world-soul retrieval // a bit of pirate lore

Imago Archive #11

Imago

The project I’ve been easing into for the past couple months is finally starting to get up on its legs. I won’t get into all the ins and outs here, that’ll have to wait for the manifesto; but I will say there are worse elevator pitches for the project’s aim than “what if grad school were good?”

Granted, if you described it that way, I’d hem and haw and rage against the shortcomings of academic research containers, and how I’ve spent a lot of time and energy distancing this project from that frame and its limitations.

…But in the end, when the core of your project involves setting up a support structure for researching and developing skills and navigating knowledge work… you can’t be too mad that it’s impossible to escape the ‘grad school’ frame.

Which is part of the problem: our world has so few support structures for adult research that we really only have one way to think about it, especially if that research is loosely in the domain of the humanities. That’s part of what I hope will change.

At the moment, Imago is just me and my own lines of study. My central concerns are

1. The Container Itself: How can a research container both support and be driven by a Whole Person — just just their mind, not just naked intellect with everything else as a side dish. How can body, heart, mind, and soul all be part of it. How can a Whole Person be welcome there. How can study, action, practice, cultivation, and a life lived with virtue and grace all exert their own gravity. What does it look like for advanced learning to be undergone in a way that’s more than just reading, writing, listening to lectures, and managing the social politics of a nascent career?

2. My Own Inquiry: Most of my time so far has been spent on the container, but within that, I do have a line of inquiry I’m chasing down. In the broadest, most ambitious strokes, I’d phrase my question as: “How to retrieve the world-soul, and how to drive its evolution?”

   On a more granular and direct level, my questions have been the questions that drive this newsletter: what are the mythodynamics of human life and consciousness? What do we know (and what can we know?) about the deeper layers of Life as it expresses itself on earth, as Earth?

It’s a broad inquiry, no matter how you slice it. If I was doing things the usual way, I might narrow it down to an incredibly tight question with so many caveats that even I barely care about it. (And I may test out that approach later on, to see how it changes the way I think about all this.) But for now, the drive I feel is largely exploratory, and that exploration feels wide-ranging. I need to see the landscape to get a better feel for what areas need more digging.

I’m keeping some Imago updates on Patreon, so if you like what you’ve seen from Infra and Imago Archive so far, and you want to help move things along (and keep up with what I’m doing), I’d love to see you over there.

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Telos

Life, then, is a continuous process in which the original drive divides itself into a growing variety of forms, but retains a basic direction. It has no goal, Bergson says, in the sense that human actions have goals, in other words, no one can anticipate its future course, which is more similar to an artistic creation than to the operation of a machine.

- Kolakowski, quoted in McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

Every time I open this two-volume brick of a book, there’s something deeply affirming or deeply challenging in there — always deeply fruitful.

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The Black Spot

I have an irritated spot on my palm. It was barely visible yesterday, though it did sting a bit. Today it’s red and I think a bit wider across. I don’t remember getting a cut or bite, nothing like that — it’s reminding me of that bit of pirate lore, the black spot.

It’s an uneasy trope to feel myself in the middle of. Death, betrayal, decay — not a lot of fun ways to spin it, not a lot of ways to let my psyche fall into a nicer story than the obvious ones. The easiest retreats are banishings: knock it off with the mythic exploration and archetypal nonsense, it’s just a little cut or maybe some kind of skin rash from petting a stray dog. Just wash it, put on the ointments, and keep an eye on the thing.

But lore, once invoked, isn’t an easy thing to banish. The only way out is through, maybe. What does it mean, me getting the black spot today? What dynamics are activated, by being a marked man?

What parts of a man awaken only when he’s been marked?