Welcome to this daily email rewrite experiment.
Every day for the next week I will send out a daily email. The following week, every day I will send a rewrite of the email from 7 days ago. I am not sure how long I will do this. The first goal is one month.
This email is long. If you desire, skip to the bottom where I collect all the links. But I am a big fan of the journey and ensuing transformation, and believe some things just cannot be life hacked or time optimized.
Why am I engaging in this experiment? Well,I generate a lot of stuff. I have an idiosyncratic blog. I have a newsletter on my website which has become a repository for unsent newsletters. I run little experiments in code, processes, human interactions, ritual bathing, reading Ovid in the Bathtub… you get the picture. Maybe you are like me, or know someone like me. This experiment is a way for me to play with reflection and refinement vs. generating.
What will come of this experiment? We will all find out!
This image is Agnes Pelton’s “Orbits” (1934) from the March 2020 NYTimes article.
What is the inspiration for this project?
Well it comes from two online communities that I participate in. In one community I was bemoaning the fact that I write about anything except my actual long term writing projects. Someone suggested I do this exact exercise as an exploration of process as product. In this sense, this email is an exploration of being versus doing.
The second inspiration is from a discussion I had with another community. In that second community we come together to discuss things like John Vervaeke’s YouTube series, Awakening From the Meaning Crises. This is a series on sense making, how do we make make life meaningful, from the perspective of cognitive psychology. We also have conversations with authors, such as Michael Bungay Stanier, about organizations, process, sense making, and … you get the picture.
It was during one of these conversations that the group started talking about creating knowledge versus preserving knowledge, or creating vs preserving. I imagine this email project is exactly that, an exploration of creation and preservation.
Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome 1961 at Moma. Image from artranked.
That blue image from Yves Klein was intended as a palette cleanser. Now I will talk about what is on my mind.
Troubadours!
I have been thinking a lot about archetypes the past few days, and also I recently blogged about archetypes. What happens psychologically when you imagine yourself as an archetype? The archetype I am considering for myself today is the Troubadour. I am not sure what mythological character that would be, maybe Orpheus from greek mythology. To me, this is different from a say, a bard, which I associate with wisdom traditions or keepers of culture, as described in The White Goddess. A troubadour, for me, is alchemical. It is about the transformative power of love.
First what is an archetype? I think of it as a fundamental and mythic character. I come across the concept of archetypes all the time. Here is a description of my archetype encounters as a fourfold.
Dr Jason Fox talks about methods for building character in Ritual of Becoming, some of this work reminds me of thinking about archetype, especially the choose one word.
I am in Jungian-ish, therapy, and my therapist and I often talk about what archetype or complex I am devoted to (e.g., Hera the jealous wife, Diana, the maiden warrior).
I was listening to the Future Thinkers series on Archetypes and how to use archetypes to change habits.
I went down a Gene Key rabbit hole, and watched a video by Gene Key author, Richard Rudd, about archetypes, and expanding your imagination by imagining yourself as embodying an archetype. Gene Keys to me is an example of a new mythological framework for exploring archetypes. I am also a sucker for anything with a correspondence table. My favorites are in Dale Pendell’s Pharmako Trilogy.
This table of correspondences is from pinterest.
Trobairitz!
This image is from a website about medieval women. Apparently lady Troubadours were called Trobairitz! What is a Troubadour? Well, historically, they were poet musicians who composed and performed metaphorical and allegorical works about the transformative power of romantic love. Perhaps they were the first people to create lyric poetry about love. The troubadour tradition began in Provence, also called Occitan, in what is now the south of France. Provence, in the middle ages, was the source of many things sense making such as the Grail Legend, the Cathar heresy, and the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition.
Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, made an academic study of Troubadours and mythologies of love. And in my troubadour deep dive, a friend told me to investigate Joseph Campbell’s wife, Jean Erdman, a dancer who worked with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham.
In this marriage of the mythologist and the dancer I see a pair of jungian archetypes, the anima (dance, the body, space) and the animus(music, ego, time). The dancers dance to the music of the troubadours. Many troubadour songs, chansons, could be considered dance music. This dance is participatory knowledge, knowledge is enacted by participating in the dance.
I am going to stop now and begin the conclusion, mainly because I am near substack’s email length limit. There are a million more digressions I can go on and maybe I will in next week’s rewrite. But for now…
What does it mean for me embody the archetype of the troubadour?
Maybe I will write some lyric love poetry, maybe I will play some chansons on the guitar, maybe I will dance, maybe I will play the board game Carcassonne. Recently I had a transformative experience of love that I struggle to express. The transformation was internal and the events that caused it seemed particular and mundane - but there was something universal happening. And this is one interpretation of the troubadour, to create an embodied, such as musical, container of love for personal and interpersonal transformation.
Thank you for joining me on this experiment.
xo
Meredith