heavy shit
alice coltrane, john mcphee, and your bibliomancy forecast for the week of jan 26
the knight of pentacles, and an excerpt from John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World:
In the way that scenes of vanished moutains can be inferred from their debris, the vision of continetns covred with ice came straightforwardly to Agassiz as the product of reasoning carried backward from evidence through time. Itis one thing to say that the ice was there, quite another to say how it got there. If the origin of mountains is sublimely moot, so is the origin of the ice. Characteristically, the prime mover is not well understood.
the aleatory
Strength does not come from the surface. It comes from somewhere deep. Yes, it can be cultivated, but it can also be summoned.
But you know this. Lifting something heavy, you pause and send some arrow of yourself down into the earth, you tense your legs so that they do not dissipate the strength that you’re borrowing from the rock. You have always known how to do this.
In times that call for strength, be wary of dissipation and surfaces. (Your phone is a dissipation laser, a surface machine.) You may have spent so long eddying around on soap bubbles that you have forgotten where you are and what you’re breathing. But the thing that has always made you strong is as close as it’s ever been. If you cultivate a closeness to it, you will move when it’s time to move.
the forecast
It’s a good week to eat some potatoes and call an old friend. Be wary of images. Get under the noise.
writing prompt
Use words and words alone to lift something heavy. Pay attention to how you’re doing it while you’re doing it. Then do it again.
a chune
“Andromeda’s Suffering” by Alice Coltrane
How do heavy MFers get heavy? You know, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Coltrane, John McPhee, CD Wright, how? Not spirit, let me tell you. Later and later in Alice Coltrane’s career, the more she meditated and chanted, the more her music, forgive me, dissipates. I was surprised to find this at the Hammer Museum’s Coltrane retrospective—as you progressed through the gallery, through the typewritten letters in perspex cases and the televisions droning out seventies TV rainbow distortion, as she arose into universal consciousness, the thing I love about her records disappears. The greatest works are at the intersection of grief and transcendence. Too much transcendence and everything turns into a vegetarian cookbook. (I love vegetarian cookbooks, but I don’t especially want to listen to them.) Heavy MFers get heavy because there are heavy things in their path.
credits: small spells tarot deck by rachel howe
Annals of the Former World by John McPhee
Lord of Lords by Alice Coltrane
dear diary, ice is the gestapo. If you or anyone you know has a personal gofundme or similar, send it to me and I’ll put it in next week’s newsletter. In the meantime, lots of Minneapolis mutual aid links here. XS