Spirit Artifacts; Pasternak Apport

Пастернак упорствует! (Updates: Scroll to the end) 

August 25, 2023

This is a tale about Apports & Spirit Orchestration, so do one's best to remain curious, unbiased and unafraid as it unfolds.

I'm now nearing the end of a month's vacation I luxuriously granted myself; August for August. I had already started painting again a couple months ago, exploring the media of watercolour that I had been trained in as a child, and love most of all techniques. During this time, I decided to work through some remaining grief from the transition of my siamese child, McHenry by painting about him (he had manifested via ectoplasm in a dark seance a few months his transition, and about which I produced a painting- another blog for another time.)  As I painted, Fiona, his sister, who had transitioned last year, leaving me in a great black hole of grief, came and watched. McHenry then began participating, and we painted a few abstracts I now call "Spirit Artifacts" - and then Fiona and I painted some that displayed her memories of certain stages of her transition. And then William Hurt, the actor -- who had been "dispatched" to me shortly after his transition to support me in my grief about Fiona and for me to help guide him in his newly transitioned state -- became interested, and Bill (he insists I use this name) and I painted a series of Spirit Artifacts about the various stages that he could recall about his transition. And as we focused on this intense creative endeavour, my main guide, Boris Pasternak, was drawn to our energies, and then said that he wanted to try it. Because he could not and/or would not remember his long-ago transition, and knowing that I'm also a poet, he decided we would numinously enter a few of his poems and interpret them as Spirit Artifacts -- the results shown below, as informally recorded by an iPad camera.

Revenons à nos moutons. A couple days ago -- Wednesday to be precise, with no-time on my hands, I decided to venture once again into the depths of Manhattan, specifically, SoHo and parts of the East Village. SoHo (SOuth of HOuston Street; "Houston" is pronounced "how-ston"). SoHo was, in the early 1900's, a district of business filled with warehouses and factories. In the mid-1900's, it began to change to a district that was growing with art and people, as many artists were moving from Greenwich Village to get away from the intrusive invasive capitalism, and found refuge in the enormous lofts with floors and floors of empty factories.

I can recall when Soho was practically deserted of human habitation even in the early 1980's, but still a strange and magical place. One of my favourite experiences was when I passed what apparently used to be a factory and warehouse for primarily black pepper, and decades later, I still sneezed when passing it. My landlord at that time was one of the few people to live in what was basically an unconverted loft - which defies description - who had bought the building to renovate it through his company known as the mysterious "Karma Inc." headed by a stern man who had once been an abbot in a Tibetan monastery.

Revenons à nos moutons again. There had been tentative plans with a friend to go along with me on one of 3 possibilities: The New Museum; a movie; meandering. But he was unable to join me, and as difficult as it is for me to choose something, I felt drawn to the movie at The Angelika Theater, one of my fave places since way back when. The film was a weird sci-fi indie, which while very very clever, left me feeling disturbed.  This was further accentuated by the fact that there were only 3 other people in the entire theater besides me - strange, but not untypical for a weekday afternoon outside the tourist districts, and while most NYers are at work. I left to meander to my fave chocolate shop, Marie Belle, and discovered I was headed in the wrong direction - not hard to do coming out from a dark place into the disorienting chaos of the city. As I reoriented myself, I continued to feel disturbed; a shifting from dark to darker; lonesome; abandoned. I began to feel overcome by decades-old memories of meandering these streets with friends now long gone, all taken hostage and swept away by the AIDS pandemic. I recall writing in The Risen about feeling as if a great Mother Ship had come and taken everyone but me; I was feeling this again as I absent-mindedly turned another corner. There was so many routes I could take to the chocolate shop, I wasn't paying attention, just pointing myself in the general direction, while continuing to feel my feet touching something other than the ground. I now realize that I was entering a dimension of Spirit that is There and not here: the Impossible and not the only possible; Other Side Up Looking In.

As I turned a corner that was no longer a terrestrial corner but fading incandescently, I passed yet another empty storefront, probably a casualty of the bleaker of recent covid times, and was very briefly pulled from my morbid mediumistic reveries by a book left out in the open on an architectural piece of one of the doorway pillars. I passionately love printed books, and also love that sometimes they will be left by previous owners out on the streets here, perhaps in hopes they might be of use to someone else. They're seldom very good or interesting, but this one was unusual in that it was a hardcover, seemingly quite old, and had a painting on the cover. Closer examination revealed the title was in Russian cyrillic and the painting of some Cossak-ish looking figure. Mildly interesting but I didn't bother picking it up after a brief glance, as I couldn't read Russian and didn't care about Cossacks.

I resumed my journey to the chocolate oasis and had taken less than 10 steps when I was almost rudely stopped by an odd feeling-realization: wait a minute, was there just the one book? But why would I be thinking that? Besides, the truffles were calling. But I went back all the same, to discover that my intuition was right: there was another book beneath the Merry Cossack:

I thought I recognized the smallish portrait on it, as well as the gold-embossed cyrillic, having just completed 5 paintings with their owner, Boris Pasternak.  What are the odds? Although there are a couple small Russian/Ukranian neighborhoods in this and other boroughs, this particular area is not in any way. This particular book - old, non-English, peculiar but clearly boring - left on a street in one of the largest cities in the world, where thousands of people theoretically passed it, but none ever saw it; only I. The other book was clearly there to hide and even discourage anyone from seeing this one, and orchestrated for me and only me. I was stunned into a kind of numbness that, once worn off, I realized this was an actual apport -- of a 1st edition book about his famously acclaimed novel Doctor Zhivago. It was his way of giving me a spirit arm around my shoulder, to comfort me from my dismal siberian inner mental meanderings. (No offense meant to any Siberians, but I'm hoping you know what I mean.) The actual translated title here is "Doctor Zhivago - Autobiographical Prose; Selected Letters - cloth bound, 1st edition, Moscow, 1999. 

This is the 2nd time Boris has used communication involving this particular novel (utilizing a funny commentary via a well-known song from the movie of the novel) --  and so now I refer the reader to the blog posting of the story when he first introduced himself to me via a spectacular spirit-precipitated self-portrait, rendered in my 2 favourite colours. It also involved McHenry. The further in you go, the bigger it gets:

Precipitated Painting of Boris Pasternak

WHERE IS MOOSE & SQUIRREL?

Here are the Spirit Artifact paintings Boris and I produced, in their manifested order. 1-4 are mystical renderings of his poems, and titled the same. Possibly more to come. Primarily executed in watercolour paints (plain and iridescent) and inks (plain, scented and iridescent) with other traditional pigments including mica). As for the other paintings mentioned before, I hope to exhibit them on an online gallery once I find the proper scanner - any recommendations, please feel free to offer guidance.

[All paintings 6"x9"; All paintings © August Goforth]

1. In The Woods

2. Snow Is Falling

3. August

4. A Brazier's Bronze Cinders

5. Untitled

9/26/2023

Пастернак упорствует!

Pasternak persists!

A good friend who has been acquainted with the Risen material even long before it was published, shared the following after our recent conversation about the Pasternak apport event (detailed above).  We had just had a long discussion about his possibly accepting my invitation to attend a rare physical mediumship event in the Spring. A couple days after, my friend reports the following. Keeping the idea of spirit orchestration, note that his locating and reading Pasternak's novel preceded the apport affair.

"I'd been wanting to read Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago forever, and then your apport story pushed it up the to-read list. I didn't have a copy, though. Two weeks ago I was in a used bookstore in Philly, actually looking for another novel, which they didn't have. I had already picked out a book for my wife, but then realized I had no cash, and I knew this place, at least years ago, did not accept credit cards. I asked anyway and they now accept them, but with a $15 limit. I looked for another book, Mann's Doctor Faustus, to reach the limit, but they didn't have it either. Then I remembered Zhivago, and looked and they had a lovely paperback of a recent translation. 

"I've been toying with reading Zhivago for a week, then finally this afternoon felt like I could start it again and get into it. I read the first 10 pages again and decided to sit on the front stoop and read in the sun. I went out, read a few pages then started watching a guy lock his bike to a pole. He looked back at someone coming up the sidewalk. I looked to see who it was and it was a woman carrying a bunch of colorful clothing on a pole across her shoulders.  When she got closer I saw that they were shirts, sports jerseys, 30 or 40 of them, all different, very colorful. As she walked in front of me the one on the end facing me had a name on the back, the only name I could see: Pastrnak. He's a Czech pro hockey player. I had never heard of him."

I remarked that this had Spirit Orchestration written all over it, and asked my friend how this experience made him feel. He responded:

"What am I feeling? It makes me feel good, like I am harmonized with something larger, part of it all, all of it moving forever. One of the characters in Zhivago actually talks about this feeling in the opening pages: 

“I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it. One must be true to immortality — true to Christ! Ah, you' re turning up your nose, my poor man. As usual, you haven't understood a thing." 

My friend added:

"Another thing. I had read in the introduction that one criticism of the novel had been its reliance on coincidences. Pasternak countered by saying, "The frequent coincidences in the plot are (in this case) not the secret, trick expedients of the novelist. They are traits to characterize that somewhat willful, free, fanciful flow of reality."

I (August) report this ongoing story just to record its personal, evidential meaning to me and my friend, and not to try to convince anyone outside the experience of its validity. Thus, exemplifying without explanation, it may perhaps provide the kind of validity that other readers might be seeking for their own personal numinous experiences.