kingtycoon: (Default)
003
In the end I think I'm better at painting that photography, or maybe my camera is poor, or maybe my lighting is crummy, anyway, this one is (and take my word for it) nicer than it looks. But it's also pretty complicated and hard to explain. It was hard to think about too.

Here's the image I was going off of. You notice that it's #11 in the Waite deck - but that's to do with Astrology and I honestly haven't included any astrological themes so far, I don't know if I will. Astrology is cool and all, I won't speak against it exactly - but this is my deck and it's all about the Wasteland and my experience and I don't see a lot of stars in my city. When I do - I don't recognize them, so Astrology is out. But Justice is often enough and traditionally the 8th card. So I started thinking about Justice.

This wasn't awesome for me - it turns out that I don't really value justice as a virtue. True fact, I think of Justice as being fairly regressive as a quality - right up there with Honor. It is altogether worse to have Justice than it is to have something else, that Justice, conceptually, negates. This was just a feeling I had, a sense, but I wanted to understand it so I did a little studying. What is Justice? I looked into it and thought about it a lot. In the end I concluded that Justice is a concept in the West that is based on principles of Natural Law - which I do not condone. Life-Liberty-Property - okay? Sure you have these rights? Except that no. No, that's a purely western and I think, reckless construction. Now in that state where you have those natural rights, then Justice is a significant concept because you're constantly going to be in conflict with other people. Your liberties and properties, maybe even your life is always getting on the toes of everyone else's life liberty and property. So you have to have a system of justice to figure things out within the paradigm. You with me so far? So I thought and thought about what that all means - and I couldn't get anywhere. Locke is, fine I guess, Tabula Rasa.... hey man, if you say so. But people who know me know I tend to hold with Hobbes, a little more. And after looking into Utilitarianism etc... I found that I liked Hobbes a little better in terms of his ideas about Justice.

So this image was very informative for me. The Leviathan, the state, the power of the overwhelming giant-king. See? I put it in there too. Giant menacing kings.

At this point though - the symbolism kind of spoke to me. The sword- my sword is the Sharpie Pen - the pen being the sign of political stakeholders (i.e.: Legislators) and intellectualism (i.e.: Me and you). So a pen, he's got that big pen? Sure, I get it. And the little village, heck I like that little village, that speaks to me.

But what's my idea here? What's my thought? What is the concept I'm trying to convey that will eventually have a mythic and mystic connotation when removed from this (overwrought) context?

So I consult the I-Ching, and it's showing me Hexagram #8 - Holding Together - Union So I had it. The union of people. From there some of the imagery came. Now - I'm kind of happy that I paint these things without a plan or special insight, and maybe I'm doing a lot of after-the fact rationalizing. but look.
009
Here's the little village in the valley with the wall of bricks in a ring. The Bricks. Unity - apart, alone? What's a brick? Together they make the strong wall that holds the predatory giant king at bay. More than that they're a ring, it's a ring - the union of lovers, the sanctioned, unbreakable union. Together - together and united the little village in the valley is not menaced by the king, he may prey upon them, but together they resist his overwhelming strength, force him to reconcile, to wait. His pen, the law, his official strength, it looms over the village but the walls are strong. The roads - the roads join together, all unity of the hill. There are the terraced little farms on the hillsides
015 in the image of hexagram #8 - they're common, together, the road leads to the safety of the village where they are joined together into the one road.

But what about this guy?
018
This shirtless little weirdo? Well, this came about. Honestly this was a hard painting to paint. I had ideas, but couldn't make them come together, I actually erased and repainted it a few times. But I kept having this other hill. And I thought - it's got to mean something, and the menacing king. Look - Justice, conceptually - is delivered by an overwhelming power - in our society justice is handed down from the court, it is decided by the bureaucracy. There is an element of inequality inherent in systems of justice - of all vs. all within the concept of Natural Law. So this shirtless little madman represents that - the idea of the individual claiming his rights, challenging the power of the king. He stands atop the other peak and is not effectual, not against the power of the giants. He carries his own pen, trying to go to the battle, thinking that it is a swordfight. See, he's undone already, he has contended according to a lopsided system that automatically doesn't favor him. He is aggrieved and considers Justice to be something he deserves, but that he must fight for. Because Justice has within it that quality of inequity. So there is the little village, that is untroubled by the predation of the great, because in communion the many have the power to resist. So... Commonwealth.

I suppose I should note that these cards, these ideas flow out of one another, into one another - there's an organism being made. $6 Satisfaction leads to a journey - the journey requires the #7 Infrastructure, which suggests the unity of action, but is also a destination for the querent - #8 the Commonwealth.
kingtycoon: (Default)
001
So all the way to #5! Nice work. Actually, I ran out of the canvas-paper that I've been using so I bought some biggish boards to paint on - so #5 the Television is the biggest painting I've ever painted. Nice, I know. It's also, now, the only television in my house.

The cable-girl, who came to sell us upgrades and so on - she was shocked, I think authentically shocked, when we said we don't have a TV. We sure don't. That is how I am able to talk about it in the way that I am about to. The old Cathode God is pretty entrenched -and when it came time to paint my version of the Pope -the Hierophant - I didn't take too many minutes to realize that I'd paint a Television. Here's the story. First of all - the hierophant is meant to indicate the Orthodoxy, connection to faith, communal identity, and - significantly - to connect the material with the celestial. If you look at the old cards you'll see the pope giving that two-fingered blessing. 2 up 2 down - the bridge between the heavens and the earth. Well the Pope of the world that I live in is the TV. Dig it - the American Orthodoxy relies on the TV. If you, like me, don't have fluency about contemporary programming, if you don't follow television sports (football and basketball) then you're out- you are in the out crowd. People will think you can't talk and they won't talk to you, they'll suppose you've nothing going on or if you do that you're strange.

002
I'm painting my own tarot deck for the purposes of amusement and metaphysical awakening - so I probably count as pretty weird. In this respect the TV is easily compared to the Pope - cause Religion and TV are things I've dallied with and both of them are things I've tried to get away from, and both of them exert a tremendous influence over my interactions with people and the social world that I exist within. The TV is the contemporary orthodoxy, and participation with TV is a vital sacrament in the social circle. Channels, Cable, that kind of thing - it's like denominations, pastoral or monastic callings. The television also connects you with the unreal - the world of imagination, the heady heaven of thought and shared drama, the myths of the time, the socializing power of the collective imagination. I won't deny, I won't hate, or be hostile, but I'll resist, just me personally, with my life, I'm too busy and too generative to absorb religions or imaginary ideas. I make my own man.

003
I gave the TV some acolytes. And kind of pillars. The Antenna point up, the screen is the connection to the earth.

005
The Vicar of Christ carries the keys - and I thought it would be alright to put some keys in this- and where else, you rest them on the boob-tube.

I know this an old-timey TV and I know that there's the internet. I know about these things. The internet, it's community but still an outlier, the TV is orthodox - look at how the internet is used - Netflix man, it's all watch and commune, and be part of the community. People come to the faith, called to the temple, it is a conversion experience.

More than that, I mean - I first used the internet on a TV like that - C128 baby, Amiga and the VGA graphics on an old staticy TV. Atari? All of that the old CRT Television is an awesome icon and I don't care that wood-paneled - no remote control - bunny ears TVs are out of the world now, the image and identity of the Television goes to here, to this.

February 2023

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