Kel Valhaal

I will in this note begin to engage and “explain” the work of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, particularily the mytho-philosophical aspect of it. His work has had an incalculable effect on my own way of thinking, so in laying out my understanding of the Ark Work I am also contextualizing myself to some degree.

Now, Hunters main vehicle for transmission of his ideas is the website ARKWORK.ORG, where texts are arranged in categories corresponding to nodes or figures of the system of thought. There is the Perichoresis - the Trinity - made up of Music, Thought and Drama, the Transcendental Qabala made up of Axiology, Metaphysics, Cosmogony, Eschatology; then there’s the Ark, it’s scene and the work in the name of it, the three levels of desire which can motivate endeavor, and finally the split subject-matter: the ccreative-active aspect of Aesthethica and the reflective-reactive aspect of Renihilation. To start with I will focus on these last two, and Aesthethica in particular.

Aesthethica and Renihilation are poeticised as weapons: a three-headed hammer and a four-bladed sword respectively. These weapons are carried by the figures of Kel Valhaal (KV) and Reign Array (RA), who are the two aspects that make up the subject. These can be handwavily linked to a whole host of dualisms: right brain — left brain, emotional— rational, creative — analytic, romanticist — classicist etc. etc.

Any endeavor will play out through the interplay of KV and RA, neither being primary or dominant although often to some degree at odds, with the complete reintegration and reharmonization being a central goal of Arkwork. Their work can be best approached by looking at their weapons: KV has a hammer: the archetypal tool, which builds, but which can also destroy. Think of Nietzsche who said he was “doing philosophy with a hammer”. The inspiration for this I would asume is the hammer wielding Los from Blake's mythology, who also is a figure of the creative: “the eternal prophet”.

The hammer has three heads: Adaction (Adaptation), Apocalypse and Endeavor. Adaction concerns the changing of ones vision or worldview to account for an intrusion, an unforeseeable event that can’t be accounted for within the system as it is. Why this is an active act (pertaining KV) and not a reactive act (pertaining RA) is worth meditating on because it is perhaps counter-intuitive. Here we can think of paradigms, in Kuhns sense: as empirical data increasingly intruded and disturbed the Newtonian model what was needed and what Einstein did was not to reflect or deduce from within the preexisting system but rather making a curious creative leap: assuming the speed of light to be absolutely constant. The deductive work comes after this initial intuitive, arational, creative act.

Apocalypse concerns visions of the future. Not in the sense of tracing lines from current movements and deducing future constellation of things, but in the sense of conceiving an ideal as a spectral goal to work towards. Arkwork is apocalyptic in the sense that the future visions are taken to the end: the end of capitalism and the transformation of humanity-society-technology into our progeny.

Endeavor is the carrying out, the working towards of the vision. Performing actions in the world. Quoting Hunter:

“Endeavor is a practice of making deposits in the name of The Ark - whether they are mental, physical or social, and then allowing those deposits to yield returns.  Apocalypse is reviewing the horizon within which the deposits make sense, and Adaptation is accepting reconfigurations of that horizon”

--Aesthethical Economy, March 10, 2017

These three aspects: adaption to intrusion, creative vision and concrete action, form the hammer of Aesthethica. The name of the hammer is noteworthy: Aesthethica is at the same a sort of temporalized world-of-forms, where corpuses of aesthethic-ethic idealizations writhe, sprout and languish. Kel Valhaals act is creative on this level: in Aesthethica. Apocalyptic vision, the forms of adaction, and the form of action in the name of The Ark are all ideal formations in Aesthethica.

There is a lot more to be said here, even only within a cursory overview, like why is Kel Valhaal a young girl? Why is she bound to Reign Array with a helmet of molten gold? And my analytic approach feels a bit stiff compared to the poetic softness of Hunters writings, I am not at all certain that my way of laying this out will be more pedagogical than his. But to a large extent this is something I am doing to further my own understanding, to see the full extent of the notion of Arkwork and Hunters vision, and to see where my own practice and thinking will - and maybe unconsciously already do - diverge from his. Hence these texts will not be systematic, this look at KV is far from exhaustive, right now I am just focusing on getting myself to write anything at all, because it is time for me to really begin with my endeavor.