Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
I went to a dance on Saturday night in honor of, and for the healing of, a woman with cancer. One of the stations at the dance (including, you know, dancing) was a small table set aside for making artwork. After checking the auspices, I created this image of the current Mansion of the Moon — the First, the Horns of Aries. Normally, this Mansion is an image of a black man in a hair shirt throwing a spear at an enemy; and it’s used magically to bring down an enemy. Generally, this Mansion is considered unfavorable for many things, but healing and taking one’s medicine are among the things for which it is favorable. The image is supposedly good for destroying enemies, and it seemed to me that it was a good talisman to destroy cancer.

So, I made this prayer flag of a warrior, loosely based on the Maasai (I forgot the red cloak) of Kenya. The text around him says, “Geniel, great and powerful angel — Strike down cancers of the body, and the soul, and of the nation.” Drawing on cloth with permanent marker was an interesting experience. Once a line was drawn, that was it; I couldn’t go back and correct or fix it.

Accordingly, I worked from the outside in — first I drew in the frame, then the rough shape of the man, then the rough lines of the horizon, then the tree, then the sky and grassland, and finally the shield and then the man himself. It’s certainly not perfect, but I like the idea of creating “art on the fly” like this. It probably took me less than an hour to make, and it serves as a powerful talisman against cancer — as well as being a beautifully quick way to provide someone with a piece of art.

I think this is one of the powerful potentials of the Mansions of the Moon — the notion of carrying around the tools to make twenty-eight images or their variants in quick order, depending on a variety of circumstances, strikes me as a very powerful way to do Art Magic for people. It’s more intense and requires more investment in the work than burning incense or doing candle magic, but it does have the benefit of creating artwork that lasts a little while.

(It’s worth mentioning that I learned about the Mansions from my friend Chris, who is a student of Christopher Warnock, esq. — he of Renaissance Astrology fame. I’m not an astrologer by any means, but I am an artist who likes to work with image and art as magic.)

Hail, holy Gildas, history’s minder,
who saw in his time both decline and fall:
Praise to God alone you chose to render,
for well you knew that all empires call
for service they cannot always return.
You saw the old wall in ruined glory,
and deduced that in time all thrones must burn;
Thank you for saving that sad, old story
when it was still new: now grant us vision
to understand these lowly, passing years
when rulers treat the poor with derision,
and the winter of our discontent nears.
Gildas, guide me to deep understanding
that my deeds add to my nation’s ending.

A prayer for Gildas winds up asking some hard questions about how my wants and needs and desires help contribute to the downfall of my country.

I taught the knot a few times, and then we had a contest.  One kid declared himself the winner, but then his tie promptly fell apart — he’d not tied it properly. Another kid got it fast enough, and won a tie from me — black, with brown and green palm trees and an orange tiger that had belonged to my dad, from Paul Stuart in New York.  All in all, a very successful competition.  I don’t consider this my entry into the glamour entry this week, but it’s a quick look into my classroom.

The world is a lot stranger than we give it credit for, and our own human history is proof of that.

Today’s American history class began with a student pondering, “did they really play organ music while the lions killed and ate the Christians? The Romans, I mean? Didn’t they play organ music or something?”

And the answer is yes.  Yes they did.  They played happy music, the kind of music they play at the circus when the police clown chases the robber clown and all sorts of silly things happen.  They played music like that because it was supposed to be funny — poor, helpless criminals who’d done bad things to society, running away from implacable and teethful wild animals.  All kinds of things could go wrong to the humans, and the crowd laughed, the way we laugh at slapstick Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry cartoons or the Three Stooges, or my personal favorite, the Coyote chasing Road Runner.

And then the Christians seized narrative control. They got authorship rights, and changed the nature of the story.  A bunch of Christian martyrs – a word that simply means ‘witnesses’ — got thrown into the arena, and instead of pleading for their lives, or running away even though there was nowhere to run — they sang hymns and prayed prayers while the lions ate them alive.

The audience stirred in their seats. They began to wake up from the grandeur that was Greece, and the glory that was Rome.  These were people, out there on the sands.  Not just anybody, but people, real live people.  Not slaves, but people who had been Roman citizens, practically flinging their bodies at the lions to be eaten, so they could join their Christ in heaven.

People converted to Christianity in droves.  This was the real deal, after all — their God, their son of God, reasoned the pagan Romans, were completely unafraid of death, which was something that Apollo and Aphrodite and even Zeus had not been able to instill in pagans.  Christianity offered genuine hope to people, in a darksome and loathsome time.  A world without death and fear.  Plus, watching people – real people – get ripped apart by lions to clown music was a bit much.

Gordon’s whisky rant of the last few days may have been on my mind.

I tossed my textbook on the floor.  I called it a lie, based on a collection of true facts.  I said lots of things had been left out — but things always got left out — in fact most everything always gets left out.  I argued more vehemently than I usually do.  I gave examples. Some were raunchy and disgusting to the kids, and also “perfectly normal” for other times and places.  I probably grossed out a half-dozen girls.

It remains true.

History is not real.  It’s only the sanitized and selective narrative of a highly-suspect collection of facts that we’re currently willing to tell ourselves are important.   All kinds of things get left out, ignored, or just displaced.  Sooner or later, we have to remind kids of that — that their entire history class is presented as a single narrative, but it’s not.  Not really.

Update:  I ran into a parent in the hallway who mentioned Big History, and suggested that it might be a better sixth or seventh grade offering than what we have now.  It’s not a bad idea.   But it’s still important to understand that it’s a false narrative masquerading within a costume of true facts, and that this is true of every history out there.  It’s always just a collection of facts that happen to grab our attention and mindset at a given time, as significant.

But they’re playing State of the Union Bingo as they do.

SotU Bingo works like this.

1. Make a 5×5 grid.
2. The center box says “Ladies and Gentlemen,” and it’s a freebie. Regardless of how the President starts his speech, the player always gets credit for that.
3. The night before the speech, have the students fill out the rest of the 24 empty squares with words like “Jobs” or “economy” or “War in Iraq” or whatever they think the president is going to speak about.
4. Words like “a”, “an”, “the”, or other simple words like that are off limits.  Words have to be about policies, like law and order, or scientific advances.  No more than 3 words in any box; but really, it’s best to keep your categories broad.
5. Each word you choose can only appear once.  ”Jobs” is not the same word as “economy” even though they might seem like it.
6. On the night of the speech, players (students) listen to the State of the Union speech, or read it the following morning.  They get to fill in one square for each item on their card that the president spoke about.
7. Anyone who achieves “Bingo” — five across, five down, or a five diagonal — before the end of the speech can stop watching right then and there.

We’ll see how they do tomorrow.

She taught me a new way.  ”You’re not their editor,” she said. “Editors and proofreaders get paid to do that kind of detail work.  Your job is to get them to explain their thinking in detail, to mandate that they tackle hard questions, and that they include facts to support their arguments, whatever those arguments might be.”

Her process that she asked me to try out was to go through each set of assignments with an eye to making 1-2 positive comments, ask a question or two about comment, and demand clarification where it seemed to be necessary.  I’ve been trying this technique on and off for about a year, and something about it clicked tonight.  Today.

My papers are graded.  I’m leaving school today with all my grading done, and no papers in my school bag for the first time in a year.  Maybe for the first time in my teaching career, too, I’m leaving school with a feeling that I’ve graded student papers properly and accurately and suitably, and that I can really dig in to plan the next few days of school without worrying about the student papers piling up.

It’s a good feeling.  Thanks, K!

We live in an age of miracle and wonder, when we’re learning as much about the past as we are about the future, and our sense of the world in which we live is being shaped and re-shaped by all sorts of weirdness, regularly.  Gordon at Rune Soup does an irregular feature where he points at the prior history of our planet as being full of serious oddities.  There is a dominant narrative of history in the Western world, and the evidence has been accumulating for quite some time that the World History course I taught for 15 years (while more or less knowing it was full of holes), needs to be elaborately re-narrated.  Not with crazy stories of ancient aliens or visitors from Sirius, necessarily, but at least to acknowledge that the Americas were probably settled (fully settled) more than 100,000 years ago, and that this is not the first time that people on opposite sides of the planet have been able to communicate and trade with one another.

And now we’re talking about going back to space, and going with the intention to stay.  I think of the miracles and wonders that may lie ahead, and I’m hopeful.  I’m also a little fearful, because voices I respect suggest that this is yet another bubble to inflate that may all yet come crashing down.  Still, Dum spiro… spero.

Yesterday, after I got weary of grading papers, I did some experimentation with Brushes, the digital painting program for my iPhone, and did this miniature of the 24th Mansion of the Moon. The Angel Abrinael watches over this image, which is that of a woman giving suck (or comfort, or milk) to her son.

I’m not thrilled with the image. In fact, I think it’s terrible. The woman is too tired, not at all enthusiastic for this child in her arms. This is supposed to be an image of prosperity and vigor, and instead it comes across as a world-weary and beaten-down image. I hope it’s received in the mindset which it’s supposed to convey, and not in the way I actually created it.

It is of course, a type of the Madonna and child. The hair is similar to the hair of a gal I know who has dreadlocks, and the dress is the blue I associate with the Virgin Mary. There are things about it that I like, but it definitely needs some serious re-working.

It’s also the first time I’ve really used layers in an image. This image has three layers — the lettering, the woman, and the border. All three layers really need more work (and I wish I had the ability to grid or make straight lines in the image, but BRUSHES doesn’t allow for that kind of fine control, unless you have that control in your hands.

I’ve written about this problem before, though — as has Ira Socol and lots of other artists and performers and writers and theoreticians and so on. One’s first efforts rarely live up to the hype of the initial intention. I’m no more capable of painting a Leonardo DaVinci Madonna masterpiece than Leonardo was when he was five years old. I’m still learning my tools, I’m still learning the underlying artistic skills that go into making something beautiful, possible.

So often, when we teachers give a student a bad grade, we’re discouraging them from continuing to produce great artwork or great writing. But this is in fact the opposite of what a master artist would do to a student, isn’t it?

The master artist, or master magician, or master teacher — the master, regardless — says, “here, do not draw her body this way, as you have here… draw it this way. Tug the line of her mouth upward, and narrow the shadows on her neck. Use different pigments and hues to color her face. What is the source of the light that illumines her? Where is it? How does it strike her to create shadow?”

The work continues, regardless of whether or not we become perfect artists or magicians or students or writers or poets or scientists. We do not achieve exactitude — we discover instead that there is more to learn. The first painting of a Mansion of the Moon is an initiation, a starting place for further refinement and further lessons, not an end point.

Welcome (back) to the beginning of the work. AGAIN.

Via Flickr:
The 24th Mansion of the Moon, an image of a woman with her son, was used for the increase and protection of herds of cattle (at least according to the explanatory text). I’ve never done the 24th Mansion before, and I’m not particularly happy with how this version came out. But yesterday I had a tiny baby in my arms who was not even as long as my forearm. I think this woman looks too tired, and not up to the challenges of raising the baby — a little too down, perhaps, for an image representing the increase of prosperity. So I’ll be re-doing this image the next time that I have time to draw when this Mansion comes around.

Mighty Saint Jude, protector of the lost,
guardian of the needy and friendless!
You open doors just when we need them most —
the blessings of your bounties are endless.
Perfect is your help when the time is right,
so perfect, indeed, that all stand in shock,
for without fanfare or showers of light,
you open paths even through solid rock.
Therefore we may call you a quantum saint,
doling out miracles in quiet way:
Though hope be lost, you resolve our complaint,
reshaping the world like potters shape clay.
Saint Jude, I give thanks for your gracious aid
that solved my troubles when I was afraid.

Elizabeth Gilbert, of  Eat Pray Love fame, did that TED Talk I love so much about becoming aware of the concept of the genius, and how knowing or at least believing that the creative spirit was outside herself, actually helped her write better.  I think that praying to the saints — Celtic or otherwise — is kind of like that.  When we put the source of the solution to a problem outside ourselves, while at the same time connecting the solution to the divine, we give the Universe space to imagine a genuinely creative solution to the problem.

The beauty of it is, the solution winds up looking brilliantly ordinary.  And holy at the same time.  Congratulations, Rose.

And one of them, apparently, just got chewed up by a bulldozer a few weeks ago.

In lieu of going places, though, I’ve been spending a lot of time at my school and at home working on manifesting the Design program at my school.  With the help of a colleague, I posted my grimoire — er, the Design Manifesto — on an empty bulletin board, so that students and other passers-by would have a sense of what Design Thinking means, and how to bring it into their own lives.

The Romans had a word in Latin, which is ubi.  It usually gets translated “where” but it also refers to “when.” Accordingly, I’ve been playing with my conceptions of sacred time in connection with this cosmogram concept — places in our worldview that resonate as sacred — and doing my best to play with sacred time in 2012.   Accordingly I’ve been setting aside some time more formally to pray, and to do the work of grading student papers, and using time in my studio at home to work and make art.  I’ve also been expanding my daily practice into the evenings, and doing some work calling on higher powers, though I won’t be saying much about that here.

I still want to do the exercise of visiting some sacred places, though.  I’ve not had much luck with the local café, although I view it as a sacred place, because I’m there every day.  I get all sorts of signs and signals from it, but little that’s really unusual.  Some places I need to go back to, soon:

• The waterfall beyond the railroad tracks near where my friends T & F used to live;
• The garden overlooking the ocean where I learned to sail;
• The beach where I first drew a labyrinth
• The gallery of the Hudson River School paintings in America’s Oldest Museum;
• The chapel of my old school — the one I went to, not the one I taught at;
• The church across the street from the school where I taught for 15 years;

And then, once the weather gets better,

• The mountain
• The river
• The streets where I live
• The stone circle up the hill…
• The fire.
• The blueberry patch

There are other places, of course. We all have them — places where the course of our lives alters, and which we regard as sacred ever after.  I’ll have to make it a priority this year to go on a long tour around to a good many of them, and see them.