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Photographer Vance Gellert has come back from South America with a series of striking photographs of healers and healing, currently on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in an exhibit entitled Smoke and Mirrors: A Journey to Healing Knowledge. Gellert used medium- and large-format film cameras to bring out details and vibrant colors, to evoke a spirit of place; photography, he says, captures images infused with layers of meaning and nuance that give the recorded facts a human and emotional connection.
We earlier wrote about psychopharmacologist Rick Strassman, and the dramatic end of his DMT research, which he abandoned in the face of personal pressures, family crises, and dismay at unexpected reports of encounters with alien beings. Strassman, after taking some time off to work as a weaver, has now returned to hallucinogen research, joining with toxicologist and neurochemist Steven A. Barker to found the Cottonwood Research Foundation, whose projects include developing an ultra-sensitive assay to detect naturally occurring tryptamine hallucinogens in humans, in both normal and non-normal states, and an assessment of the effects of ayahuasca in a group of normal volunteers, with the goal of developing treatment protocols in collaboration with drug abuse treatment facilities.
Artist Luc Perez has completed a new eleven-minute animation entitled Shaman, to be released as a French-Danish coproduction from Danske Tegnefilms and 24 Images. The story begins in modern Copenhagen, where Utaaq, an old Inuit, sits at a bus stop. He sees a bird from his native Greenland — rare in Denmark — and he remembers a great battle he once had with a wicked sorcerer who used a tupilak — an avenging monster fabricated out of animal parts — to kill other hunters.
The National Museum of the American Indian — part of the Smithsonian Institution — is sponsoring a film festival with the title Vídeo Amazônia Indígena: A View from the Villages, which will showcase award-winning productions by indigenous videomakers of the Brazilian Amazon. The showcase is intended to honor the work of the independent media organization Vídeo Nas Aldeias (VNA), Video in the Villages, which for twenty years has provided video training and production support to indigenous mediamakers in the Brazilian Amazon.
There is a Greek word, hamartia, which is usually translated as tragic flaw, although it connotes more a cognitive than a moral failing — the lack of an important insight, a misperception, a blindness, a failure to perceive ethical and spiritual consequences. The idea of hamartia is often ironic; the very strength that makes the protagonist a hero is what brings about disaster.
I just thought I would pass along links to two recent articles people may have missed but are worth looking at. The current issue of Scientific American has an excellent summary of recent work on the mechanisms of hallucinogens, which, using animal models, appears to locate their site of action in pyramidal neurons in layer V of the somatosensory cortex.
Coyote the trickster — generous and greedy, crafty and impulsive, clever and reckless — is not dead yet. Coyote is the great cosmic creator and the clumsy destroyer — as literary critic Franchot Ballinger puts it, “a force of multifarious creative energy.” Coyote is killed, chopped up, crushed, and destroyed, yet always comes back to life, sometimes wiser and sometimes not, just like the indigenous peoples of North America who created him.
Daniel Mirante is a young — thirty years old, which is young to me — visionary artist, author, and researcher fascinated with deep ecology, shamanic traditions, ancient mythology, and the creative process. In 2000, he founded the well-known Lila website — the word lila means something like cosmic play in Sanskrit — as a creative collective and resource for people exploring what Delvin Solkinson of the Elfintome Arts Collective has called medicine culture — shamanic forms of creativity and healing, including plant-based entheogenic practices.
A number of artists have attempted to render the striking visual experiences that occur after ingesting ayahuasca or DMT. In the Upper Amazon, there are both indigenous artists, whose traditional work consists largely of abstract patterns, such as those found on the now well-known pottery, clothing, and other household goods of the Shipibo; and visionary artists, mostly mestizo, whose work is characterized by detailed representations of spirits, trees, animals, objects, and participants in ayahuasca healing ceremonies.
I have always been a big fan of Terry Riley. I still have my original 1964 vinyl pressing of his In C, which burst on the classical music scene like a revelation — minimalist, aleatoric, melodic, haunting. His musical trajectory has carried him beyond minimalism to a sometimes startling eclecticism, but all his music is shimmering, luminescent, and beautiful. My teacher don Roberto Acho spoke of the singing of the plants as being puro sonido, pure sound; Riley writes, in the same sense, pure music.