Cross-Post: The Post-Rock Way – Resolve | Majesty | Standing Strong

08 Dec 2021 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Music Tags: , ,

This is a post that I just posted on my other blog about philosophy/spirituality and post-rock. I wanted to share it here as well.

One of the standout albums of the year for me (and it’s no surprise given the excellence of their previous album) is BLAK’s El Tall d’Escil·la. It’s so excellent, and their musical skills are so fantastic that even the live album version from a few months later is mind-blowing. I’ll defer to Veil of Sound’s review to give a sense of the scope of this album:

So, let me give you the idea behind the new album’s title. El Tall d’Escil·la (Scylla’s Cut) ,tells a story of Nisos, who was the king of Megara and he possessed a single lock of purple hair which granted the city invincibility. His daughter, called Scylla, fell in love with Minos, king of Crete when he invaded Megara. In order to win his heart, Scylla cut off her father’s purple lock from his head and presented it to Minos. Minos, disgusted with her lack of filial devotion, tied Scylla to the bow of his ship until she drowned. It’s a sombre and hearbreaking end to Scylla’s life, however this kind of tragedy can play into the hands of bands like BLAK, who can musically narrate and express the despair and dejection with great skill and elegance. BLAK have the gift of reaching into the depts of your soul and bringing out all the emotions you have concealed and kept under wraps. Music is a powerful tool when it’s in the right hands and BLAK are craftsmen for sure. It will all make sense when you immerse yourself into Scylla’s cut, and let the music take hold and carry you to where it needs to go.

Veil of Sound, “Review of BLAK – El Tall d’Escil·la”, Pat O

The first track stands out in particular. The title “Contra nosaltres quan siguem forts” (Against ourselves when we’re strong) (thanks to the Veil of Sound review for the help with this) has a deep and evocative feeling. It’s pulled at my heart and supported me through many a drive and adventure this summer and fall. I even wrote about a meditation session on a paddle board recently that was accompanied by this song.

We face difficult, sometimes epic challenges, in life. I’ve felt that so many times in recent months. I’ve regularly felt like I’m meaningless and have wanted to die, regularly. However, there’s a certain resolve in standing in the midst of chaos and delving into your own inner strength and light. So often, tarot has told me to stand strong (Strength) and find my own truth and light (Hermit) while walking through the challenges of darkness, distortion, and delusion (Moon).

Daring the heights, facing death, standing strong despite our weakness, no matter what metaphor you choose, this song speaks to that majesty and courage. There’s something empowering at the core of this song that pulls you along into the swell of all challenge, and somehow you feel strong, even if the ego is destroyed in the process.

This is the path of the warrior, meant in the Shambhala way.

https://thisisblak.bandcamp.com/track/contra-nosaltres-quan-siguem-forts-live

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Philosophy Riffing | Liebe wird aus Mut gemacht – Love is made out of courage

14 Oct 2021 3 Comments

by zeuslyone in Letting Go, Loss, Love, Narratives, Philosophy Riffing Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Here is the second birthday creative gift post for myself. I’ve gotten responses from multiple people that they liked my posts of audio clips and wished I would do something more intentional or even more like a podcast. I attempted that last night with a general theme of “Liebe wird aus Mut gemacht” – “Love is made out of courage”. This almost hour-long first attempt at this kind of post is very much philosophy riffing and shared experience. I hope that people enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it.

NOTE: One detail I got wrong multiple times early in the recording – the dialogue I mention is Plato’s Phaedrus, not Phaedo. I tend to get those two dialogues’ titles mixed up in my mind, and it’s been years since I’ve read either.

Please give me any feedback on whether you enjoy this post or have themes you’d like me to explore in the future. Furthermore, let me know if you like the riffing style or would prefer something more structured! I’d love any feedback to consider whether to do more of this in the future and how best to go about it.

Previous post on Love and Language

Post from my other blog with some related analysis regarding experiences of love and language in relation to post-rock

Heartbreak | Poetry | Undeath

26 Sep 2021 2 Comments

by zeuslyone in Heartbreak, Poetry Tags: , , , , , ,

Loss, death, grief
The heart stills
And feels empty
Yearning for a spark
Life — no longer present

And yet, not dead either
Like a hungry ghost,
Starving for the desired
While still shambling around in this body
A facsimile of the person before

“Unheimlich” — unhomey, uncanny
The space between alive and dead
The heart between overflowing and pulverized
How do you sit here in undeath? In unlife?
The presence of sitting contains multitudes…

The depths of feeling light the way
Truth lies not in a covered heart, in a comfortable story that explains away
Courage to face everything authentically
Such is real love
Such is the intensity of life and death to wake the heart

May this help others find their own ability to sit in the feelings of loss, confusion, and despair.

Gassho!

Tarot – Understanding Yourself Through the Major Arcana: Moon

26 Jul 2021 4 Comments

by zeuslyone in Spiritual Path, Tarot, Warrior's Path Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve been meaning to write about the meaning of particular tarot cards and what they can say about the spiritual and existential journey of life since a deep dive into the classic Japanese RPG Persona 4 Golden last year. Since then, I’ve been reading the tarot off and on, more frequently recently, for guidance through some tough times in life.

I think it would be useful to write about my experience with Major Arcana cards that have shown up strongly and repeatedly in my readings – explaining what they mean/have meant to me as I try to traverse the challenges of my life.

This time, I’ll write about the Moon card which has been a repeat pull in many spreads in the last few months.

The simplest way to summarize the Moon card is that it is a stage of the path that is a journey through darkness. It often is represented as a traversal of water between two pillars which represent some gate to beyond on the other side. The moon hangs above it all as the light through the darkness.

Often when people speak of this card, they focus on dealing with illusions. Picture this: you travel through the darkness with poor lighting. What you experience is skewed from the darkness of the night air. This is where perception is distorted into illusion, where imagination can fill in the gaps of what’s really there.

However, this card represents more than that. It also represents intuition. When you are forced to follow your own path through the darkness without your standard senses as being trustworthy, you have to trust your inner light, your intuition, to guide you. In some senses, this matches up well with the Hermit card.

Finally, the aspect I see discussed least: there is a danger to this journey. Going through the dark is no small task. If there are challenges in walking a trail in daylight (which there are), these are compounded in the darkness, and there are varieties of night creatures who can see and prey on you in the dark.

Ultimately, we could summarize all of these aspects by describing this as a journey that engages with the unconscious terrains of your life (water and moon as symbols) that you generally have covered over or are unaware of: a journey into your internal shadow lands or “Shadow work” as some might call it. In a very real sense, it’s a long dark night of the soul (although I don’t believe in souls). There is a danger of failure, loss, confusion, or a certain kind of self-destruction in traversing the darkness, but there’s also great transformation and wisdom to be gained in the journey and getting to the other side (a gate and threshold to traverse).

I feel that this card has come up for me time and again personally as I’ve had a lot of feelings and experiences thrown into doubt in recent months, and I’m even left questioning my concepts of romantic love and partnership. It’s a deeply existential struggle to truly look at such things and question precisely what they are and how you’ve valued them, possibly reevaluating who you are and who you will be in the world in the process. If defining relationships become a place of doubt and possible illusion, then you’re left with deep questions of what is real and who you are within that reality.

Thinking about this for this post reminded me of a hypothetical scenario in Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty” in which he discusses doubt through a thought experiment where he talks about a simple statement of “I’m living in England” but then imagines a slew of people coming in, telling him he is wrong, and offering proofs that that is not the case (§419-421). If this were thorough enough, your ground conviction in believing something to be the case would fall apart. This is the kind of illusion and doubt that one faces in the trials of the Moon, in my experience: the feelings and perspectives you’ve taken for granted without much analysis suddenly come deeply into question, and you are pushed to explore shadowy, unexplored realms within yourself.

To put it the most dramatically in terms of relationships, I felt resonance with a chunk of dialogue in a favorite show earlier today:

Liv: Why are you doing this?

Major: Doing what?

Liv: Making me doubt the only thing in my life that I was sure was real.

iZombie, S2: E4

This is a stage of journey that takes more resolve and courage than most any other. One of the only other ones that pops to mind is the resolve of patience for the Hanged Man, but this card differs, in that it’s a resolve to keep stepping forward with conviction, courage, and the willingness to face self-destruction for deep truth, unlike the call to resolutely accept and surrender to process with the Hanged Man. Regarding this, I would like to link a post on resolve from my other blog about post-rock. It fits well with the consideration of walking resolutely through the darkness.

Even though everything I’ve said here might have a dour ambience, I find few cards as empowering as the Moon card. There’s the real opportunity here for the fundamental investigation and hero’s journey to come through to great insight and growth. Being called to connect with intuition, face doubts, and throw your self-concept into danger are not things to shy away from. They are some of the greatest opportunities on the spiritual path and represent the greatest courage there is. This is the true vulnerability of the Warrior.

May this help others find their way through their own personal dark times.

Gassho!