The fourteenth issue of Wisp is released.

Here follows my editorial:

Beyond The Pale

by Éric P. Lemoine

In the latest book of the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, the eleventh and last of the Wizard’s Rules is revealed —not taught but rather shown, in the form of a highly sought after book. The book is unveiled to be all blank.

[as explained by the Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander] The rule of all rules. The rule unwritten. The rule unspoken since the dawn of history […] The only way to express it, to make sure that you would grasp what he was intending to tell you, was to give you a book unwritten to signify the rule unwritten.

—Chapter 65, p. 592, U.S. hardcover edition

The use of the blank book as a symbol is hardly anything novel; tradition has it in runes for instance, with the blank rune, called “wyrd” (fate, destiny) incorporated in the set.

More than being a mere plot twist, what do these remind us of?

First, that far from being a curse, the blank page is also a blessing in the promises of an entirely new universe that you can fill up with your imagination.

Second, that what we perceive is irremediably shaped by our interpretation, our values, our beliefs.

What do we see when we see this cover? A white horse?

Not just a white horse. For instance, does it make us feel good, excited, or cold? Perhaps it makes you feel good —if you have a liking for horses, or if you enjoy the colour white; and perhaps not so much, if you are an Oriental or someone living in cold lands for whom white may be a symbol of death and the great beyond. Even if you don’t consciously think about the associations, they are present nonetheless, and very often are blended in your perception so well you don’t even remember you have put them here.

We are comforted in living behind the familiar paled fences of our associations, and yet constantly opening a fresh eye onto our world should be a regular endeavour for us.

For we may not notice it or even consider it, but everything is new each time we look at it. And a new setting means new opportunities, even if looking for them seems beyond the pale.

“The picture of a flower in a botanical book is information; its mission ends with our knowledge. But in pure art it is a personal communication. And therefore until it finds its harmony in the depth of our personality it misses the mark. We can treat existence solely as a textbook furnishing us lessons, and we shall not be disappointed, but we know that there its mission does not end. For in our joy in it, which is an end in itself, we feel that it is a communication, the final response of our knowing but the response of our being.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore

The random quote today led me to a comment in the group story I wrote a little more than a year from now.
I found in it a renewed resonance this morning…

(*) After he sent his reply to Yann, Yurick took a deep breath in appreciation of all that had been done the last past days.

However tedious, all in all, it had allowed him to stay away from other people’s trauma, and stay focused on his own issues. Now, the feeling of the energy at hand was starting to become lighter. Like a thin ray of light poking through a thick layer of rainy clouds, announcing that the silver lining was more than just a consolation. It was announcing the sun to come.

He took the book of stories that had been unburied (like his pleasure to write) from the bottom of the sofa’s cushions when they’d received hosts last week-end, and looked with amusement at the opening note about the “random quotes”.

A strong sense of an inkling started to dawn at him.
Thanks to the random quotes — or more appropriately said, to convenient synchronicities — “stuff” was never lost or buried in the insides of that ever-growing story, which was eating with gluttony at the edges of its expansion. Things were popping up here and there, reminding of old loose threads, or pertinent inclusions or links to be made.

But there was more. He, for a long time, had thought that imagination was expanding things to make physical reality look smaller in proportion than it was. Like when they’d looked at Dory’s pictures, and everything looked so big on them. Even the mere thought of nine dogs was huge. But when they’d met her, and Dan, and the dogs, it was all so much smaller. Even seeing Dory manage her dogs made having nine dogs seem manageable.
But the reverse was true: physical reality had its way of dwarfing imagination. Not so much making it smaller, but compacting it, making it fit in an unbelievably condensed and small space.

Take that book. Thousands of words, billions of probabilities, endless threads and hundreds of characters, all packaged in a small stack of inked paper. The trick was that when you look at it that way, when you got that small stack of paper in your hands, it all seems so manageable; one starts to get accustomed to it, then fails to see the newness in it each time it’s opened to tell a story.

Imagination is the true gauge of the vastness of the universe. It’s so easy to forget…

Ping feng (or byobu), traditional screen (wikipedia commons)

The Shift

(See this post for some context)

Wisp 13 is now released.

Here’s my editorial:

Exquisite Corpse

by Éric P. Lemoine

Spontaneity—genuine spontaneity— beyond what appearances might tell us, is not something that comes easily, especially given our usual upbringing which tends to bend or harness it into something productive for society.

The Surrealist movement in the 1920s is remembered among other things for artistic and playful experiments that led to expanding our boundaries and views of reality by practising spontaneity without allowing the thought process to hold the full prominence it usually gets. Automatic writing —and automatic drawing— were in fact techniques that Surrealists developed extensively, before they were used by pioneers of conscious exploration such as Jane Roberts.

One of their games/experiments in particular was known as “cadavre exquis” (exquisite corpse). It required a group of people to collaborate in order to compose something (initially sentences, but by extension, drawing, collage etc.) without having a complete view of what the others had contributed to the creation.

There is something reminiscent of an exquisite cadaver in Wisp, for each contributor brings in a piece without necessarily knowing what the rest of the picture looks like before the final release. For months, at each release of the magazine, it has been a joy and a privilege for the editors to see the final picture of Wisp reveal itself before their eyes, and the common themes of the issue bloom from the intermingled roots of different yet contiguous varieties of plants.

As you may see, the plants have grown a fair deal, and this current issue proudly sports no less than sixty-four pages. Truth be told, it has been a practical exercise in spontaneity to acknowledge that the experiment was no longer bringing as much ease and fun as it has been, given the time it required to keep the quality on a par with previous issues.

We often wish for change, but it always comes as a bitter irony when we realise that we’ve been the very one holding on to a given experience by wanting to prolong it longer than it required.

In many ways —and of course timely synchronicities have come since to reflect it more than once— Wisp has fulfilled the extent of what it could be in this format. It makes each of the past thirteen issues even more precious and dear to us, even if the website will still be available for future developments.

But for now, it’s time for the Will-o’-the-Wisp to take a well deserved break, but not before thanking every reader and contributor of this exquisite adventure, and revealing its current one!

Wisp 12 is now released.

Here’s my editorial:

So Long As It’s Black

by Éric P. Lemoine • published in Wisp e-zine, issue 12, June 13th 2009

In these times we’re living in, success is more often than not valued by the end result. Little is thought of the process leading up to it, not to mention the lengthy detours that may have been required in the making.

Efficiency being paramount, as a society we quickly reach the point where true creativity runs thin. If one could judge the vivacity of creative endeavours by what is deemed to be the pinnacle of entertainment, one would notice how many of them are simple variations, if not shameless rip-off’s, of old themes, series, movies, songs and so on. Not so surprising, after all: what could be more efficient than copying something that works? In the 1920s at the beginning of the era of industrialisation, Henry Ford, one of the fathers of this movement, was famous for saying “any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”

With all the developments since the 1920s, Ford’s ideal of an efficient production system has assumed proportions he perhaps would never have imagined. Needless to say, it’s far easier to produce things now (even with the current state of economy) than it has been for decades.

One could easily be fooled, however: that promise of delivering the means to unleash your creativity to your doorstep (if not in the comfort of your home) with that customised experience is often but a pretence. For while it may be easy to manufacture a T-shirt tailored for you, or a website made with your own branding, oftentimes none of this creates anything novel beyond the boundaries of what is offered.
There is a mirage in that, which aligns with the basis of the observation behind Ford’s reasoning. Only five percent of individuals know exactly what they want if asked about the design of a specific thing —let’s say, the type of vehicle they want. The remainder simply don’t know (or in some cases will want to have a say on a minute detail).

It becomes rather interesting to ponder, when you consider that more and more people (if you’re reading this, you are probably one of them) align with the idea that they are creating their own reality based on the desires they project to the universe at large. If Ford is to be trusted on his observations (and history seems to give him credit for them), it means that most people will gladly adopt whatever is handed to them.

So what about the five percent, you may ask? If read too quickly, it may seem that they would be fated to an unwarranted uniformity.

In actuality the statement can be seen in a more optimistic light. It means that for any boxed concept, at least five percent of people would come up with out-of-the-box ideas. We are not talking of a tiny rainbow stripe surrounded by black; we mean: any boxed concept. Perhaps you are in the 95% when it comes to favourite beverages, but definitely in the 5% when it comes to an idea of spirituality.

It’s been a year now that Wisp has been online, and on paper. Thanks to the various means provided by Ford’s legacy (within the 95% of the webzine production tools) we are able to reach many people with new ideas. We intend to stay in the fringe 5% when it comes to ways of thinking, art and imagination.

We hope also to continue to take the time it requires to produce a magazine worth reading, sharing and re-reading. When it now only takes the push of a button to copy-paste and reproduce quantities of information, let us then not mistake instantaneity for being in the present (in other words, being present).

With that in mind, we hope you’ll enjoy reading the lines that follow, may it be along, across and between.

Read more here and  feel free to share…

At one point in the cult movie Donnie Darko (2001), the hero (Donnie) confronts his health instructor’s simplistic view of the spectrum of human emotions, based on the “teachings” of a local new-age celebrity.

Emo scale

Basically, even if a voluntary over-simplification and caricature of some new-age philosophies (positive part of the emotional scale versus negative one; feels good/feels bad dichotomy), this is an interesting point that is being made.

In this kind of view of our emotions, we tend to consider that we are a point on an infinite line, which gives us only two possibilities: go “forward”, or “backward”, no matter what direction it may entail. It reinforces our striving for getting “better”, and classifying all our experiences as worse or better than something else.

In a sense, it’s a perfect draft for all of our social systems, education being one of them.

Another view of the emotions spectrum is given by the age old Chinese philosophies.

Cycle of Emotions, Chinese view

This diagram is a representation of the view of the emotions of classical Chinese medicine. Each of our main organs are represented by an element (there are five elements in the Chinese system: fire, metal, earth, water and wood), and these elements interact with each other to create the whole spectrum.

What is interesting is that there are different types of interactions, as some elements are “nourishing” others (the blue arrows on the diagram; for instance water nourished the wood etc.) and some are “controlling” others (represented by the dark arrows; for instance, water controls fire; metal control the growth of the wood etc.).

Each of the elements have a pole of emotions which are composing a balance. For instance, the emotions of the heart (element fire) are joy/panic; for the lungs (element metal) these are serenity/sorrow etc.

How you can easily counteract an unwanted emotion is by using the “controlling” cycle. For instance, fear controls love/joy. Uh-uh… seen that somewhere? Yes, it is rather interesting to notice that this line on the blackboard of the teacher is but one spike of the wheel of emotions.
And furthermore, we could object to this simplistic teaching of going towards love as well: if you feel fear, trying to manifest the opposite emotion by striving towards love isn’t necessarily going to make things easier. There is a natural flow of these emotions, that it is one’s responsibility to find out for oneself. Otherwise, it would be like saying “as fire counteracts ice, anytime you feel cold, burn something to feel hot”. You may end up with no clothes at all at this rate.

Once we notice that not one emotion is more desirable, everything can become clearer. Going to each extreme of the arrows is only tantamount to spinning the wheel more quickly while the goal of Chinese medicine is to restore a sense of balance and harmony.
It only can be achieved by understanding the whole picture and accepting the whole spectrum of our emotions, and not touting one as better than the other and risk the consequences of severing its links with the rest.

Note: another more lyrical view of this discussion was presented in the last issue of Wisp

Some translations I made from Zhuang Zi (or Chuang Tzu)

桓公读书于堂上，轮扁斫轮于堂下，释椎凿而上，问桓公曰：
“敢问：『公之所读者，何言邪？』”公曰：“圣人之言也。”曰：“圣人在乎？”公曰：“已死矣。”曰：“然则君之所读者，古人之糟粕已夫！”桓公曰：“寡人读书，轮人安得议乎！有说则可，无说则死！”
轮扁曰：“臣也以臣之事观之。斫轮，徐则甘而不固，疾则苦而不入，不徐不疾，得之于手而应于心，口不能言，有数存乎其间。臣不能以喻臣之子，臣之子亦不能受之于臣，是以行年七十而老斫轮。古之人与其不可传也死矣，然则君之所读者，古人之糟粕已夫！”

Zhuang Zi, Ch. XIII

In French