ORA, LEGE, LEGE, LEGE, RELEGE, LABORA ET INVENIES
Organizing the sale of the Liminal Analytics: Applied Research Collaborative library, I’ve been struck with the re-realization that life is so much more than some scribbled lines of text, no matter how beautiful they are. What started out as a select sale, is now expanding into nearly everything, like a small spark growing into a blaze, and what is being burnt away is any illusions as to the worth of those things which can never last beyond a few scattered years. What use is all of this material when life itself ebbs away without notice?
In our contemporary world, images and words cover up the more potent truths that are available to us in a shred of sunlight skipping shadows across the wall. I say that directly, as it happened while moving a stack of books that I looked up to see the interplay of light and shadow on the wall, the setting sun blinking through a wind blown winter tree limb, and I saw luminosity and emptiness, being and non-being, as a phenomenal flux, inseparable and whole. The poetic resonance of reading is no match for the sober experience of becoming intoxicated by existential flux itself.
Having written a couple of articles in the past week exploring the mytho-poetic concept of the Kali Yuga, I’ve come to realize just how deadly the conceptuality fostered by our culture is, how separated and dissolute we have become from any sense of true meaning or being. This is not to downplay the worth of literacy, or the teachings gathered in books, but without direct experience such material is useless. Anyone listening to the vibrant pre-war folk music of the Americas, or the unutterable truths of any folk form, can see very clearly that literacy is not a necessity for profundity, and a collection of the world’s wisdom in text means little, when the world itself isn’t wise enough to access it directly in the moment itself.
“Each moment and its contents, consumed instantly in the fire of space’s expanse, is in immediate dissolution in the instant of coagulation. A supreme offering unto nothingness, here, suffused with gnostic aspiration.”
It was only after deep consideration of the research results from 2013 that it was decided to initiate some dramatic changes in operating procedures for 2014. This past year Liminal Analytics has been actively testing a theory of mediated research which highlights speed, mobility and immediate deployment, rather than grounded and static methodologies. As part of this test, and as managing director, I’ve been traveling extensively throughout the midwest and eastern United States to attend and co-host events, conducting ambient ethnographic investigations into the outer edges of society and mind.
In New York City we’ve co-hosted a number of events at the acclaimed Observatory Room in Brooklyn, New York with Shannon Taggart, a wonderfully talented photographer whose work on the critical cusp of culture has been a long time inspiration to all of us who work with Liminal Analytics. We’ve engaged in pioneering research on the growth of Santa Muerte’s devotional tradition with Dr. R. Andrew Chesnut, Chair of Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. I’ve made frequent research trips to the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, to attend seminars and meet some of the leading lights in contemporary psychical research. In Chicago I presented a talk on the interstice of sound and vision titled ‘As We See Sound: Explorations of Audible Color’, we produced a trailer for Joscelyn Godwin and Guido Mina di Sospiro’s novel, The Forbidden Book, for Red Wheel/Weiser/Conari, and throughout the year we’ve been in contact with innumerable individuals active at the heart of the current cultural zeitgeist.
What we’ve come to realize in all of this is that practice, contemplation and travel are more important than any of the materia that we’ve been accumulating to support our research back at the office. A brief conversation, a brilliant flash of inspiration, or a moment on the open road are worth more to us than amassing material goods no matter how valuable they are. There are very few works which speak to that immediacy, I’ve quoted David Chaim Smith above, a contemporary practitioner living a life of contemplative retreat in Brooklyn, and his is one of the few voices today that speak directly to this radical sense of immediate and open realization.
With the new Morbid Anatomy Museum set to become a vibrant hub of activity, access to vital archives at so many other institutions, as well as the wonderful University libraries around the country (and the globe for that matter!) attempting to build a private research library when there is active work to do doesn’t make a lot of sense. The resources can be used in other ways, and arranging a visit to the right venue provides much more value than amassing our own horde of material. There are others out there who can make better use of it than we can at this point, and as an initial offering to our new procedural goals we’ve decided to offer up our library for sale to fund future endeavors.
Yet, I hadn’t expected that in attempting to sell off the current library holdings, that the lessons learned would go as deep as they have, and hit so close to the heart of the issues at hand. This week I contacted Jackson Street Books, Inc., Georgia’s oldest antiquarian & used bookshop, to see if they would be interested in taking a look at what is going up for sale. One of the owners who I spoke with asked if I was talking text books, and was hesitant at first, probably thinking this was another random ad hoc offer hitting during the holiday rush. It made me laugh to think of the long hours of careful collection to develop a unique research library for Liminal Analytics’ work, the work of an active research collaborative investigating the outer edges of society and mind, and to have a question about text books be the first thing that came up.
However, we live in a disconnected age. Although I’ve been in Jackson Street Books a number of times, and even mentioned the work I do, they have no idea who I am, nor should they really. Our society doesn’t operate on those principles of interaction any more, and while they are a well stocked, historically relevant used bookstore that’s worth a stop if you’re in the area, they are not an active cultural hub hosting events or curating the information environment in Athens, Georgia, so why would they have any care for who I am or what we do at Liminal Analytics? They would benefit from the curation we’ve done on the books, and could easily sell them, but beyond that it’s another superfluous meeting during the day to day of business.
I thought of contacting local libraries, but they would have no use for storing most of these books dealing with critical interstices of cultural change. The books would end up for sale just as we’re doing because of their unique nature. It is a sad fact that most local libraries today focus on current popular interests and the supposition of local wants, rather than taking a direct role in educating the public beyond basic computer skills and literacy. There’s no organizations or wealthy philanthropists to gather the material into something accessible to the public, and I don’t have the time or resources to do that either. The loft we have rented in downtown Monroe, Georgia in order to host the library is owned by one of the representatives of the historical society, and she laughs at the books and says “Gee, y’all read a lot.”
“The blaze of secret mercury rides the razor’s edge, distributed evenly in all things. Sky and earth coalesce as each encounter becomes a sacrificial gesture.”
– David Chaim Smith
The library sale has become a stark, burning lesson that the only thing worth anything is the music of the moment, a love supreme that surpasses all this material, material that most would as soon see pulped as they would see it passed on to future generations. We are all immersed in our own worlds, caged by our concepts of culture, wealth, worth, self and innumerable other discrete details that separate us from the immediacy of the interplay of luminous space.
So rather than lament the loss of a valuable resource, it is with great thanks and deep appreciation that we offer up our library for sale in order to dive further into our ongoing research programs, visible, invisible and often liminally in-between. At this point we are most eager to be done with what we are done with and begin new efforts to begin 2014 with a vibrant sense of purpose for our continuing active investigations into the liminal realms of the unattended, invisible & overlooked. The fire we started in selling off the library, has sparked a re-cognition of truths that we’d begun to forget in surrounding ourselves with the conceptual cages of written words and faded bindings.
Lapidem quem reprobaverunt aedificantes,
hic factus est in caput anguli
–
For more information on Liminal Analytics: Applied Research Collaborative – Click Here