Tree of Life Geometry, Revisited

I’m not entirely sure this will work. But here goes.  Thanks to Gordon’s recommendation to try out VINE, I was able to produce a trio of short videos today, including this one on the traditional geometry of the Tree of Life.  It’s fast, because Vine only allows six-second videos.  But it’s kinda cool, and if you watch it a few times, you can probably figure out how the geometry of the Tree fits together.  Enjoy!

Vine: Video of the Tree of Life

Update: Apparently you have to go to Vine’s website to view it, because I can’t embed it on a WordPress site.  Alas.  Enjoy anyway.

Compartments, measurement, geometry

My evolving druidry kit
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Over the last few days, while working on other things, I’ve been fussing and sawing and sanding and gluing small bits of wood into place to make this little box.

I’m a member of a couple of druidic organizations, namely AODAand DOGD, and I’ve noted that the more of these kinds of ritual groups and ritual paths that I practice, the more that my house and life gets cluttered up with stuff… stuff that’s difficult to pack, difficult to put away, difficult to sort or keep separate, and difficult, frankly, to explain in short order.

Plus, there’s the Hermetic Kavad, which is going to take more carpentry skills than I currently have, to finish in any appreciable way that people are going to find useful or interesting. So there’s the need to practice those skills, and this is a good way to do it.

I need more practice. Clearly.

Part of it is that carpentry is not pure geometry, nor pure measurement. The thickness of the wood worked matters; so does its flexibility and strength. The rules for assembling pieces are not hard and fast – there are knots in the wood, there’s the fact that a piece of wood which has straight sides is not perfectly straight, and there’s the challenge that cutting a piece of wood that looks flat may in fact warp it — particularly if it’s these tiny thin pieces that make up the internal walls of this box.

Also, this was about making sure that certain objects fit, and fit snugly, inside the box, without a lot of wiggle room (Some of them are fragile, after all). It’s not pure geometry by any means. Actually, most of it was done with a straight-edge, with only inches marked and not to any degree of accuracy (no quarter or half inches).

And you know what? It turned out ok. Not perfect by any means. But not bad. Not beautiful. But functional. Acceptable. A suitable learning experience.

A good beginning.

If you’re further interested in the contents of the kit, click on the picture, and visit the Flickr page… there’s about 20 notes about the contents of the box, but you have to be on Flickr to read/see them.

Via Flickr:
(Roll over the image to read the notes.. but on Flickr, not here.)

I had it in mind to build a small box for the tools and equipment of druidic practice in the DOGD. I got the box from Michael’s Arts & Crafts, and I’m in the process of laying out a Celtic knot-work pattern on the outside, along with spaces for the four animals of the directions (hawk, stag, salmon, bear), the sixteen geomantic characters, and the various other sigils of this society.

One of the big problems was the red cross and the green ring. The standard 5″ diameter one doesn’t fit in the box. I’ve now tried making a 3×3″ ring and cross, but the scale of the two parts seems off. Time to remember my proportional rules, and try again.

Inside the box are compartments for incense and candles, a small egg cup ‘chalice’, a crystal ball, three candlesticks, two cauldrons, a wand, and (tucked out of sight) four geomantic “Druid wands” for casting geomancy charts. There are also two bottles which will eventually hold Spagyric preparations, and space for several more. Although I don’t think this box will ever be able to hold all 17 spagyrics that the order has on offer… by then it will probably be time for a new box…

John Keats, Cultural Appropriation, and Drawing

Chapman’s Homer: a poster
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
The eighth grade was writing poems and creating illuminations or illustrations of them, after having read a number of poems by Rumi in a book called The Illuminated Rumi. The idea was that by asking them to think about the visual images in the Rumi poems, and comparing them to the illustrations, they would see how important visual imagery is to the development of poetic language.

Then, of course, they wrote and illuminated their own poems. It was a great little design thinking project — how does a set of word provoke a set of images? How does a set of images provoke a set of words? How can words and images together provoke new feelings?

I didn’t wish to make a poster for one of my own poems, but I figured I’d illustrate one of the poems that I have memorized, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” by John Keats who died in 1827. My deal with the English teacher in question was that I would leave in the pencil guidelines and planning marks, so that students could see my design process to some degree, and have a sense of my construction process. As I described it to her and to her class, the poem is about a book, so the illustration includes a book. On the pages of the book itself are two illustrations which are themselves illustrating the second half of poem. Both of the images are about the astonishment and amazement of discovery of unexpected sights in the natural world, so someone — the current reader, perhaps? — has illustrated the margins of the book with examples of local plants and a dragonfly. The cycle of discovery continues and grows richer and deeper. Thus, Keats’s words inspire SEVERAL layers of discovery: the possibility of delving into the writings of an ancient Greek poet; the willingness to investigate history (the “Cortez” image) and astronomy (“Watcher of the skies”); and finally the natural world and the skill of drawing (the plants in the margin notes of the book, and the poster itself).

I recently said something dumb on Balthasar’s blog which I shouldn’t have said, and I apologize here, publicly… For as I made this poster, I was uncomfortably aware of the degree to which this poem — which I’ve always liked — can be read in another way as part and parcel of a bit of cultural appropriation. Keats’s poem comments on an English translation of an ancient Greek epic, and in the process of describing that work… Keats claims both Homer, and several islands dedicated to Apollo, for the English language and the English-speaking peoples. The astronomer is in one sense gazing upon the sky in wonder, but in another he’s laying claim to the heavens. And Cortez — well. It was actually Balboa who stood at Darien in Panama, and gazed at the Pacific — but the cultural -appropriation (and -destruction) of the power- and wealth-hungry captain of the Aztec conquest should be self-evident.

But I’m not sure I would have read this poem that way without drawing it out first. I needed the opportunity to create the poster before I would have seen the cultural complexities the poem raises. And in good design fashion — the solution to one problem also raises several new problems on its own. As my friend Josh says, “There’s no better or faster way to generate problems than to create a solution.”

We discover things about the world through the thought processes we use to investigate it, and any means that we use to do that — writing, or reading, or drawing, or visualizing, or ritualizing, or glamorizing — will help us make new and deeper discoveries. It’s remarkable the things that we uncover as we go through these processes. As the poet said, “pull a thread, and find the whole world attached to it.”

Review: The Arte of Glamour

Deborah
Castellano’s first book on magic is called The
Arte of Glamour. The foreword is by Gordon
White, of the blog Rune Soup.
Glamour is a complex concept in magic. Originally, the word meant
or means something like “enchantment or magic,” and then gradually
morphed toward “outward seeming”, and then morphed still further
towards its current meaning, along the lines of “the quality of
being beautiful, exciting and attractive, which excites attention
and notice,” as in a way for the external appearance of something
to fail to match its internal reality. One casts a glamour spell,
in other words, to delude the observers into believing things about
yourself or another that simply are not true. The Fairy Godmother
in Cinderella, for example, casts a glamour
over her charge, to make a prince fall in love with a woman who
isn’t quite real. Except. Except, of course,
that the glamour cast is so effective, because it raises
Cinderella’s own self-worth, and breaks the chains that bind her
mind.  Her self-worth is battered by ugly stepsisters — whose
glamour serves to clothe the outward form of beauty, but does not
cover over or hide inner self-worth; and yet the glamour makes the
outward appearance of Cinderella match the inner beauty. It makes
her confident enough to dance with princes, to be the belle of the
ball, and to leave on her own terms — not as concubine to a spoiled
prince, but as suitable quarry for the royal hunt for a queen —
embodying both the power of the throne and the future bearer of
royal heirs.  This is not to suggest that Cinderella’s sole
power is as a baby-making machine, of course — only that this
option is open to her as to no one else at the royal ball…
because her outward appearance and her inner character have been
brought into alignment.  Glamour, in other words, is a magic
not exclusively to change outward appearances, although it can be
used that way.  Even more so, though, it is a magic to bring
the inner character and the outward appearance into alignment.
 As the Steve Martin character says to Rick Moranis
in My Blue
Heaven, “Sometimes
you gotta change from the outside in!”  The Fairy Godmother’s
glamourie on Cinderella is one such bit of
serious spellcraft — change the outward appearance so the inner
beauty shines through; change the outward accessories so that the
inner character is revealed; change the mode of travel so that the
capacity for regal mercy is apparent to all. So, to say that
glamour magic is only about fixing up one’s outward appearance is
to cast aspersions on the whole art.  And this glamour is not
about transforming pumpkins into coaches, or mice into coachmen, or
rags into sumptuous gowns, but about transforming one’s magic with
sumptuousness and sensuality — not, strictly speaking, sexuality,
but rather the play and interplay of senses and sensory experience
upon one’s daily life.  And THAT
is what Deb is about doing — to your magic, to your
life, to your friends (and, in my case to my students), and to your
world. Accordingly, there is only one pumpkin in Deb’s book.
 And for her, the spell here is a vehicle for transforming
one’s arrival at a party from awkward guest to mistress of the
seasonally-appropriate sensory-overload experience.  No mice,
but plenty of ideas about how to transform rags to riches on a
budget. For there is a Cinderella story threaded through what she
writes in this book.  In Cinderella’s time, to be the
fireplace-ash collector was to be lowest among the low; today, we
don’t think much of people whose job it is to handle baby fluids
like puke and burp on a regular basis.  And yet, Deb shows us
how she’s been able to transform such complicated and demanding
labor through a ritual and spiritual practice that raises her
quality of life, that makes her queen of her own
dominion, and look good doing it.
That requires vision.  It requires even greater vision — and
more than that, a degree or three of self-discipline — to bring
that vision to fruition in a way that others can read it and learn
from it and experience it themselves. As I read through
The Arte of
Glamour the first time, I thought of
six or eight people I knew whose magical practice would be
strengthened by reading it. Then, as I finished it, I thought,
“Actually, all those people already practice their magic
this way.  I just never quite noticed before, that this is how
they work…” It was as if Deb helped me take the
blinders off, and helped me see that magic didn’t have to be one
way alone, all candles and incense and stentorian commands — it was
also cocktails in a wood-paneled bar with a live jazz quartet, it
was learning to tie a new knot in a beautiful silk tie, it was
helping to paint a friend’s house on a weeknight alternating with
poetry and food and conversation
because COLOR! and SENSUALITY! and POETRY!
and FOOD! matter.  They
matter a lot. One of Deb’s big concepts is La Dolce
Vita — The Sweet Life.  The Creamy Life, almost.
 A lot of the Puritan values we grow up with in New England
are ritualistically opposed to anything resembling the sweet life.
 Instead, we get a long litany of work hard, be
content with your lot in life, if things are rotten you must have
deserved it, God wants you to be miserable here so you can have a
happy life there, you were destined for what you get.
 If Deb serves to remind me of anything today, it’s that
there’s huge value in recognizing that the 4o-hour work-week is a
magical construct which serves almost everyone else except you, the
one who has to live in it. Yet the quality of our lives matters. It
doesn’t matter if we’re peasants in 14th century France or
modern-day wage slaves — the girl who buys a tortoiseshell comb
from a wandering pedlar’s pack is after as much glamour  as I
am when I buy a new purple and dark blue tie for Thursdays.
 We need a bit of richness in our lives, and we need a bit of
sensuality and color and… frankly… splendour.  We don’t
have to live beyond our means to achieve this kind of magic; we DO
have to find ways to look for it, to manage it, and to create it
where it is lacking. And Deb gives you permission to fail at this.
 Not every spell will work.  Not every glamourous outfit
will survive contact with the party (grease drippings and paint on
a new pair of pants, alas!) Not every delicious potluck party will
go according to plan.  You won’t like every cocktail, and the
jazz quartet is playing too loud.  There are days when you
will be a hot wreck of emotion because something you planned
meticulously and deliciously to be a feast for the senses is in
fact a bunch of rapidly-cooling food at a party that no one showed
up for. But Cinderella would have gone to the ball anyway. Even if
her fairy godmother hadn’t shown up, to cast a spell and throw a
glamour over everything she glanced at, Cinderella made her own
plans. She had a dress picked out from the Salvation Army, and
modified to suit her needs.  She wouldn’t have been the
bellest belle at the ball, but she would have gone.  Her shoes
were shined, and she had a tip for the bartender ready in her Vera
Bradley purse (that matched the fabric of her belt in color). Deb’s
best gifts are these, though she hardly calls them that: pluck,
courage, risk-taking, risk-management, adventurism. What my
mother’s mother used to call sportiness.  ”Go on, girl.
 Go out. Be a sport.  Who knows? Maybe your date tonight
has a tall friend.”  There are always risks to take in calling
something magic when it doesn’t look especially like “woo”, and
even in calling it magic at all. But Deb,
and Deb’s book, says, “Go on, be a sport.  The Ladies are
waiting. The bartender tonight makes a great cosmo, and the
saxophonist is awesome.  This is your life.  Live a
little. Find your own sweet life.” A Note for
Non-Magical Teachers I don’t know how much or how
many of my readership left have been sticking with me since 2009,
and the days when I was an up-and-coming teacher-blogger (I’ve left
a lot of that behind in the last few years, haven’t I? Thanks for
sticking around).  You may be wondering about the relevance of
a book about magic to your classroom, where there’s no magic unless
someone does a Harry Potter book report.
 Here’s my thoughts on a takeaway on that. One of the big
thoughts I’ve exported from magic to my own classroom is the
concept of Darshan: we benefit in
our daily lives by being in the presence of a great teacher.
 Being in their physical presence helps us absorb their habits
and modes of thought.  And the research on teachers bears this
out — students in great classrooms, in the company of great
teachers, make amazing progress in a relatively short time.
 (We’ll leave aside the other research that shows that
teachers can have an awesome year one year, and help their kids
make great progress; and be absolutely appalling the next year — as
my friend Sou says, “sometimes the chemistry can be amazing, but
the timing is wrong, and it just can’t work out”).  But I
think that we, as teachers, have to believe that a kid in our
classroom takes away from us some of our ideas about success, and
dress, and habits of life.  If we bring a brown-bag lunch to
school with a bag of potato chips and a sloppily made sandwich,
that conveys one message; a bento box with quality food conveys
another.  And parents and school districts expect us, in part,
to convey quality messages to our students even through our
non-verbal cues. So, in part, Deb’s book is about learning to ramp
up the quality of one’s non-verbal cues, both to yourself and to
those around you.  I don’t think you have to do any of the
altar work or the magical spells work she suggests in order to
radically improve the quality of
the Darshan energy you put out; you
don’t have to do “woo” magic to benefit from the kind of mind-set
rearrangement she suggests here.
 And doing the lesser levels of
work she suggests will help you do better at speaking to your own
students about the non-verbal cues they send to themselves and to
each other through what they wear, how they dress, and how they
choose to live.  If you find yourself wondering how you’re
going to make ends meet, or wonder what’s becoming of the culture
in which we live, then I think Deb’s book has some important things
to teach us, as teachers — she’s saying (as much through what she
doesn’t say as what she does) that as the educators of today’s
youth, we have a responsibility to teach kids that their outer
messages can reflect or even change inner character — as much as
inner character is broadcast through our outward glamourie.
 The average teachers’ guide doesn’t ask us to think about
that or teach about that, and yet we have to teach “that stuff” on
a fairly regular basis, through dress codes and our own outward
presentation to our students. Deb is saying, it’s important for
folks individually to be thinking about this stuff for ourselves.
 I’d add to that, it’s important for us as teachers, that we
try to be thinking about the effects of our non-verbal cues upon
the children we teach.  For they will inherit the earth, and
our non-verbal messages wind up becoming part of their long-range
symphony of the senses.  We should be conscious about how and
what messages we broadcast, and Deb’s book is a great way to begin
thinking about the issues anew. Rating:
★★★★★, for practical advice and for a sense of an overall theory of
glamour workings.

Thumbnailing

At right is a photo of a symbol set for thumb nailing — rough
outlines of Titles, Map, Subheadings, borders, bullet lists, text blocks, portrait and landscape images, graphs and symbols and piecharts, and so on.  All the rough parts of a student’s visual presentation design in rough, easy to draw symbolism.

And below, just few samples of more than a dozen designs for posters that I produced (along with another sixty or so that my students produced) in the space of about fifteen minutes, using basic thumb-nailing skills.

I showed students these symbols, and then set a timer.  As the timer wound past every two minute mark, I asked students to switch from portrait to landscape and then back again. Each student created about a dozen thumbnail sketches of visual presentations that they might do in the future.

The Challenge of Preliminary Work

One of the things that’s really hard for students is to get past the monkey-mind fear-of-failure.  There is so much concern about doing a specific assignment “right” that they can’t often let go of themselves enough to do a lot of interesting preliminary work.  So we have to model or imagine that work for them and create opportunities for them to do that work despite themselves.  How do we get students to do enough preliminary work that they can imagine more possibilities for themselves than just their “first go” at a problem that we the teachers set for them?

We have to create opportunities for them to brainstorm multiple pathways forward.

Which is what I did on Friday.  I taught kids to brainstorm using thumbnail drawings, and to generate multiple possibilities in four minutes or less.

It’s a great way forward. Require them to produce quantities of work, without giving them too much time to think about the quality of any one piece.  It’s a radically different kind of training, of course.  Rather than asking for one piece of work, I asked them for an indefinite number of pieces of work.  And the result is that they (and I) generated about a dozen possibilities each for their (and my) work moving forward.

In essence, I taught them to brainstorm without telling them they were brainstorming.  I gave it a name that even took away the fear of brainstorming.  But by generating all these thumbnail drawings, I gave them the possibility of solving problems in multiple ways.

We’ll see if it last through vacation.

Mansion 28: belly of the fish

Mansion 28: belly of the fish
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Today, while the Moon was at the Midheaven and in the 28th Mansion, I completed the write-up and the image-making of the “Belly of the Fish,” and in the process learned a bunch of things about copying art, and making art.

First things first. This image is a rough parallel of the work of Nigel Jackson, as seen in the book Mansions of the Moon by Christopher Warnock, esq.. It’s hardly an exact copy — Nigel has much more skillful line and dot work than I have, and he presumably had a much larger canvas on which to work, which I don’t have. I did borrow the rough outline of his work — dhow in the middle, rocks on either side, fish below the boat, stars above. And some of my figures were done with reference to his. I don’t think I could have drawn the smaller fish around my big fish without reference to his image, for example.

But one of the things I’ve said before about this work, of course, is that doing it once has a tendency to connect you artistically and energetically to the picture and to the forces it represents. I feel fairly confident that I’ll be drawing this one again sometime, and that I’ll have an increased sensitivity to the image, and that, gradually, I’ll be able to compose the image on my own. It’s really the nature of the path of this kind of magical/artistic work — first you copy the masters, then you improve the quality of your Seeing, and then you improve the quality of your Working. The Copying is a preliminary to the Seeing, the Seeing is a preliminary to the Working, and all three are preliminary to the Mastery of the Work. One cannot produce the masterpiece before one has served the apprenticeship.

Via Flickr:
Completed the 28th mansion of the moon today. This marks sixteen completed images, which means I have twelve to go, to complete all of them.

Amnixiel is the angel of the 28th mansion. He’s for completion, for harvests, for increase of merchandise, for peace between spouses, for besieging cities, to travel safely by road (but to bring evil to sailors), or to hide or destroy treasure.

I took the dhow and some of the design for the stars from Nigel Jackson’s version of the image, and the arrangement of the rocks, and the rough shape of the fish. However, I used more of my own work in the process of laying out the water around the fish.

Pop-Up Book: Five Elements

I’ve been working on this pop-up book for a while, and I used Vine (thanks for the recommendation, Gordon!) to make a miniature video of the images in the book. The interface seems a little clunky for Vine; frankly, though, the interface of a pop-up book is pretty clunky, too.

Anyway, here’s the still images from Flickr:

 

Are there things wrong with these books? Sure.  I think that I would re-design them next time so that the background panel is the same color as the Element itself; and I would do a better job of building the landscape suggested by each of the four Elements: the dawn meadow, the summer greenwood, the beach at autumn, the winter forest.  I’d also try to do a better job of suggesting the other symbols related to each element, like the signs of the Zodiac, and such.  But hey, it’s a pop-up book, and my first such book completed, and I’m pretty proud of it.  Sure, you can’t exactly read it to your kid over an iPhone or a Kindle, but it’s not bad.

Along these same lines, I ran a class today in how to use the 3D printer at school, and I taught seven kids the drawing schematic suggested by Dave Gray (which I call the Semigram).  If you haven’t taught yourself this basic set of drawing instructions, and taught at least one other person how to use it, YOU ARE MISSING OUT.  None of what you see in the photographs attached to this blog post would have been possible without that visual training, however brief, however simplistic.  I cannot stress enough how important it is to have at least some basic drawing skills built into a Design Thinking plan at school, and you cannot get past this particular hump if you keep telling yourself, “Oh, I’ll never be able to draw.”  This book was drawn with scissors and glue, as much as with pen; but it took the knowledge of the drawing aptitudes to be able to construct the book.  It involves a way of seeing the world.

Oh, yeah.  And magic. Without magic, and some intentional investigation of the Mysteries of the Western Tradition (like alchemy, and magic, and suchlike) this book wouldn’t have been possible, either.

 

Creativity vs. Imagination: Moon Mansion Diptychs

Moon Mansion Diptychs
Originally uploaded by anselm23

The difference between creativity and imagination has been much on my mind lately.

Imagination appears as the ability to become ‘dreamy’, for lack of a better word, and visualize or ‘see’ things within the mental realm. It’s the capacity to form new ideas, or bring forth ideas based on things not presently or currently seen. Copying someone else’s vision — as I effectively did in these two drawings, largely based on the work of artist Nigel Jackson, from the book by Chris Warnock on the Mansions— is one thing.

But creativity is not really the same thing. I mean, we might think of them as the same thing, but they’re two different capacities. This, to me, is the power to call forth something from the imagination, and make it real or sensible or visible to someone else. I know plenty of imaginative kids, for example, but I know a lot of imaginative kids who aren’t very creative — they’re sort of lost in a fantasy realm where they are capable of dreaming themselves the heads of corporations or the most amazing rock guitarists. But those same kids don’t actually do the work that gets them moving forward toward that dream.

Likewise, I know plenty of creative kids who aren’t very imaginative. They do all sorts of little drawings, and they’re very productive — these kids wouldn’t dream of not doing their homework, because they’re actually eager to ‘create’ something, to bring something into being. But they’re not very good about bringing forth something new or unique to themselves.

There’s of course a third category, which is people who are both imaginative and creative. I wish that I fit consistently into this category, although most of the time I think I’m only one or the other; it takes a lot of time and effort to be both, and some days it’s just very hard to get anywhere near that combination of powers. It requires an incredible amount of practice to build up to the point where one can be both productive, and capable of summoning forth a vision of “things not seen” so that others can also participate in that vision.

So imagination is largely a mental skill, but creativity is largely the skill of taking mental-to-material. Where one is largely a matter of dream or day-dream, the other is a matter of tool use — whether memory or imagination or skill, or the use of actual physical tools, be they knives or drills or scissors or glue or word processors or graphics software programs or t-squares…

And I’m not at all sure that anyone would agree with these definitions, which only makes the problem harder. But I think in general that our culture makes much of imagination, without making an equal fuss over creativity. And yet, without creativity as I’ve defined it here, all the imagination in the world won’t actually get anything done.

Via Flickr:
I’ve noted in the past that paper doesn’t seem to hold a magical charge for very long…. and yet it turns out that you can make quite an interesting power simply by folding the paper in half. A friend of mine is having difficulty with her health, so this evening I made a pair of the Mansions of the Moon for her — Egibiel to drive away the bugs that make her ill, and Amutiel to bring her health. These two mansions are not normally used for matters related to health, particularly not lung-health (which is her particular issue), but she wanted something immediate. This, plus some good cold-care tea, seemed to be a good combination.

It’s worth saying that a Moon Mansion, or any sort of tool like this, is not a useful substitute for actual health care. This only serves the purpose of bringing spiritual forces to bear on a physical problem; but the realms of being are discrete and not continuous. Simply having a pair of angels watching out for your health in no way obviates the need for genuine health care.

Pop-Up Palace of Memory: Alhambra

Alhambra
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Gordon’s post about Al-Andalus from several months ago (update: ok, 2+ years ago!) has been on my mind (he has a great post today about 24 phone apps that can change the way you live and work, and I’ve already downloaded several of them).

Anyway, about Al-Andalus, Gordon writes:

Of course, it’s only an advantage on a group level but that is one of evolution’s many, many grey areas… Grey areas that Darwin himself freely admitted were there.

How does this relate to western magical history?

Because magic is like the gay giraffe. Whenever it has shown up -and it shows up everywhere- historians have brushed it aside. “That’s not a magic book. It’s an astronomy book.” And in the ninth century the difference was what, exactly? (By the way, pause to enjoy the mental image of a historian literally brushing aside a giraffe wearing lipstick and eyeliner.)

Whenever you see an historian referring to an ancient text as medical, mathematical or scientific you need to train your nose to smell out the conjure. Because, chances are, it’s right there under the surface.

So why is this old entry from two+ years ago on someone else’s blog tugging at my mind today? Well, it begins with a plan for a book. A colleague of mine is annoyed with how a specific project in her class has been going for a while, and I had the idea that I could assist her by combining it with the technology from all these pop-up books I’ve been buying about how to make pop-up books.

Pop-up books are an interesting technology. They’re easily made of simple paper, and yet with a combination of geometry and glue, you can make a 2D-ish surface become 3D-ish. The bends in the page become walls and roofs, and when combined with drawing and collage they can become tremendous vehicles for storytelling and imagination. (By names and images are all powers awakened and reawakened).

So of course, I had to provide “proof of concept”. And so I made this little layout as an exercise in creating a Spanish abcedarium, “A est por al-Andalus, y La Alhambra.” My Spanish is terrible, but you get the idea: her students would learn to build pop-up books by building fourteen pages akin to this one — each of which would teach a different pop-up structure, and one of the provinces or regions of España. Interesting proof of concept, no? Teach kids some engineering skills related to hinges, tabs, and folds; some mathematics and geometry; some paper-folding and drawing techniques; and a little bit of a language and culture that may be critical to their long-term survival…

Sounds familiar, no? Sounds an awful lot like grimoires, no? Or maybe more like a particular grimoire, one from al-Andalus at the height of that place’s power. No, we’re not going to brew goat piss and dog’s blood and mercury into an incense that will give eternal life; but maybe we combine art and mechanics and basic materials with a decidedly-odd symbol-system in order to teach kids things they didn’t know they needed to know — things about color and graphic design, about story and engineering, about mathematics and geometry and relationships and right angles, and wars in other times and places, and who are you, really? Are you the sort of person who gets stuff done? Or are you the sort of person who hangs back and lets others do all the work?

A Digression to Magic
I read somewhere that Israel Regardie, the mid-20th century magician, heard that someone was building the Enochian tablets as three-dimensional objects, with physical pyramids on the tablets, carved and painted and symbolified in a way that gave the powers of the tablets. He was horrified, and wondered why anyone would give the Enochian powers that much room — he said they were difficult enough to deal with as two-dimensional beings, much less having actual space in which to move.

My friend Scott says, “A picture is worth a thousand words; but a part is worth a thousand pictures.” And it turns out that a pop-up card can be sigilized just as easily as your notebook. In fact, it’s more so. It’s like squeezing your word-set into a machine: a machine that works every time you pop open the hinge. And so a how-to-build pop-up books pop-up book is potentially a very powerful grimoire indeed, because it will give you techniques for making your sigils three dimensional.

My life has gone into overdrive the last two weeks. The two weeks I’ve spent dabbling with pop-up cards.

Returning to Educational Theory
Gordon says, and I re-quote:

Whenever you see an historian referring to an ancient text as medical, mathematical or scientific you need to train your nose to smell out the conjure. Because, chances are, it’s right there under the surface.

Which means that most of the books in the Design Lab are actually magic books. They’re books about how to make mathematics do your bidding; they’re about how to make healing salves for your hands, and how to learn the stars. They’re about how to draw, and how to learn to memorize, and how to learn to relearn, and how to build machines that talk and fly, and how to cast metal, and how to build mechanisms that can move the world.

I’ve stocked a library for children (and adults) with books that belong in the Restricted Section at Hogwarts. And if your school has a design lab, or a design library, or even a how-to section in the regular library, so have you. You have a library shelf filled with grimoires, that will summon powerful spirits to aid and assist your students.

The Challenge…
Of course, the challenge is that these books must be used. You can’t simply wave students at a group of books on the shelf, and say, “follow the directions in those books to the letter.” It doesn’t work that way.

No, the challenge is that you, the teacher, have to go through the grimoires laboriously, and demonstrate that you are learning the skill. You are learning how to learn. You are building and managing the process that you are hoping to teach them. You are showing students, in front of them, that the skill with knife and glue stick and cutting board and rotary cutter and T-square, can be learned and practiced and improved upon.

… And the Palace
And yet. And yet, to have the grimoire is not enough. The medieval daemon-summoning books had a context, and so do we (whether as wizards like Gary Stager or as teachers like Jason Miller. Or did I mix those up?). One has to go into the palace, too. The Palace of Memory.

None of what I’ve told you about pop-up books is useful if you haven’t got something to say or show. One of my kids learned the basic technique shown in this Alhambra card in two minutes. It’s easy: make two parallel cuts equal in length to each other, perpendicular to the fold line of the page; and then score and fold the “hinges” at the outer edges of the cuts. Congratulations, you now know the basics of the box cut. Cut the upper line slightly longer than the lower, and pinch the triangle: you’ll get a triangle or a roofline.

But. But — currently — he doesn’t have the imaginative chops to take the basic box-cut and turn it into something else.  I make the basic box cut, and the triangle cut, and a world of options opens before me: this can be a house… oh, if I cut the paper right, this can be an arcade of a monastery, or a palace… oh, it can be in Spain… oh it can be the Alhambra, in Andalusia… which makes me think of that entry by Gordon… And as various potentials emerge, the potential for the reënchantment of the world comes along with it.  There’s a whole collection of stories that can be inspired by, and built by, the box-cut… but you must know the stories to tell them this way.

So, if you haven’t been teaching students how to retain information and store it in memory, both visually (by image) and by geography (by place), they’ll only have one piece of the necessary strategy for learning this engineering… this magic. Memory allows kids to have the ingrained symbolic context to read this as the red stone of the Alhambra and the fancy Moorish arches of the Court of Lions, no matter how poorly my penknife executed the work. The green paper becomes the paradis, the walled garden; the blue paper becomes the sky, with the surrounding lands of Al-Andalus forever hidden from the servants within the walls; the white, the mystery; and the square pavilion at the center, the place where the page folds, is the canopied space where imagination runs riot.

WIth the right Palace of Memory, you can say to students, “build me a pop-up book that shows the first seven Presidents of the United States” or “the ten Native American tribes you know” or “Seven stories from the adventures of Lewis and Clark.” You have fewer options if all they know is Pokemon and the prepositions.

Reclaiming Ourselves
Politicians, parents, students, colleagues, and “reformers” expect us teachers to be wizards – capable of protecting students from difficult truths, attacks on their physical bodies, and assaults on their mental capacities.

It sounds like we need to be wizards. So… let’s be wizards.

Via Flickr:
One of my colleagues teaches a foreign language unit on the regions or provinces of Spain. The kids make posters for the various regions. I thought, what if they made pop-up books instead? This is Andalucia, inspired by the Alhambra.

Rough draft

Rough draft
Originally uploaded by anselm23

Via Flickr:
Guess what our spring musical is going to be??

I’m thinking that this will be a good roughed-out version of our cover. But I want to experiment more — I don’t like how Sandy’s nose vanishes into Daddy Warbucks’s tuxedo, or how Sandy and Annie’s lack of color plays against the background. Either I need to develop some buildings (a la “NYC” or the Warbucks mansion in the background) or I need to do something to make Annie and Sandy stand out from the background somehow. More contrast, in other words. Since I can’t use color (this is for the program, as well as for the t-shirts for the cast), I’m going to have to get quite creative. Somehow I have to put the logo of our drama club in there, too, along with the dates for the event. Lots of things to change….

Two Takeaways
The designer and the visual artist in me is really pleased. After four years of practice, I can produce a passable first-draft copy of an iconic picture in American art and theater and “literature”, and the three characters are recognizable. The lettering is off, but lettering is my weakest area — and this is a first draft, in any case. There’s one little bugaboo in the upper part of Daddy Warbucks’ eye that makes me think he’s pretending to be innocent while rolling his eyes at the ceiling, which sends shivers down my spine… because I’ve read Gordon’s take on the Jimmy Savile and Jersey scandal…. and of course, Annie:The Musical! is not that story.

At the same time, though, the teacher in me is really kind of displeased. This is a bit of graphic design at school that kids should be doing. However, judging from some of the recent artwork on the covers of our programs, it’s work that either kids don’t want to do, or don’t want to do well. If a kid doesn’t want to do it, that’s one thing. If a kid doesn’t know how to do it, that’s another. Both are challenges to the program I’m supposed to be running — and it means that I have to find a way to build our graphic-design program post-haste, or create an after-school studio in graphic design, or something. But schools should be able to produce this stuff in-house, based on the skillset that teachers inculcate into students. The fact that I don’t know of any students in our little school who can do this is mildly upsetting to me. The fact that ‘m the one who’s supposed to train them to do this is alarming? Why me?

Apparently, because I can do it myself.