I really enjoyed this, as I always do your writing on spirituality and religion. I think about this a lot but I still haven't worked out how to effectively communicate my thinking in this area. I always find a lot of what I think expressed in your writing. I seem to end up ranting about the devil...
It is disturbing and, in my view actually evil, the way that contemporary "spirituality" has been reduced to the realm of feelings and imagination and vibes. It doesn't have nothing to do with that, but that's just the first step! You have to keep going, follow that thread until you are outside of yourself. Authenticity and self-discovery and healing are almost incidental.
People want God without the Devil. Want to feel the Good without having to deal at all with Evil. So these things that are supposed to be used to fight evil are instead sold as balms for anxiety. And that in turn keeps a lot of people from engaging with spiritual things on any level.
Any organized effort to engage with the ultimate good, the light of the universe, God, universal truth, etc, is going to get tainted by evil, that's how evil fights back. Eventually all most people can see is the evil so they can't engage with the original goal of the endeavor, the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment.
Many times over the years spiritual practitioners have intentionally stripped away most of the meaning, religious associations, the concrete systems of their beliefs, from spiritual objects or tools in an attempt to share some of the benefits with others and maybe that way entice them to embark on a genuine spiritual journey. And then evil got in, turned it into commerce and made the leap to something greater much more difficult.
So that's why I think everyone needs to go back to a REAL church with a LATIN mass... No, no, wouldn't it be wild if I took it there? I don't know what we're supposed to do but it does seem like the bare minimum we owe genuine spiritual leaders and communities like af Klint is to present their work in the context of their actual systems of belief and spiritual striving.
I actually think the Latin Mass movement is related to this empty spirituality, in that it is ritual without substance. Nostalgia is always going to be flat. And going to the Latin Mass and distracting yourself with arcane knowledge is a way of staying out of the trouble and complexity of a living church. It’s telling that it’s JD Vance, Jordan Peterson, (supposedly) Elon Musk, and these other reactionaries who are drawn to the Latin Mass and who consider Pope Francis the antipope or at least an enemy of the church. It’s another form of evil, I think, to prefer a dead rite to a living body that you can’t control.
I wholeheartedly agree. For those men and others like them it's also a naked yearning for a time when the church was a more effective tool for dominating women who are, of course, Satan's little helpers.
I really like framing it as preferring a dead rite to a living body that you can’t control. These sorts of people seem to want everything dead: dead country, dead culture, dead religion. These men are so terrified of death that they fear all change as death and so they fear life and so they kill everything they can.
yeah, and unfortunately it is not great. It has the same problems as the rest of the Af Klint industry: establish her inside art history by overly simplifying her work and what she was doing. Voss's project seems really rushed, too, in an effort to have the first biography and establish the narrative.
I think a good af Klint bio is probably in the works, there are historians who are working against this story of her as the inventor of abstraction. but they're being more careful so it takes a while.
I really enjoyed this, as I always do your writing on spirituality and religion. I think about this a lot but I still haven't worked out how to effectively communicate my thinking in this area. I always find a lot of what I think expressed in your writing. I seem to end up ranting about the devil...
It is disturbing and, in my view actually evil, the way that contemporary "spirituality" has been reduced to the realm of feelings and imagination and vibes. It doesn't have nothing to do with that, but that's just the first step! You have to keep going, follow that thread until you are outside of yourself. Authenticity and self-discovery and healing are almost incidental.
People want God without the Devil. Want to feel the Good without having to deal at all with Evil. So these things that are supposed to be used to fight evil are instead sold as balms for anxiety. And that in turn keeps a lot of people from engaging with spiritual things on any level.
Any organized effort to engage with the ultimate good, the light of the universe, God, universal truth, etc, is going to get tainted by evil, that's how evil fights back. Eventually all most people can see is the evil so they can't engage with the original goal of the endeavor, the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment.
Many times over the years spiritual practitioners have intentionally stripped away most of the meaning, religious associations, the concrete systems of their beliefs, from spiritual objects or tools in an attempt to share some of the benefits with others and maybe that way entice them to embark on a genuine spiritual journey. And then evil got in, turned it into commerce and made the leap to something greater much more difficult.
So that's why I think everyone needs to go back to a REAL church with a LATIN mass... No, no, wouldn't it be wild if I took it there? I don't know what we're supposed to do but it does seem like the bare minimum we owe genuine spiritual leaders and communities like af Klint is to present their work in the context of their actual systems of belief and spiritual striving.
I actually think the Latin Mass movement is related to this empty spirituality, in that it is ritual without substance. Nostalgia is always going to be flat. And going to the Latin Mass and distracting yourself with arcane knowledge is a way of staying out of the trouble and complexity of a living church. It’s telling that it’s JD Vance, Jordan Peterson, (supposedly) Elon Musk, and these other reactionaries who are drawn to the Latin Mass and who consider Pope Francis the antipope or at least an enemy of the church. It’s another form of evil, I think, to prefer a dead rite to a living body that you can’t control.
I wholeheartedly agree. For those men and others like them it's also a naked yearning for a time when the church was a more effective tool for dominating women who are, of course, Satan's little helpers.
I really like framing it as preferring a dead rite to a living body that you can’t control. These sorts of people seem to want everything dead: dead country, dead culture, dead religion. These men are so terrified of death that they fear all change as death and so they fear life and so they kill everything they can.
Did you read Julia Voss' Klint biography from a few years ago?
I love Klint's artwork and would really like to read something worthwhile about the milieu she was working in.
yeah, and unfortunately it is not great. It has the same problems as the rest of the Af Klint industry: establish her inside art history by overly simplifying her work and what she was doing. Voss's project seems really rushed, too, in an effort to have the first biography and establish the narrative.
I think a good af Klint bio is probably in the works, there are historians who are working against this story of her as the inventor of abstraction. but they're being more careful so it takes a while.