litewave

Now that Lana started posting excerpts from Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott on her Instagram accounts, I googled out some commentary on this poem: http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/tennyson/section2/page/2/ More specifically, the Lady eventually leaves her tower and descends into the outside world after she falls in love with knight Lancelot. And then she dies. Typical Lana.

The mixing of autobiographical facts with archetypal imagery looks like the result of the Jungian maturational process called "individuation". It's a process where archetypal or religious material as well as forgotten autobiographical memories emerge from the individual's unconscious into consciousness and if the individual successfully integrates them with their consciousness they will be positively enriched. Art, religion, philosophy can aid the integration. It may be a challenging experience though and cause psychological disturbances. The unconscious is the individual's broader identity, the suppressed or unexpressed parts of their soul. So the Jungian individuation seems to be sort of what I imagine as the integration of soul and ego. Lana seems to have experienced an identity shift toward the soul, which also manifested by her adoption of the beautiful majestic name "Lana Del Rey".

Some notes... The Honeymoon album cover shows Lana inside a vehicle that takes people on tours around LA. This could be interpreted as the soul incarnated in the body touring the world of time and matter, time symbolized by movies/Hollywood and matter by LA/West Coast (as opposed to the soul's origin in the timeless heavens symbolized by NY/East Coast in Ultraviolence). The Honeymoon hotline features a mix of art and mysticism on one hand and science and technology on the other. This reflects the duality of soul and ego, as expressed through the functions of brain hemispheres -- holistic intuition and analytical logic. Terrence Loves You contains a reference to Major Tom from Bowie's Space Oddity, who goes into space and gets lost. Basically this is a modern variant of the old story of going out to explore reality and getting lost and disconnected from one's home. Psychologically it is a failure of integration of new possibilities with what one already has/is, leading to a disintegration of one's identity: a separatist part (ego) of one's identity (soul) gets detached. The modern age gives us a flood of new possibilities and the failure to integrate them would result in a sort of repetition of the ancient fall, instead of reunion of ego and soul on earth.

I'd love an orchestral version of this.

I find this song to be the best from Honeymoon so far. Beautiful melody and haunting ethereal atmosphere.

Interesting. I don't know much about her pre-Born to die songs but from what I glimpsed her typical concepts were already there, just waiting for the moment when richer melodies and production bring them to the world stage.

I can see the alchemical reference to rebirth through fire but there seems to be a difference between being purified/refined by fire and being destroyed by fire so you have to start from scratch again. The second option doesn't seem particularly attractive, it's like a major setback and I'm afraid that's implied by HBTB. In terms of eternity this is just another ripple in time but in terms of human life this may lead to a long period of rebuilding consciousness.

This T. S. Eliot quote about time and timelessness, or movement and stillness, or incarnation and transcendence, nicely sums up the audio video for High By The Beach: Reality contains all possibilities, which are fundamentally timeless or eternal because they can be neither created nor destroyed. But among these possibilities are their orderings in sequences which we experience as time, as processes in which things become differentiated/individuated. Thus timeless reality contains in itself its temporal manifestations or expressions - timeless art manifests as life, script comes alive in a movie, so to speak. The eternal soul embarks on a voyage of exploration of reality, with ego as the pinnacle of the soul's individuation in time and a body as their expressed form/vehicle in which they live and move. The first two singles off Honeymoon offer two scenarios of what happens next. The first one (Honeymoon) is a vision of love, of reconciliation of the qualities of ego and soul, of learning from the past and continuing the journey on a higher level. The other one (High By The Beach) is a vision of further deterioration which will compel the soul to get rid of the ego and start again. Ken Carey - The Third Millennium

"Moves perpetually in its stillness." Nice description of that gif in High By The Beach audio video. The gif seems to combine the concepts of time (change) and eternity (changelessness). Pity that the account is private.

Love their new song "Make Them Gold". Iain's guitar gives it a pretty cool underlay. Looking forward to studio quality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r5_uSwO_J4

Coexistence of different meanings in one expression is typical for art and metaphor. It's a bridge between meanings. To reduce it to a single definite meaning is the way of the analytical left brain hemisphere, something artists seem generally unwilling to do. And yes, they may not fully understand their own visions either. It's not really surprising - we wonder what our dreams and feelings mean and we consult friends, psychologists, dream books and whatnot. But obviously an artist must understand at least some significant part of their art and relate to it, otherwise they wouldn't care to create it.

It would be strange if Lana was the only musician with esoteric messages. Such information can be accessed from books, internet, other artists or from within oneself. I can see it in the work of Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode, Rihanna etc. Personally I am not into paranoid interpretations like those of Illuminati/conspiracy theorists. I think they don't go deep enough into the nature of reality and derive their worldview from arbitrary fragments they feel threatened by.

For me it's an open question to what extent Lana consciously/rationally employs esoteric symbolism in her songs and videos. Much of it may be based on feelings, which seems to be generally the way of artists. And there are parallels between exoteric and esoteric meanings, like the relationship between man and woman and the relation between ego and soul or masculinity and femininity within oneself. For Lana, the exoteric meaning may be primary or sometimes even the only one but she seems to at least unconsciously intuit also the more subtle, spiritual dimension of it, judging from her poetry, haunting music and religious imagery in videos. She lifts the mundane to that higher level. She has also explicitely stated her interest in metaphysics both in the academic/philosophical sense (which she actually studied at university) and in the popular/spiritual sense. Which too may influence her art, even if not in a direct or fully conscious way. At the bottom it is quite simple: masculine and feminine, analysis and synthesis, differentiation and unification, definiteness and ambiguity, individuality and collective, part and whole... It is the implications that follow from this dichotomy that make reality complex.

Lana often emphasizes the masculine/violent aspect of her lover and the feminine/submissive aspect of herself. She abstracts these aspects from the whole persons and creates a juxtaposition of archetypal masculinity and femininity that she yearns to integrate in a harmonious whole. I don't know if this reflects her own personal imbalance or simply her enjoyment of the sexual union, but her message also has a significance in a society that has repressed femininity by repressing women or by making everybody, men and women, more masculine in the sense of more individualistic, more rationalistic, less intuitive, and ultimately more materialistic and less spiritual. In this wider message she can be seen as a representation of the repressed Femininity itself that seeks to reunite with the reigning Masculinity, both on the level of society and on the level of the average person.

Butterfly - metamorphosis? New era begins.

It's the same loss of paradise theme she sings about in her albums and in movies.

Goddess is coming for the sacred marriage but god is still caught up in his video games and she can't break through that virtual world.

Life imitates art... "Art" is the Pleroma, the realm of perfect Platonic forms or concepts that transcends spacetime. These forms are abstract, general, like Tree, Beauty, 35 (a number) etc. They manifest in concrete worlds, in spacetime or Kenoma, as concrete, particular forms, like concrete trees, concrete beautiful things, 35 concrete things etc. This manifestation is "life", partial, incomplete representations of the more general forms, in particular locations of spacetime. Spacetime itself can be regarded as one of the general forms in Pleroma, in which other general forms have particular, differentiated representations (parts). In other words, Pleroma is God, whose manifestation in spacetime is creation (both the activity and the product).

I haven't studied philosophy in a systematic way but I have long been fascinated by some fundamental questions about reality, which I guess boil down to this one: Why is there something instead of nothing? Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that deals with such fundamental questions but today the word is also associated with study of a "spiritual world". I am interested in metaphysics in both senses. Philosophy, unlike natural science, is not based on rigorous physical evidence but mainly on logic, thought, feeling and tries to come up with meaningful or plausible explanations not necessarily confirmed by physical evidence. It seems to be more about musing about possibilities than having a concrete definite answer. Philosophy and science should inform each other, and they often do. I am not a scientist either but I like to read popular literature especially on modern physics because modern physics is investigating pretty fundamental stuff too like the nature of matter, space, time and the origin of the universe. Another interesting area is parallels between religious and scientific concepts. Regarding the origin of life, I can imagine that life is purely physical; whether it originated on earth or the seeds were transported here by a meteorite (theory of panspermia) is not particularly interesting to me. What is interesting to me is whether life, especially our human life, is really purely physical or if there is also a non-physical component as claimed by religious traditions (a consciousness or soul that survives the death of physical body) and where this comes from and goes to. It is conceivable that there may be other worlds than the physical one we know and this idea is now being pondered in physics too (string/M-theory, multiverse). Aliens (including ourselves!) may actually come from those other worlds.

Yes, it is well known that encounter with the unconscious part of ourselves may trigger a spiritual crisis or "dark night of the soul", with a variety of mental or psychosomatic problems, as the person tries to integrate and may feel overwhelmed by those emerged psychological contents. Lana's references to "deadly nightshade" and "poison" may symbolize such a difficulty or pain with opening up to the soul. Also, according to Jung the first stage of the process of spiritual maturation (individuation) is encounter with the so-called "shadow", undesirable aspects of ourselves that we deny in ourselves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_%28psychology%29 Songs like "Fucked My Way Up To The Top" or "Money Power Glory" may not only portray a lusty/greedy ego but also the shadow, undesirable traits that the ego denied/repressed. Unless you read these songs as a sarcastic expression of what critics attributed to Lana, they express open acknowledgment of undesirable traits in oneself. That shouldn't mean that one identifies with them, just that one experiences and accepts the fact that these traits exist in oneself (and perhaps also finds that they may be used in a positive way). Honest understanding of oneself is a prerequisite to a constructive life.

Lana resonates with beat and hippie ideals. Those people were not against social connection; they sought social connection on a deeper, more visceral level than the bureaucratic, formal, rationalistic interactions that are common in our modern society. The emotional undercurrents have the power to destroy a social order or transform it into something more living. As you said, it's a two-way street.

On the other hand, those little outbursts are kinda cute.

She went from being the one who sings the body electric to becoming the body itself...

Trans-Am might actually be the concept/story of Ultraviolence. http://www.clashmusic.com/features/american-dreamer-lana-del-rey-interviewed Coast to Coast... Brooklyn to LA. Even the album cover suggests a ride.

That tire swing caused some confusion lol... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_%28Lana_Del_Rey_EP%29#Critical_reception It's a nice symbol, a pendulum on which Lana rides between heaven and earth, periodically descending and ascending. When she is at the highest point, presumably somewhere in heaven, she is in complete stillness (timelessness) and has the highest potential energy; as she descends the potential energy is converted into kinetic energy (motion), which reaches its maximum at the lowest point - the divine potential is actualized in creation. Then she ascends as the created parts are reunited into the whole from which they came. But as you said, she retains her connection with the heavenly realm throughout the process.