Longhaus press
Longhaus Press publishes at the intersection of spiritual and creative practice; its mission is to regenerate cosmos. As the print- and digital-media organ of the Longhaus ecosystem, we support work that bridges Eastern and Western cultures, responds to the wounds of colonialism and modernity, and makes specialized knowledge available to wider audiences. We see ourselves as the publishing wing of a movement of people who wish to connect the intellectual cultures of modernity, which are good at diagnosing problems, to the philosophical, creative, and spiritual technologies that can help us go beyond understanding towards transformation.
Throughout The Muse and the Mountain and in the work of Longhaus Press to come, readers will encounter practices for dismantling the frameworks that constrain our sense of what is possible. The "Cartesian frame"—the mechanistic worldview that reduces reality to what can be measured empirically and controlled—has led to invaluable innovations, but when it becomes our only way to see the world it deprives us of spiritual resources, exhausts our planetary wealth, and cuts us off from dimensions of experience essential for creative flourishing.
As we go forward, Longhaus Press will produce an illustrated children’s book series directed at Anglophone learners of Chinese, a book-length manifesto that audits our current ways of doing business and proposes an alternative rooted in the laws of karma and Indigenous wisdom, an illustrated meditation workbook on Buddhist phenomenology and the art historical tradition, and a comprehensive survey of the work of Kent Bloomer, the architectural historian and artisan whose theory and practice informs our own. We will also put out digital media that offers entry points for the rest of the Longhold ecosystem.
THE MUSE AND THE MOUNTAIN
The Muse and the Mountain is a practical guide to creativity as a spiritual path. Its chapters are a series of meditations, reflective and guided, that reconnect the idea of the Museum in the Western tradition with the ancient practice of sitting with the Muse—that is, the practice of cultivating inspiration from divine and cosmic forces. In it, you will discover techniques drawn from ancient wisdom traditions and Buddhist practices of consciousness for how to re-enchant our relation to the art object and make ourselves porous towards the sources of inspiration in our world.
Many of us think of the museum as a space for works of artistic genius and sacred artifacts of human culture, but few of us treat it as a sacred site or relate to its objects as access points for the divine. The very presence of a ritual object in a museum, instead of in a temple or some other sacred space, is an index of a secular orientation towards that object. An object in a museum might have held sacred power for some other people in some other period or culture, but for the modern person it is often merely a historical artifact, something we study and even marvel at but don’t typically invest with divinity. For Western modernity, the story of art history is the story of secularization.
When you visit the British Museum in London, you may notice that many of its objects have been taken from contexts where their function was to protect the threshold of a sacred space. You will see dozens of Egyptian sarcophagi that have been taken from their tombs, including the sarcophagus of Cleopatra. You will see the Elgin marbles, Greek statues stripped from the side of the Parthenon. You will see thirty-foot-tall Assyrian sphinxes that once stood guard outside a temple. The presence of these objects behind museum glass is a disenchanting sign that they have failed in their protective task. It is also a sign that the modern museum is a space whose agent of magical protection is not a god shaped like a sphynx or man or dragon but the imageless transparency of museum glass itself. Such glass allows the object behind it to be always visible but never intimate. It feels symbolic of our modern relation to the object, which worships visibility and critical distance above intimacy and mystery.
One key insight of The Muse and the Mountain is that this secular museum is hiding another, older kind—the one the ancient Greeks had in mind when they built a Mouseion, a “shrine to the Muses,” whose purpose was to cultivate creative power through the practice of sitting with the muse. It is this older museum that The Muse and the Mountain wishes to enter. It seeks to get us away from seeing the museum as merely a collection of objects of culture one is obliged to know and venerate and towards a model of the museum as a place where one can go to receive the power to create directly from the objects that such power has created. It wants to help us achieve a state of consciousness where works of art can be experienced beyond their objecthood—as presence, as guide, as the cleft in the mountain where the muse can speak.