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The Green Book
25/5/24 12:00Last October I began a course on manifesting. I'd been creatively blocked for too long. I wanted to manifest my next book—the inspiration, the form, structure, something.
The instructions said to do one lesson per day. So each morning I visualized as directed while typing out what I saw (I think of this as "keyboard shamanism"), eventually racking up 144,000 words of...well, text.
But from Day One I felt a need to illustrate what I was seeing. Not yet aware of its evils, I used AI to generate some of my base images. Then I built a digital collage for each day's meditation using those images, stock elements, just-plain-purloined pictures, my own photos...whatever.
I wound up with a deck of 90 wide-format, high-resolution slides. Somewhere around Meditation 35 I accepted that this is the book: an oracle, a journey through time; unpublishable, of course—too personal, too many copyright issues, more AI elements than I'd want to put my name on.
But when I've distilled those 144,000 words down to 30,000 I'm going to commission a bookbinder to make a one-off, full-color, hand-bound, real book out of it, just for me.
Here's number 11: My Original Sound:
Upper left is Haystack Rock, upper right a large tolling bell. Across the bottom in blue-violet are the stereo soundwaves from a recording of Palestrina's motet "Sicut Cervus" and the words Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea at te, Deus from Psalm 41, which in the King James Bible is rendered "Like as the hart desireth the water-brook, so longeth my soul after thee, O God."
The instructions said to do one lesson per day. So each morning I visualized as directed while typing out what I saw (I think of this as "keyboard shamanism"), eventually racking up 144,000 words of...well, text.
But from Day One I felt a need to illustrate what I was seeing. Not yet aware of its evils, I used AI to generate some of my base images. Then I built a digital collage for each day's meditation using those images, stock elements, just-plain-purloined pictures, my own photos...whatever.
I wound up with a deck of 90 wide-format, high-resolution slides. Somewhere around Meditation 35 I accepted that this is the book: an oracle, a journey through time; unpublishable, of course—too personal, too many copyright issues, more AI elements than I'd want to put my name on.
But when I've distilled those 144,000 words down to 30,000 I'm going to commission a bookbinder to make a one-off, full-color, hand-bound, real book out of it, just for me.
Here's number 11: My Original Sound:
Upper left is Haystack Rock, upper right a large tolling bell. Across the bottom in blue-violet are the stereo soundwaves from a recording of Palestrina's motet "Sicut Cervus" and the words Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea at te, Deus from Psalm 41, which in the King James Bible is rendered "Like as the hart desireth the water-brook, so longeth my soul after thee, O God."