Author:
daniel hernandez
Subject:
Arts and Humanities
Material Type:
Module
Level:
Adult Education
Tags:
  • Artist
  • Clown
  • Daniel Hernandez
  • Divine Ridiculous
  • Fun
  • Gnosis
  • Jodorowsky
  • Love
  • Magic
  • Mask
  • Performance
  • Ritual
  • Shamanism
  • Theatre
  • Trickster
  • License:
    Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives
    Language:
    English

    Divine Ridiculous

    Divine Ridiculous

    Overview

    Re-Magination
    Connect to your magical imagination and creativity

    LESSON 0: THE MAGICAL JOURNAL

    LESSON 0: THE MAGICAL JOURNAL

     

     

    “To do this type of study one needs guidelines and guide-posts, and in our approach this takes the form of graffiti, or signs”

    Michael Bertiaux, Ontological Graffiti

     

     

    Dear friend,

     

    Let me tell you here and now that the lessons in this course are not going to be spelling out what you have to do in a step by step way. Really, this is not a course where I am the teacher and you are the student. We are rather agreeing to be part of a magical school where every one of us is the teacher and every one of us is the student. Soon, I hope you will be sending me lessons! 

     

    The lessons take the form of a letter from a friend that is a text for you to meditate and act upon in any way you like. In this course, you are training your ability to act. So, you are encouraged to act and think for yourself, and to birth things into your life in whatever fantastic, ritualistic, spontaneous and creative ways turn you on. 

     

    In this course, you will be keeping a magical journal. The journal is the place where you will record in words and in pictures the results and processes of the various lessons, games and exercises we will undertake, along with your own musings and experiments relating to the course. Also, you will note down as many dreams and daydreams as you can in the journal, either in writing, or with pictures, or both. 

     

    This lesson is not really a class you do once and then it’s finished. The Magical Journal is a practice. As well as it being a unique artwork in it’s own right, the Journal is also a form of qualitative data for our research. You are documenting a process in a way that can be shared within our community. When I say “qualitative” I mean highly subjective. The content of a magical journal is unbounded by logic and can be totally absurd, incomprehensible, foolish, surreal and abstract.

     

    Playing in our imaginal realm is an important type of fun to have, not only as artists but as human beings. We are going to be doing a lot of what is called "magical thinking" in this course. Magical thinking is freed from survivalist imperatives and from rational/scientific limits and controls. Magical thinking is totally fantastic. The world needs magical thinking. Rational scientism may have brought many benefits, but it seems it cannot always be relied on for happiness. As divine ridiculous artists and magicians we are going to allow ourselves to think in wonderfully novel ways and see what happens. As Andre Breton famously said: “the man who cannot imagine a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot”. 

     

    Another type of thinking we will employ in this course is called “clown thinking”. One of my teachers, Eric de Bont, helps his students to develop their clown thinking. When faced with a problem, The Clown triumphs through a special kind of absurd logic that dwells in the genius realm of divine visionary madness. Magical thinking and clown thinking are some of the most delightful types of thinking there are, so it is very lucky and fortunate that we are going to have the chance to use them more now that we are being divine and ridiculous all at the same time.

     

      (Since we are also in some ways an "art movement", and “a magical archive” we should say from the start that we as a group are interested in sharing the work produced. So, as well as journaling, all kinds of ‘documentary' disciplines are part of our research.) You will be asked to photograph or scan certain parts of your work to add to the archive and share with the group. (*for a full understanding of how we use and share images in divine ridiculous, visit this page)

     

    Often, what ends up in your magical journal, even when you put it there yourself, has mysterious origins. Later, when you look back over it, you will probably have forgotten all about certain entries. I would like you to think that - hidden within your interior spiritual architecture - clandestine divine intelligences are going about leaving their graffiti, which appears “out of the blue”, in your own artistic output. In divine ridiculous, starting with the journal, we are going to have fun with the ancient art of mediumship, the idea that sacred utterance or art can have a spirit or intelligence of it’s very own that we can communicate with, or that is trying to communicate with us, or send us clues, like an oracle. 

     

    With the journal, as in all of our magico-artistic work, one of the special powers we are cultivating is that of CLOWN. Clown is a world where IT’S COOL TO BE BAD - in which being in a place of ‘not being able to do art' is the very place from which genius springs. So, if you, like many, have thoughts such as “I can’t draw” etc. take heart and know that you are in absolutely the perfect place, and possibly quite ahead of the others in the class, to start making drawings that have just the sort of innocent, raw, naive quality we encourage in the school.

     

    When we meet up at a workshop or happening, our journals will be shared among us freely and shamelessly. You will be able to look in my magical journal, and I will be able to look in yours. Of course, even if someone else looks at your journal, they will never really know what it means to you. If you really need to keep a secret, for example as a powerful way to build a ‘charge’ around some mystery you are working with, you can still encode or encrypt it symbolically within your book. There will be no catholic-style ‘confession’ or freudian psychoanalysis of the journals, and sharing them is not compulsory. In general, however, within our school, we are encouraged to share things as peers when we get together - even if it feels a bit vulnerable - simply as if they are the scientific data of an absurd magical laboratory, or if you prefer, art that you are proud of. You have reason to be proud, you are becoming more magical and more artistic and more open, and whatever you do, even when it is ridiculous, is totally divine. 

     

    Maybe you already keep a journal. If you do, you are welcome use it for this course. If you don’t, it’s time to begin. Keep the journal with you as much as possible, where-ever you go, along with a pencil case containing the various art materials you would like to use to decorate your book. You can use your journal at any time and put anything you like in it. If you would like some good ideas of how to use your journal, Keri Smith's wonderful interactive journaling book How to Be an Explorer of the World, Portable Life Museum is full of provocations that will help you to fill your journal.

     

    Sometimes if you are with friends I want you to pull out your magical journal and pencil case and invite them to add something to it or make a communal drawing. That is a really fun and important exercise to do with your friends. This is going to help you let go of the idea that you are the ‘Author’ of this journal. Let’s say that the journal is the miraculous product of a community of friendly intelligences residing both within, and outside of your “self”. 

     

    The way I see it, in our culture, the inflated self-importance associated with the cult of the author or ‘star’, is eroding our ability to focus our energies magically and intelligently towards collective intentions. In divine ridiculous, one game we play is called "THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR." You know and I know that it isn’t really murder, it’s just a way of loosening up and getting free, and aligning ourselves with our collective intentions. 

     

    A note: you are still allowed to enjoy wild fantasies of being a big star that everyone adores. Your image of yourself as a great author is also a powerful and important part of the current we are working within. If this sounds contradictory or illogical to you, you will see later in the lessons, that in "magical thinking,” and “clown logic”, illogical contradictions can and must exist in a very different way than we may have been taught in our culture. As we get into the physical part of the workshop, we will be working within an ancient model of the psyche in which the individual ego is less dominant, and in which we begin to think of our “self” as something more akin to "a collective of souls". By working, for example, with MASKS, the schism that locks us into thinking we have to choose between simultaneously existing contradictory ideas can be resolved, and we will start to draw power from the idea that we are in the presence of a highly diverse community of distinct intelligences or spirits that are artists and teachers interested in helping humanity, just like us.

     

    One mantra we play with is this: 

     

    "THE COLLECTIVE IS THE ARTIST."

     

    So then, in all of your creative output, you don’t have to be responsible for measuring if your work is ‘good’ or ‘bad', there is no longer any wrong or right way to do it, but I simply ask you between now and the next time we meet, to get out of your own way and to make a point of practicing using your journal and carrying it with you.

     

     

    The actions of an individual in a trance are not motivtated by what he has learned, but by what is.

    Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa, Le Mat (The Fool)

     

    Now you are going to open your journal so that you have 2 blank pages in front of you. You are going to draw a big question mark in your journal that takes up a whole page and meditate upon it for a minumum of 5 minutes. You can take as much time and care as you feel like drawing your question mark. That question mark is the first symbol we put down in the journal when we start this course. When you draw this symbol, it is like you are connecting your mind-power with everyone else in the group who is doing this course. You all have your own unique and marvellous question, and you all have a clue in the form of the card from Jodorowsky’s Marseille Tarot. We are drawing the question mark to offer a gift to the rational mind by allowing it a blissful moment of rest from giving rational explanations all the time. For one moment we are going to celebrate mysteries of all kinds and see what happens when we connect with the unknown. A question mark is a wiggly line like a snake and a dot like a hole. This exercise is an invitation to become the snake and dive into the hole, to explore the hidden labrynths of the mindstuff. The meditation is not the kind of thing where you are emptying your mind like a zen-master. Voudon-Gnostic artist Michael Bertiaux, (hereafter MB) who we will return to many times in the course - in his beautiful book “cosmic meditation” says:

    meditation is simply a process for exploring our experiences inwardly, whereby we grow into a deeper relationship with the universe as we see it - an exploratory voyage of self-discovery, which extends the horizon of human awareness in all directions. It appears as an approach to self-awareness and grows into an understanding of what the self and what awareness truly are. In brief, it is self-understanding, or understanding that takes us very far and connects us to all that we meet along the way.

    On the facing page, after you have done your meditation (use a timer if you want) you are going to make a self portrait using a pen or pencil, taking as much or as little time as you like, with the following guidelines:

    1 - you will execute the self-portrait in one continuous line without lifting your pen or pencil from the page. 

    2- you will execute the self-portrait with your non-dominant hand

    3- you will execute the self-portrait with your eyes closed, NO PEEKING!

    Please take a photograph of this 2 page spread and post it up to the group page here, so we can all get inspired and excited about letting our minds hang out in the mystery, seeing unknown and inexplicable parts of ourselves and each other.

    Once, when I was nervous about making a mistake, a fool called Jonathan Kay told me “All we can ever do, is begin”. It’s true, and it is really all we ever do. So, if we are actors, and surely we are, we must act. You can start now if you want.

     

    With love

    Hernandez

     

     

    Bibliography and References

     

    Bertiaux, Michael - Ontological Graffiti

    Bertiaux, Michael - Cosmic Meditation

    de Bont, Eric - http://www.bonts.com

    Breton, Andre - Point du Jour

    Jodorowsky, Alejandro  and Costa, Marianne - The Way of Tarot

    Kay, Jonathan - http://www.jonathankay.co.uk/

    Smith, Keri - How to be an Explorer of the World