmic joke we need right now, I haven’t decided yet.

It’s part of this larger project, IOTA, where I’m basically playing archaeological grave robber with the shattered remains of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Taking these fragments, these orphaned sentences that somehow survived when everything around them burned, and jamming them into the contemporary landscape to see what happens. Environmental art meets public art meets whatever this is.

Sometimes you just have to put ancient Greek wisdom on a surfing statue during a pandemic and see if anyone notices.

The Fragment:

The man who knows how to heal well must look to the lifestyles of a city’s inhabitants and to their land when he examines their illnesses.

Mar 23, 2020 | Categories: Industries | Tags: Euripides, Santa Cruz, Site Specific Art | Leave A Comment »

Coronavirus: plague town extra in a dystopian film I never auditioned for

All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences.
Albert Camus, The Plague

So here we are. Day whatever-the-fuck of the new normal that isn’t normal at all. Just you, me, and that statue staring at nothing in particular, same as everyone else behind their windows, wondering if this is real or if we collectively mainlined some bad batch of reality.

Camus knew. The French always know about this shit, about how quickly the carnival shuts down, how fast the lights go out, how we’re all just stumbling around looking for meaning in the dark while pretending we’re not terrified.

Two weeks ago we were invincible. Immortal. Going about our little errands, our coffee runs, our meaningless meetings, our performances at BAMPFA. Then someone flipped the switch and suddenly we’re all plague-town extras in some dystopian film we never auditioned for. The streets empty like someone called last call on civilization itself.

And you can feel it, can’t you? That weird electricity in the air. Part terror, part relief. Like maybe we’d been waiting for permission to stop. To just… stop. Stop performing. Stop pretending. Stop moving. The machine finally seized up and we’re all standing around it like mechanics with no manual, no tools, just our bare fucking hands and this creeping realization that we never really knew how any of this worked in the first place.

The statue doesn’t care. Never did. It’ll stand there long after we’ve either figured this out or haven’t. That’s the thing about monuments, they’re built to outlast the people who built them, to witness their builders turn to dust, to mark time that doesn’t give a shit about any of us.

Pestilences and victims, Camus said. But here’s what he didn’t tell you: in between, there’s just this vast ocean of waiting. Of staring at walls. Of wondering if the people you love are okay. Of rationing your sanity like it’s toilet paper. Of realizing how much of your life was just motion for motion’s sake.
The plague doesn’t care about your plans, your ambitions, your carefully constructed identity. It just is. And we just are. And somewhere in that terrifying simplicity is something almost… pure? No. That’s not the word. Honest. Brutally, nakedly honest.

Mar 15, 2020 | Categories: Absolute Solipsism | Tags: Public Art, Santa Cruz | Leave A Comment »

Sophocles Laocoön at BAMPFA

On the evening of March 9th, 2020, right before the world went to absolute shit, we’re doing something that has no business being as cool as it was. We staged a fragment of Sophocles‘ Laocoön at the Berkeley Art Museum. Berkeley. My first memories are from these streets, this place. Coming back here to do this? That meant something.

This is part of something called IOTA, this beautiful, slightly mad project where we’re resurrecting fragments, literally pieces, scraps of lost Greek tragedies. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Plays that have been gone for two thousand years, and we’re bringing them back, breathing life into the shadows.

Now, about Laocoön. Forget Virgil’s version for a minute: forget “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” forget the Trojan Horse. Sophocles had a darker, more personal story. His Laocoön was Apollo’s priest who fucked up in the most human way possible: he broke his vow of celibacy. Got married. Had kids. And Apollo, being the vengeful prick that gods tend to be, sent serpents that killed both his sons. But here’s the twist: Laocoön lives. He has to stand there and watch his children die because he dared to be human.

The play itself? Gone. What survives are fragments, references from other writers, vase paintings, echoes. But the story, the story had legs. It inspired that famous Hellenistic sculpture, the one that made El Greco and the Renaissance masters lose their minds.

The craftsmanship, the ambition of doing this, taking these broken pieces and making theater out of them, in the city where I first learned to see the world. That’s the kind of thing that reminds you why any of this matters.

The Fragment

And fire shines on the altar in the street
as it sends up a vapor from drops of myrrh,
exotic scents.

Poseidon, you who range over the capes of the Aegean
or in the depths of the gray sea rule over the windswept waters above the lofty cliffs…

And now at the gates stands Aeneas,
the son of the goddess,
carrying on his shoulders his father
with his linen robe
stained with the discharge
caused by the lightning,
and about him
the whole horde of his servants.
And with him follows a crowd,
you cannot imagine how great,
of those who are eager to take part
in this migration of the Phrygians.

When one is no longer weary, labors are delightful.

For one takes no account
of trouble that is in the past.

The Location

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive sits at 2120 Oxford Street in downtown Berkeley. Used to be a UC printing plant, the same one that printed the official UN Charter in 1945. The document that was supposed to prevent World War III, hammered out on industrial presses in right here.

In 2013, the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro came in and redesigned the whole space. These are the architects behind The High Line and the The Shed in New York City and The Broad in Los Angeles. They took this industrial workhorse of a building and turned it into a spectacular contemporary museum and film archive.

Collaborators:

Babatunji was breaking on street corners in Hilo at fifteen. Street corners. In Hawaii. Not some fancy conservatory with mirrors and barres and trust funds. And somehow that kid, moving his body to the beat in all the wrong places by all the right measures, ended up with Alonzo King and created something entirely his own. Ballet meets breaking meets contemporary meets hip hop.

Aleta Hayes started as a performer for Robert Wilson, Robert Wilson, the guy who makes theater that’s like watching glaciers if glaciers wore Armani and had something profound to say. You learn something working for a visionary like that. You learn that rules are just suggestions and that weird is a compass, not a warning. At Stanford she leads the Chocolate Heads Movement Band, interdisciplinary, multi-genre, all university words that usually mean nothing, but in Aleta’s case she’s done the work. Princeton, Tisch, the Sorbonne. She knows the rules well enough to break them properly. That’s the difference between rebellion and revolution.

What these two have in common is this: they understand that movement is language, that the body tells truths the mouth can’t, and that the best art comes from people who have traveled far from where they started and refused to forget the journey.

Sophocles Laocoön at BAMPFA

Mar 10, 2020 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Site Specific Dance, Site Specific Theatre, Sophocles, Theatre Photography | Theatre Documentation | Leave A Comment »

Stapleton: Palo Alto Florist

The real perfectibility of man may be illustrated, as I have mentioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The object of the enterprising florist is, as I conceive, to unite size, symmetry, and beauty of colour. It would surely be presumptuous in the most successful improver to affirm, that he possessed a carnation in which these qualities existed in the greatest possible state of perfection. However beautiful his flower may be, other care, other soil, or other suns, might produce one still more beautiful.
Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population

Stapleton, Palo Alto Florist

Stapleton’s. Except it’s not Stapleton’s anymore, it’s Michaela’s Flower Shop now. The original owners are gone, but the building? The building doesn’t give a fuck. It’s still here, faded pink paint chipping off in the downtown Palo Alto sun, surrounded by high-end specialty boutiques selling $400 candles and artisanal olive oil.

This rectangular relic shouldn’t exist. Not here, not in the middle of Palo Alto’s relentless march toward whatever’s next. But it does.

And I like it. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because it refuses to pretend. Maybe because in a town that’s bulldozed everything that came before in the name of disruption, this weird little time capsule with its peeling paint and vague smell of the Summer of Love is still standing.

Defiant. Anachronistic. Real.

Feb 26, 2020 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Palo Alto | Leave A Comment »

Laocoön Rehearsal at BAMPFA

What we’ve got here is me hauling a fragment of a lost Sophocles tragedy into BAMPFA like I’m smuggling contraband across time itself, rehearsing in the actual space where this thing’s going to live or die. Babatunji’s wrestling with Laocoon, not the marble version sitting in the Ufizzi, the breathing, screaming one, while Aleta’s working all the chorus angles, and I’m standing there trying to give shape to something that’s been dead for 23 centuries in a room that smells like climate control and curatorial ambition.

This is the real deal, the unglamorous grind of making ancient fragments speak in a contemporary art museum, betting everything that somewhere between Blake’s scrawled manifestos on the wall and the polished floors, between Babatunji’s body and Aleta’s voice, we can resurrect what’s been lost. I’m not making theater, I’m conducting an exorcism in reverse, calling the ghost back into the room, rehearsing on site because I know the space itself has to become complicit, has to give up its institutional cool and let something dangerous happen.

Blake knew it: “Without Unceasing Practise nothing can be done Practise is Art / If you leave off you are Lost.”

We’re not leaving off. We’re right there in the kill zone where art either happens or it doesn’t, no second chances, just me and Babatunji and Aleta turning a museum into a temple.

If Morality was Christianity Socrates was the Saviour

יה [Jehovah] & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim
of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact, or History of Ilium
      Art Degraded Imagination Denied War Governed the Nations
Evil
Good & Evil are
Riches & Poverty a Tree of
            Misery
      propagating
Generation & Death

The Gods of Priam are the Cherubim of Moses & Solomon: The Hosts
            of Heaven
Without Unceasing Practise nothing can be done Practise is Art
      If you leave off you are Lost

The Angel of the Divine Presence

מלאך יהוה [Angel of Jehovah]

ΟΦΙουΧος [Serpent-holder]

                  HEBREW ART is
            called SIN by the Deist SCIENCE
All that we See is Vision
from Generated Organs gone as soon as come
      Permanent in The Imagination; Considerd
            as Nothing by the
                  NATURAL MAN

What can be Created
Can be Destroyed
      Adam is only
The Natural Man
& not the Soul
or Imagination

Good

לילית [Lilith]

Satans Wife The Goddess Nature is War & Misery & Heroism a Miser

      Spiritual War
Israel deliverd from Egypt
      is Art deliverd from
            Nature & Imitation

            A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect : the Man
            Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian
You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art

The Eternal Body of Man is The IMAGINATION, that is God himself
The Divine Body } ישע [Yeshua] JESUS we are his
          Members

            It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision)
The True Christian Charity not dependent on Money (the lifes blood of Poor Families)
      that is on Caesar or Empire or Natural Religion
Money, which is The Great Satan or Reason
      the Root of Good & Evil
            In The Accusation of Sin

Prayer is the Study of Art Praise is the Practise of Art
Fasting &c. all relate to Art The outward Ceremony is Antichrist

      Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only
                               Read Matthew C X. 9 & 10v
by pretences to the Two Impossibilities Chastity & Abstinence Gods of the Heathen

He repented that he had made Adam
      (of the Female, the Adamah)
            & it grieved him at his heart

Art can never exist without
      Naked Beauty displayed
The Gods of Greece & Egypt were Mathematical
                  Diagrams
                  See Plato’s
                  Works

            Divine Union
      Deriding
And Denying Immediate
Communion with God
The Spoilers say
Where are his Works
That he did in the Wilderness
            Lo what are these
Whence came they
These are not the Works
Of Egypt nor Babylon
Whose Gods are the Powers
Of this World. Goddess, Nature.
Who first spoil & then destroy
Imaginative Art
For their Glory is
War and Dominion
Empire against Art See Virgils Eneid.
Lib. VI.v 848
For every
Pleasure
Money
Is Useless

      There are States
            in which. all
            Visionary Men
                  are accounted
                  90Mad Men
            such are
      Greece & Rome
      Such is
      Empire
or Tax
See Luke Ch 2.v l

Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists Their Works were destroyd by the
                               Seven Angels of the Seven Churches in Asia Antichrist Science
            The unproductive Man is not a Christian much less the Destroyer

The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art
SCIENCE is the Tree of DEATH
            ART is the Tree
            of LIFE
            GOD
            is JESUS

The Whole Business of Man Is
The Arts & All Things Common
            No Secre
            sy in Art
What we call Antique Gems are the Gems of Aarons Breast Plate
110Christianity is Art & not Money
Money is its Curse
Is not every Vice possible to Man
      described in the Bible openly
All is not Sin that Satan calls so
      115all the Loves & Graces of Eternity

William Blake, c. 1826-7