Flashes from the Dark: A Journey into Life

Monday, December 9, 2013

A Journey into Life

Very much in the spirit of this blog, someone with whom I have the pleasure of personal acquaintance has done something uniquely beautiful by forcing a part of his heart and mind onto paper. This person endeavored to give the world a story rich with meaning and went about his mission so to guarantee that the creative vision of his project would be preserved in full. Seeing little alternative, he went indy in the way that this blog loves. So while Flashes From the Dark normally advocates a policy of creative anonymity, I think Jean-Pierre Weill deserves our recognition. Uninhibited by the demands and expectations of the mainstream, he penned a book and self-published it. It is called The Well of Being: a children's book for adults, and I share this fact with you because the book is a PHENOMENAL work of art! (To understand the full extent of my enthusiasm, one must understand that I loathe the 'uppercasing' of words and the abuse of exclamations.) This book (available here) may well be the best thing I've ever read and manages to walk the reader down many separate and interwinding paths of thought, imagination, and feeling. It is a children's book for adults insofar as it rekindles that dislocated sort of nostalgia lodged so deeply in our brains that we question whether its not just an invention of our retrospective imaginations. Well, after reading
The Well of Being: a children's book for adults I can tell you that it is not. This book has layers upon layers and blends an intelligent and informed understanding of the world around us with a sort of life philosophy that at once marries reality's gravity and levity. Above all, the book represents a smart, playful, and imaginative journey into life. It is a deeply personal exploration that bears universal truth. Please enjoy a preview of the book in the above-embedded video.

2 comments:

Robin Jill H.March 6, 2014 at 6:28 AM
RoosterIllusion, I was not able to get the email to go through at the email address you gave me when you inquired about me reviewing "The Well of Being.". I tried emailing twice and they both bounced back. If you are still looking for a reviewer, do you have another email address I can respond to? Thank you!
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RoosterIllusionMarch 6, 2014 at 6:58 AM
Hi Jill!

Please try wellofbeing.book@gmail.com. I suspect I committed a typo when I wrote to you originally. Thanks!
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Basis

This blog was designed to explore the hidden side of humanity through art. As the study of and creative preoccupation with beauty, art is something I've long struggled with. I thought it fundamentally if not blatantly vain and therefore devoid of any substantive value. Indeed, like vanity in general, I regarded it as positively dangerous. At the same time, I've always found myself drawn to art with the bright eyes and excitement of a much better person. This fostered quite a tension as I felt intellectually and morally compelled to reject art while being viscerally and intuitively inclined to embrace it.

It was only recently that I succeeded in balancing this equation, in finding a happy medium where dichotomy becomes duality. Beauty, I've come to conclude, is only superficially vain (this may well constitute a whimsical type of recursion, but I believe it the truth nonetheless), holding a well of fantastic meaning just below its surface. Beauty, I now believe, is a form of communication.

This is easiest to see in art, where the beauty is the deliberate expression of the artist. Inevitably there will be a message communicated through its beauty and a meaning that underlies it. This can be more difficult to see in natural beauty, but without invoking a creator and his/her teleological message I will defend my position by referring to the response natural beauty evokes in its viewer. It is a sort of cosmological introspection when deep and inflective emotions are aroused in the self-assembled cells that previously embodied distant nebulae. These emotions are of course our reaction to natural beauty and give voice to the thoughts of the subconscious. In doing so, beauty becomes communication - flashes of meaning (perhaps personal, perhaps universal, perhaps intrinsic and transcendental, and perhaps a superimposed invention) from the vast darkness of existence.

In this sense, this blog is devoted to revealing the under-received and under-realized communications floating all around us. It is a tribute of sorts to the unseen museum next-door. I hope to post here the works of myself and my friends. Our most meaningful expressions of self that nobody knows.

Flashes from the Dark

Monday, December 9, 2013

A Journey into Life

2 comments:

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