*Magical, Mystical, Mystery Tour* Favorite Things #4

because you wanted a little diversion, not a part-time job

I don’t know about you, but I get very overwhelmed by long-ass lists:

TWENTY BEST Places to Eat…!

55 PRODUCTS YOU CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT!!

The 101 Books You MUST Read Before YOU DIE!!!

No, thanks. Even 10 can be a bit much sometimes.

Here are a FEW of my favorite things, because that’s how the song goes…

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I was in England last week, and got completely waylaid by the rail strike and a canceled flight on the way back—what was to be just a week turned into 10 days of fits and starts. Despite the complications, a nice little tour fed my creative well: William Morris’s Red House, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, The Donkey Sanctuary near Sidmouth, Exeter Cathedral, the Rossettis exhibit at the Tate, and Ham House in Richmond. (I also feasted on English-language movies, harder to come by in Spain, including Meg 2 (“Meh Dos”) and Barbie (“Barfie”—sorry/not sorry.))

Congregants by Mr. Troy Ford

Meanwhile, if one were of a mystical bent, one might take the series of strange occurrences I experienced before and during my trip as signs of some kind, though like most mysteries, it’s always a question of what form the sign might take.

Is this telling me something is going to happen—an augury, prophecy or omen? Knowing that something bad might happen, might I be able to take steps? Or if it were good, perhaps I might feel encouraged to take a risk or a chance I might not otherwise? These sorts of things could be warnings not about the future, but about an agent already in one’s life—for good or for ill—and then of course there’s always the question of inevitability: Is this fate? Is it my destiny?

Mysticism and mysteries: the clues are there, but what they may mean often only becomes clear later on, with more worldly information, sometimes just a coincidence (if you believe in such things) or a misapprehension. But not always.

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1. Hilma af Klint
   
   A few days before I left for England, I was walking our dog, Bubba, and a large crumpled piece of paper on the ground caught my eye for the color on it. When I unfurled it with my toe, I was surprised to discover a Swedish exhibition poster for Hilma af Klint, the very artist who proved the deciding factor in my decision to travel to England for my annual getaway. The exhibition in Sweden ended on my birthday earlier in the month, and indeed, I had a ticket for the last day of the exhibition at the Tate Modern. Odd, considering it was her mystical connections which first attracted me to her work.

   

   Installation view from Hilma af Klint – The Ten Largest, 2022 © Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints Verk. Photo: Åsa Lundén / Moderna Museet

   I find af Klint’s work visually beautiful—the colors, the forms, the compositions are all very enchanting, reminiscent of the Thoth Tarot deck (composed several decades later by Lady Frieda Harris) I’ve been using since I was 14 years old. After much consideration, however, I admit myself baffled by the particular flavor of mysticism for which she is known. “The Ten Largest” are enormous paintings undertaken, she said, as a commission from a “High Master”—according to Theosophy, a spirit from a higher or alternate realm of existence.
   
   While I am open to all manner of religious and spiritual beliefs, I am wary of their practical dictates—“Thou shalt nots” can get a little out of control—and also very concerned when certain people (priests, popes, and masters) are singled out for “special” knowledge which can only be conveyed through unreproducible or administrative means, like seances, trances, edicts, councils or doctrines.
   
   I have no doubt af Klint believed in her connection to these “High Masters,” but how her paintings are supposed to be any sort of description or guide to a higher knowledge of our spiritual natures makes me think of people who invent their own language: is it a language if only one person speaks it? Or is it more of a code, meant merely to obscure the meaning of a message, or even to disguise the fact that there is no base knowledge, that the divine recipe is, at heart, just mudpies?
   
   Apparently, af Klint was one of the earliest artists painting purely abstract forms (circa 1906), predating Kandinsky and Mondrian by almost a decade—even Cubists were painting a subject, like exploded violins or faces from all directions at once. Roping her groundbreaking abstraction to a religious movement feels almost like a political ploy, as royals have always justified their position through the divine, rather than mere ambition, wealth, or force of arms. If af Klint had not already been well-involved in the Theosophical movement ahead of her artistic experiments, I might have said it was a deliberate strategy to gain attention in a world still dominated by men. She also requested that her paintings not be viewed for 20 years after her death—so, not ambition in the traditional sense.
   
   As for my chance encounter with the Swedish exhibition poster? Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe I was meant to see and write about af Klint as a unique and spectacular artist in her own right, without recourse to mystical interpretation.

   

   Artist: Hilma af Klint. Photo: MTF

2. Georgia O’Keeffe
   
   So I was surfing English TV in my hotel room, and only about 3 of the 50 channels listed on the guide were actually available. Drat. But they did have an app which allowed me to sync my phone to the TV and stream through Chromecast, and so I pulled up an old episode of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett on YouTube.
   
   After the episode was over, I lost control of the app—it was as though a ghostly hand had taken over, even after I rebooted my phone hoping to break the connection.
   
   After a couple of short meditation videos and a fascinating sound bath by Lavender Suarez inspired by another mystic painter, Agnes Pelton (!) my YouTube spirit guide led me to a documentary produced to coincide with her Tate Modern Show (!!) in 2016—“Georgia O’Keefe: By Myself” by Allen Charlton. (It’s long, but it’s a good one.)

   What could it mean? I was struck by the detail that O’Keeffe excelled in her early art studies but lost interest in the prevailing styles she was learning from her instructors in Chicago and New York. I loved that her debut in 1916 came only after she began experimenting exclusively with charcoal drawings, determined to explore a new style without color “until it became necessary”—it would be quite some time, apparently, before she finally decided that she needed a color: blue. I was also inspired by her wish to distance herself from the artistic traditions of the age, and forge a new path that ultimately led her to the Land of Enchantment, New Mexico. (Was it a coincidence that I had gone to see a matinee of “Oppenheimer” earlier the very same day?)
   
   It’s no secret that many of us writing folk are questioning the prevailing formula of Writer » Agent » Big 5 Publisher. With “publishing” starting to look like nothing so much as a commercial lottery, we might begin to wonder if these pioneers of the Modernist movement could be models for a way around/under/over the gatekeepers.
   
   Or maybe I just got sucked into a really clunky app choosing videos based on my digital aura, algorithms. Impossible to say.

   

   Pineapple Bud, oil on canvas painting by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1939 - Source: Saville, Jennifer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Paintings of Hawai’i, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1990

3. Kew Gardens

   

   O’Kew by Mr. Troy Ford

   I arrived after 4pm and and just popped in to the Temperate House for an hour before it closed. But really, I went to Kew Gardens specifically to read the Virginia Woolfe short story “Kew Gardens” in Kew Gardens—success. (I’m thinking of using all the stories in “A Haunted House” as writing prompts for a series of Substack posts, but don’t tell anyone.)
   
   Anyway, it was while I was sitting on a bench under a plane tree (and the flight corridor for planes landing at Heathrow,) in quietish contemplation of the aforementioned story in which groups of people stroll around Kew, when I had the most marvelous vision of people strolling IN THE TREETOPS. I had already been there for three-quarters an hour, and lots of people had walked by on the ground per usual, but all of a sudden there they were, off in the distance clearly walking in or on the tops of the trees…
   
   Am I having a vision—are these angels, I dared to wonder?
   
   Is it some optical illusion? A mirage, a trick of the light? A reenactment of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in the lovely but wholly earthbound London suburb of Richmond?

   

   Turns out, it was Kew’s Treetop Walkway, the apparatus obscured, and the people enjoying the view from on high as terrestrial as myself.
   
   Had I noticed them just 10 or 15 minutes sooner, I might have arrived in time to walk in the treetops too, but the very, very Last Entries had already been admitted just a few minutes before, the gatekeepers regretted to say.
   
   Ah me—the way is shut.

Shut by Mr. Troy Ford