‘As Above, So Below’: Literature, Divination and Lisa Marie Presley

I cannot remember the exact sequence of events that led up to it, but I had been invited by Mar A Rodrigues, who runs a podcast series out of Portugal called ‘As Above, So Below’, to be interviewed by her for a new episode. MAR had approached me because she wanted to talk about my book The Space Oracle, which had inspired her to create the podcast series in the first place. We were finally able to meet online and talk on the morning of Wednesday January 11, and it turned out to be an absolute pleasure. Lisa Marie Presley hadn’t been part of the story at that point.

 

MAR and I discussed literature and the divinatory arts, history and science fiction, plus some of my earliest memories of space, astrology and magic. Other topics covered in no particular order included:

 

Destroy All Monsters, the Gulf War and 9/11

The Bright Labyrinth, science, magic and eroticism

Dante, The Divine Comedy and The Trash Project 

Purgatory, alchemy and the planets

Strindberg in Paris, the events of May 68 and Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik

Comic books, spiritualism and clairvoyance

 

I enjoyed it all very much – especially when we went on to astrology, a subject about which MAR knew a great deal more than I did. Overall, the conversation lasted about an hour and a half, which has resulted in the first episode of ‘As Above, So Below’ to be broadcast on Spotify in 2023. You can find it by clicking here.

 

Or if you prefer, there is also a video version of our conversation on YouTube, which can be found by clicking here.

 

And then there was Lisa Marie. I am currently finishing Paradise: the third and final part of my Trash Project for Strange Attractor Press. I’d reached the point of compiling a Glossary of Names and References, as I have done for the previous two volumes. These compilations of entries cover all of the individuals mentioned in the text. As a large part of this new book is devoted to Elvis Presley, there were a lot of references to both him and his family entered under ‘P’. I took time away from working on this to record the interview with MAR. I did a little more work on it the following day and managed to complete all the Presley references, except for one. I didn’t really know what I wanted to say about Lisa Marie, so I had deliberately left her until the end. I rose very early on the morning of Friday 13 January, around 5.50 am, specifically to complete the glossary entry for her. As I was preparing to start work, I had the phrase ‘with a heavy heart’ running through my head. I switched on the computer, checked the news headlines, and the first thing I saw was a statement from Priscilla Presley that began ‘It is with a heavy heart…’ announcing her daughter’s death. 

 

To discuss the relationship between writing and divination is interesting enough in the abstract. To go from that to the intuitive foretelling of a death in a couple of days is matter for further conjecture. MAR and I swapped some fascinating messages over the course of the morning, extending the correspondences between writing and divination further still – as if they were ever going to stop. ‘There,’ as Karlheinz Stockhausen once said to me regarding an equally strange connection. ‘I leave that with you.’

 

 

Pictured above

 

MAR

The Space Oracle (2018), available from Strange Attractor Press

MAR and KH on the mic

Purgatory (2022), available from Strange Attractor Press

 

My New Book! 'The Space Oracle'

‘

Astronomy is another form of cinema. Time is fragmented and extended. Matter becomes light in motion. The camera remains fixed, looking outwards into the darkness, while the earth moves beneath our feet.’

I am pleased to announce that I have a new book out, published by Strange Attractor Press, and it is officially launched today. There will be an event at the Royal College of Art this evening. You can RSVP by clicking on this link - the password is SPACEORACLE@RCA. 

I will be posting further background information and illustrations from the book on this blog in the coming weeks, but in the meantime here is an overview, plus some comments on the book from higher sources.

The Space Oracle reinvents the history of astronomy as a new kind of astrological calendar. This radical retelling of our relationship with the cosmos reaches back to places and times when astronomers were treated as artists or priests, to when popes took part in astral rites and the common people feared eclipses and comets as portents of disaster. Panoramic and encyclopaedic in its scope, the book brings astronauts and spies, engineers and soldiers, goddesses and satellites into alignment with speculative insights and everyday observations. The universe, Hollings argues, is a work in progress – enjoy it.

 As astronomers have peered ever further out into the cosmos their discoveries have always refused to remain confined within observatory walls. The Space Oracleshows what happens when astronomy escapes into the wider human world, and finds purposes beyond the scientific. As Ken Hollings points out, ‘the further into space we go, the more we learn about ourselves’ – Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer, Royal Observatory Greenwich

 ‘Continuing the trajectory set in Welcome To Mars and Bright Labyrinth, A Space Oracle revolts magnificently against the fault-lines of contemporary learning. Within the courtly form of a Renaissance almanac, and in a voice that echoes the recursive wanderings of a comet, Hollings gives us a vision of humanity endlessly making sense of the heavens. As he goes he shows us how the stars appear from Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg and Wernher von Braun’s Peenemünde, from the branches of Yggdrasil and the helter-skelter at Luna Park. I loved it, but then I would say that; I’m a Plutonian’ – Richard Barnett, author of The Sick Rose 

‘Reading Ken Hollings is the intellectual equivalent of being fired from the space-module for a non-stop EVA’ – Tom McCarthy, author ofMen in Spaceand Satin Island

Publication Details:
The Space Oracle

A Guide to Your Stars

Ken Hollings

Paperback
116mm x 186mm
176pp, 12 b/w Illos
£13.99
ISBN: 9781907222535

Available from Strange Attractor Press

‘A Sundial on the Moon’ in Marjolijn Dijkman’s Radiant Matter

And you don’t stop…

I just have time to report on one last publication of note before the world shuts down for Christmas. ‘A Sundial on the Moon: Eleven Variations on a text by William Blake’ was written in response to an invitation from the artist Marjolijn Dijkman to write something for her book Radiant Matter, which documents her researches into astronomy, science, perception and spirituality. I chose Blake’s ‘An Island In the Moon’ as a starting point for my essay as his unfinished prose satire pointedly referenced the Lunar Society, a key historical theme in Marjolijn’s work. The eleven variations correspond to the eleven finished chapters of Blake’s original text and are indicated by the eleven major divisions of my essay. The piece, as it unfolds, also examines Kepler’s lunar fantasy Somnium and Aphra Behn’s seventeenth-century Italian farce The Emperor of the Moon. ‘A Sundial on the Moon’ was written over the summer and autumn of 2016 while I was completing work on The Space Oracle, my next book for Strange Attractor Press, which is due to come out through the MIT Press in the Spring of 2018.

The Space Oracle is a fractured history of astronomy that brings stories of astronauts and spies, engineers and soldiers, goddesses and satellites in close alignment with pop culture references, low-budget astrological divinations and everyday observations. It’s the story humanity wishes it could tell itself about its relationship with the stars. ‘A Sundial on the Moon’, taken together with my essay ‘The Cosmos Is A Work In Progress’, which recently appeared in the Bauhaus volume Space for Visual Research, are extensions of the original research for The Space Oracle and should be seen as independent supplements to it.

This fourth and final publication in December should mark a brief hiatus before The Space Oracle makes its transept across the Vernal Equinox of 2018. Keep watching the skies for more information of this new title as it comes up. In the meantime my warmest wishes to everyone on this dark winter solstice afternoon – have a restful and happy time wherever you are and however you may celebrate the end of an old world and the beginning of a new one.

Marjolijn Dijkman’s Radiant Matter is available to order from Onomatopee in Eindhoven – find more details here.

The Cosmos Remains A Work In Progress

I have a lot of new work coming out in print at the moment – and, as is typical, it is all coming out at once. First up is Space for Visual Research 2: Workshop Manual and Compendium, which contains an essay I wrote over the summer at the request of Anna Sinofzik, one of the volume’s editors and a former student of mine. The work contained in this fascinating collection represents an extracurricular graphic design laboratory at the Bauhaus University Weimar, and I am particularly proud to have been invited to contribute – it feels to me as if a tradition is being carried through from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. My best wishes go out to all who are involved in this enterprise.  

My essay is called ‘The Cosmos is a Work in Progress: Astronomy as Communication Design – A Guide to What You Are Missing’ and is based on a lecture I gave at the Royal College of Art earlier in the year – details on that particular talk can be found here .

For more information on the publication, which is available from Spector Books of Leipzig, please click here or here.

There are two more new essays of mine that have just gone into print, and I will get to them in successive posts. Each deserves to have its own entry as each is very different. Bear with me while the blog adjusts itself.

The Bright Labyrinth at the ICA

On Saturday June 6 between 2 and 6 pm I will be taking part in a panel with Mark Fisher, Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck University of London and Mary Margaret Rinebold. The session is dedicated to ‘Changing Prospects’, dealing with change and our collective sense of futurity; and I will be presenting some extracts from The Bright Labyrinth and publicly reaffirming my desire to be reincarnated as Astro-Boy one day – although there are some who fear that this may have already happened.

 The event is part of the ambitious fig-2 year-long cycle of exhibitions and installations. This panel is one of a series instigated by the artist Marjolijn Dijkman. To give you more information on this exciting project I am reproducing the programme notes for this event below:

A three century old ritual is reimagined by artist Marjolijn Dijkman in the form of a week long presentation of ideas and discussions called ‘LUNÄ Talks: Uncertainty Scenarios’. The LUNÄ Talks take place around a table, a reproduction of the original table which accommodated The Lunar Society of Birmingham, where pioneers of the Industrial Revolution debated Philosophy, Arts, Sciences and Commerce, every month on the night before full moon. Three centuries later, this table, becomes a platform to develop and expand the knowledge production of our times. The programme includes conversations about the notion of Time, recent developments in Neuroscience and explorations in Big Data, amongst others. The programme of invited speakers posits seeds of thought planted to flourish in a close future.

Saturday’s session will concentrate on the notion of change in relation to the locus of collective imagination of the future. We will explore different approaches, which are utilised to motivate and trigger seismic shifts relating to the world around us.

LUNÄ is based on the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which was formed from a group of amateur experimenters, tradesmen and artisans who met and made friends in the Midlands in the 1760s. The original Lunar men gathered together for lively dinner conversations, the journey back from their Birmingham meeting place lit by the full moon. Members included the flamboyant entrepreneur Matthew Boulton, the brilliantly perceptive engineer James Watt whose inventions harnessed the power of steam, the radical polymath Joseph Priestley who, among his wide-ranging achievements discovered oxygen, and the innovative potter and social reformer Josiah Wedgwood. Their debates brought together philosophy, arts, science and commerce, and as well as debating and discovering, the ‘Lunarticks’ also built canals and factories, launched balloons, named plants, gases and minerals, managed world-class businesses — and changed the face of England.

June 6
2 – 6 pm
fig-2
The Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall
London SW1Y 5AH
For tickets and more information, click here.

Pictured above: the LUNÄ Table by Marjolijn Dijkman