The 2017 restoration of Tarkovsky's Stalker is being projected at IFC throughout this summer month.

Jane McAlevey 1964-2024

 

"By the 1980s.. the international arm of the AFL-CIO was implicated in supporting death squads in Central America that killed real labor organizers. I was then a young adult working on environmental issues in Central America, and the fact that unionists that I was working with, who were already deeply engaged in a battle with a capitalist class of the most brutal and violent nature, now also had to deal with killer thugs funded by the unions of my country, made a deep impression on me."

 

Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, 2012, p. 30

Daniel Richter,

Amselgesang, 2021, oil on canvas, 90 1/2 x 66 7/8 x 1 3/4 in

 

 

Peter Bruegel the Elder, Dulle Griet (Mad Meg), 1563, oil on panel, 45 in × 63 in, Museum Mayer van den Berg, Antwerp

 

 

Jim Shaw, Hillary Clinton as Mad Meg , 2017, graphite on paper, 14 in x 17 in

 

Jerome Rothenberg 1931–2024

 

The word "shaman" (Tungus: šamán) comes from Siberia & "in the strict sense is pre-eminently a religious phenomenon of Siberia & Central Asia" (Eliade).  But the parallels elsewhere (North America, Indonesia, Oceania, China, etc.) are remarkable & lead also to a consideration of coincidences between "primitive-archaic" & modern thought.  Eliade treats shamanism in-the-broader-sense as a specialized technique & ecstasy & the shaman as "technician-of-the-sacred."  In this sense, too, the shaman can be seen as a proto-poet, for almost always his technique hinges on the creation of special linguistic circumstances, i.e., of song and invocation.

 

In 1870 Rimbaud first used the term voyant (seer) to identify the new breed of poet who was to be "absolutely modern," etc:

 

  one must, I say, become a seer,

      make oneself into a seer

 

or as Rasmussen writes of Iglulik Eskimos:

 

     the young aspirant, when applying to a shaman, should

     always use the following formula

                takujumaqama: I come to you 

            because I desire to see

 

& the Copper Eskimos called the shaman-songman "elik, i.e., one who has eyes."

 

In a typical (self-)-initiation into shamanism, the new shaman experiences the breakdown of his familiar consciousness or world-view, and is led into a dream or vision at the center of which there is a often a song or a series of songs "that force themselves out without any effort to compose them."  [Thus: Isaac Tens, a Gitsan Indian practitioner cited in the accompanying text in Technicians.]  The dream & vision aspect, in fact, goes way past any limits, however loosely drawn, of shamanism, into areas where a priesthood (as developer & transmitter of a fixed system) predominates, &, on the other hand, into areas where "all men" are "shamans," i.e. are "open" to the "gift" of vision & song.

The Poetics of Shamanism (1968)

Francisco Goya, La familia de Carlos IV, 1801, oil on canvas, 110" × 132", Museo del Prado